No, abject failure on that front. I work at a BigCo, and it's ridiculous how hostile it is to optimizing hours worked.
A few examples:
There are some weekly meetings to review changes and incidents for a 100+ person department, where they work through changes and incidents one by one, in random order - basically you have to listen in for the whole hour+ so you can respond if they get to an incident/change you are involved with, you can maybe address questions/concerns for 30 or 45 seconds, but have to listen and wait to be called for over an hour. If you aren't responsive when called upon, you look bad, so 100+ people all spend an hour waiting for their 30 second slot.
Lots of neverending support / escalations for supposedly "urgent" stuff, where they say we are experiencing X problem, how do we fix it? We suggest... check A to diagnose... check B, etc... nothing. 10 minutes later... we are still experiencing X... ok, did you check A or B? nope. somehow, it's urgent enough to pester me, but never urgent enough for anyone else to do anything at all.
> There are some weekly meetings to review changes and incidents for a 100+ person department, where they work through changes and incidents one by one, in random order - basically you have to listen in for the whole hour+ so you can respond if they get to an incident/change you are involved with, you can maybe address questions/concerns for 30 or 45 seconds, but have to listen and wait to be called for over an hour. If you aren't responsive when called upon, you look bad, so 100+ people all spend an hour waiting for their 30 second slot.
Perhaps I wouldn't do it weekly with 100+ people, but since you're already there, isn't there some value in understanding more about the incidents that are impacting other teams on live systems so that you can bring those learnings back to your team and make them more robust? Or are talking about incidents on completely different stacks and systems?
> so 100+ people all spend an hour waiting for their 30 second slot.
This is a real issue at big companies. I wonder if there needs to be a standard format where the host starts each issue by quickly saying issue number and relevant people at the beginning. If your working while half listening you can give your full attention from the start of that point.
Something like that gives many people a bunch of productivity back, especially when it's easy to get pulled into a bunch of these type of meetings each day.
if you're not paying attention to the other changes in a change board meeting, it defeats the purpose of having the meeting (the interaction could be done asynchronously) and seems like it defeats the purpose of reviewing changes at all (besides audit compliance)
I've had to sit in on these things almost weekly at a previous job. I represented one small department and I wasn't a manager, just someone who knew the tech and needed to do the explaining (or was asked to at least) for the incidents.
Nothing the other departments discussed (which 95% of the call was dedicated to) was relevant for my job at all, and was at best, mildly interesting, so I tried to get other work done during it as best as I could, but it was super distracting, and I always had to half listen for my department to be mentioned.
A few examples:
There are some weekly meetings to review changes and incidents for a 100+ person department, where they work through changes and incidents one by one, in random order - basically you have to listen in for the whole hour+ so you can respond if they get to an incident/change you are involved with, you can maybe address questions/concerns for 30 or 45 seconds, but have to listen and wait to be called for over an hour. If you aren't responsive when called upon, you look bad, so 100+ people all spend an hour waiting for their 30 second slot.
Lots of neverending support / escalations for supposedly "urgent" stuff, where they say we are experiencing X problem, how do we fix it? We suggest... check A to diagnose... check B, etc... nothing. 10 minutes later... we are still experiencing X... ok, did you check A or B? nope. somehow, it's urgent enough to pester me, but never urgent enough for anyone else to do anything at all.