Snow day? Not so much

[jducoeur]

The news says that Billerica has 17.5 inches, and Woburn has 18.5. Burlington is about halfway in between, so I guess I know how much snow we have. The plowing service is on probation and I think they know it; we'll see if the driveway is properly plowed tonight.

Of course, Memento has lots of people who work remotely anyway, so the company scarcely even blinked: the message from HR wasn't so much "The office is closed" as "The roads are bad, so we encourage you to work from home". Since most people work from home frequently anyway, that's fairly straightforward. (I'm pleased to see that our new VPN seems to be holding up.)

The amusement of the day was the monthly Sprint Review meeting. Our two Product Managers live in Atlanta and Phoenix, so they usually phone in to these things, while the rest of us gather in a meeting room. This time, they decided to come to the meetings this week in person, so they are staying at the hotel near the office. The result? They were the only ones in the meeting room, while the rest of us stayed home and *we* phoned into it. Clearly, there is a karmic conspiracy against the entire project ever being in the same room at once...

Comments

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Yesterday our IT heroes put 60 people on the new softphone service.

We're open: but only 3 people (out of 180 or so) made it to the office.

On the one hand, I think that's great: we all have work to do. On the other hand, I liked snow days. :-)

[jducoeur]

Yeah, I have similarly mixed feelings. But it's convenient that it happened on Meeting-Free Wednesday. (The theory being that the developers have at least one day a week in which they are shielded from meetings, and therefore more able to actually get things done...)

[metageek.livejournal.com]

One thing I like about ITA is that the meeting population is very low. I have one hour-long meeting a week (the department) and one half-hour every other week (my team). I work with people a lot, but it's generally one-on-one, on an ad hoc basis.

[jducoeur]

That *is* nice. We have quite a bit more than that, although it usually doesn't get up to insane levels. (And my boss recognizes that she calls more meetings than anybody, and tries to push back against that instinct.)

[dsrtao]

Yesterday I met the IT guy of the business across the hall from us. We were in the elevator going home. He groused about how none of his Ph.D financial types could figure out the VOIP system or the VPN. I commiserated without boasting much about how we have everything set.

It turns out we only had problems with our new guy, who has some special factors going on.
- He's sales
+ He has a Mac
- He doesn't know what the Terminal app is

Eh, we'll work it out.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

New guy is new. :-)

I hope you don't have to do what one of the great IT guys I worked with some years ago had to do: remind people that, while on the VPN, all network traffic is going through corporate servers: including material that is neither work related nor work appropriate.

While he was "scolding" everyone, he told me privately as a laugh that it was the CEO that was watching porn, which set of the baby-minders that the CEO insisted we install to make sure the employees weren't being bad. :-)

[dsrtao]

I won't have to do that. I give everybody a lecture when they are hired and as a reminder once a year. It distills to:

1. Don't embarass the company.
2. Don't embarass me.
3. Don't embarass yourself.

[tashabear.livejournal.com]

We did our daily stand-up via Skype this morning, including our QA team in Ukraine. Quickest, most efficient stand-up yet: 15 people in 15 minutes.

[jducoeur]

Our team is, fortunately, smaller than that, and I tend to demand an efficient stand-up, so we usually manage about 10 minutes. (Our QA team is in India, so roughly the same time-difference problem. Fortunately, the Product Manager in Phoenix is an early bird, willing to call in at 6:30...)

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

Yah. My boss called last night to ask if I'd switch, working today instead of tomorrow. Tomorrow will be nutso because of today's storm, so of course I was happy to be thrown into that briar patch %^). Last night they put up a sign that we'd be opening today at 11, but it was my understanding that was a buffer in case we had a problem getting in on time, which I didn't. (Love my Subaru!) I was brought up in the Old School where even if everything else is closed, your pharmacy opens. Got in at 9 to the realization that that was a hard 11 am opening. Oh well. Did some inventory stuff, the clerks came in at 11, and we wound up closing at 2.

[gyzki.livejournal.com]

The news says that Billerica has 17.5 inches, and Woburn has 18.5.
I am slightly surprised: Wilmington is also in between, and we had well over 20; my neighbor says she heard 24", but I won't testify to that myself.

Nothing to contribute on the work meeting front: I just took two books of printout home with me Tuesday, and have been working the old-school hardcopy way.

[metageek.livejournal.com]

the message from HR wasn't so much "The office is closed" as "The roads are bad, so we encourage you to work from home".

We don't have many people who telecommute routinely, but every developer is supposed to be able to, so, yeah, it didn't hit our productivity much at all.