u/fodacao

How to deal with a manager who has been in the company 30+ years and it's basically their life?

Let me say first that I'm not a coder, I'm a "data analyst". SQL, Python, dashboards, KPIs etc.

Anyway, my manager seems to be addicted to meetings. If he sees a spare gap in his calendar he needs to put a meeting there.

We have a daily 15 minute catchup meeting that often runs to 45 minutes. (only three people in this meeting including him.)

In each of these catchup meetings, he gives me 100 actions. It's like he was sitting on the toilet taking a shit and started thinking up of lots of "initiatives" and now I need to do them.

From what I can see, his job is to justify his existence. By filling his calendar with meetings and looking busy.

He drags the whole team (30+ people) to a weekly meeting about business updates, and about 10 times during the meeting he asks "Does anybody have any questions?" Total silence. It's very awkward. Nobody ever has any questions, even my super intelligent Einstein colleagues. A fellow manager chimes in and asks some bullshit question. (I used to do this too when I was a manager in another company).

I started working on one dashboard in Power BI. He said "let's make a fortnightly meeting about the updates on this dashboard. I'll set it up."

He dragged 10 Americans to this meeting. 8am their time. Wednesday at 8am. To listen to me saying "and now I put a new chart there. That's it.".

What? But it makes sense. His calendar was empty at that time. Now he looks busy.

Plz help. My idea is to get another job.

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u/fodacao — 12 hours ago

How do you distract / occupy your toddlers when you really need them to "eff off"? For example, cooking a boiling hot dinner or chopping veggies or cleaning etc.

When I really need to work or cook or clean or whatever, I turn on some YouTube nursery rhyme videos on the TV.

My toddler (16 months old) stops whatever she's doing and becomes a zombie. She will stand in front of the TV for an hour with her mouth open, pure hypnotised. Like a statue.

Otherwise she'll be standing right between my legs while I'm waving a sharp knife around slicing veggies, or making a roaring hot stir fry.

I feel guilty looking at her when YouTube is on. She stops being a baby and just turns into a zombie.

I have tried locking her into her playpen but she hates it. And I can't listen to 1 hour of screaming. Maybe I should suck it up.

Any tips that don't involve zombification?

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u/fodacao — 15 hours ago