The developers don't have laptops, so we just lose development time when we're in meetings. Although we generally get just enough work assigned to us that we can still work only 40 hours a week, so I'm not really complaining.
The developers don't have laptops, so we just lose development time when we're in meetings. Although we generally get just enough work assigned to us that we can still work only 40 hours a week, so I'm not really complaining.
For example, I was stuck in a two hour support call meeting the other day, and I really only had to be passively listening to it and speak maybe four or five times briefly. I was designing puzzles in my notebook the rest of the time. They don't give devs laptops, so I couldn't get real work done.
But hey, I've been in plenty of classes back in the day when I didn't have to pay close attention and only had pen and paper to keep me entertained (I drew, wrote stories and poems, designed games and databases, etc), so it doesn't bother me too much.
There's a reason why there's a full team of BA's and they can't write up work fast enough to keep the devs busy, and I think this is part of the reason. But there isn't enough of a push to change things, and it seems like most people would rather communicate in person here instead of via email when possible.
The programmer equivalent attitude is "this code is horrible, it's due for a total re-write." Re-factors and re-orgs are the same things, but there's few regression tests for business besides "oh crap, we lost a bunch of money all of a sudden" which is a lot closer to coding directly in production.