Ask HN: What was the most absurd/funny statement that you ever heard on meeting? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What was the most absurd/funny statement that you ever heard on meeting?

4 pointsmgolawski8 comments

Dear HN,

I’ve been involved during my career in multiple projects in different companies, and I saw a lot of absurd quotes from developers about their work blockers, imagined complicated stuff that they have done, or them just blaming other peoples code. Most of them were total bullshit that for business/scrum sounded authentic.

So what was the most absurd, funny, filled with buzzwords daily meeting statement or situation that you have ever encountered?

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Was at a meeting with our subcontracts on a project with regards to building a new bunker/warehouse for a company. The head guy from the Masonry company had asked the question, "Are we going to use block-chain on this project?"

I was somewhat set back until I realized he wanted to make a chain wall out of masonry blocks which they are typically pre-cast not built with block but nevertheless I was humored.

Chain Wall - https://www.hunker.com/13402487/what-is-a-chain-wall

Block - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_masonry_unit

We had gone through 3 rounds of layoffs. Things were sort of bleak those days.

We were called to a company wide conference call. We sat in the conference room gathered around the phone thinking we were being laid off while someone from "HR" explained that they had made an important decision. But they didn't actually say what they were talking about, there was no meeting notes, the invite to the meeting didn't even have a title, so everyone was confused.

They recounted that over the last 9 months HR had put in numerous hours on this important project that had involved everyone in HR putting in extra hours, and it had come to a successful conclusion.

HR had renamed itself from "HR" to "People Services" to better reflect what they do.

That was it.

Dev: who should I handover to?

Mgr: Sandy

Dev: Sandy is leaving the week after I do

Mgr: We'll cross that bridge when we come to it

Back in the mid 1990s our team had to keep our compiled binaries under a certain size to fit on the eproms we were using. We were always refactoring and moving things around to fit but it limited what we could do. A project manager suggested we "remove all of the comments from the code to save space" -- not realizing the compiler does that away.

"Which bum dope was that?" (In response to, "You gave me some bum dope.")

'It's just adding a button, it should only take an hour'

Overheard a meeting where some project people were talking(you know the kind) they were talking about some project being done in C++ but kept referring it to CC++. True meeting engineers!

"I can write that in two weeks."

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