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The more urgent a feature is, the more useless, hours long, meetings a day you shall have!   
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Ayuh.
"We must have meetings to ensure we don't waste time taking wrong paths and miscommunicating. Etc."
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Exactly! 
Plus half an hour status report every hour! 
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Also, the feature is really not that important and gets in the way of one that is... 
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And it gets cancelled next week.
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Some years back, I did a project for a company whose weekly schedule went something like this:
Monday: 8:30-12:00 - Weekly MMM (Monday Morning Meeting) to assign and prioritize tasks to be accomplished this week. Everyone's presence required!
Monday: 1:00PM-3:30 - Sales goals and prioritization for this week. All department heads, technical and support people required to attend.
Tuesday: 8:00AM - Emergency meeting to analyze customer's problem reported Monday. All departments heads, technical and support people must attend to determine who will fix problem.
Tuesday: 1:00PM - "Hot" sales call pre-call meeting to plan sales call meeting. All Dept. heads, technical and support people required.
Wednesday: 7:30AM - Emergency meeting to provide sale call support. All Dept heads.....
Wednesday: 1:00PM - "Quick" meeting to check on week's progress. All Dept.....
Wednesday: 4:00PM - "Who's available for overtime" meeting. All.....
Thursday: 7:15AM - "Why isn't anything getting done" meeting. All....
Thursday: 12:00PM - Team building luncheon. Meal and drinks provided by company. EVERYBODY requi.....
Friday: 7:00AM - "What can we do to improve productivity meeting?" All...
Friday: 1:00PM - Emergency meeting to determine who will be working this weekend to catch up. All......
Friday: 3:00PM - "So-and-so's going away party." Must attend!
I might be exaggerating a touch, but some days I spent as much as 7-8 hours in meetings which had little or no bearing on my assignment. Typical week averaged about 20-25 hours in meetings, usually during prime productive time.
Their idea was that "inclusion" was important and "everybody's ideas" were welcome (but they didn't really want to hear them.)
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Wow... That is just like my previous company.
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Could be worse. Meetings halt progress but don't bear anti-progress. Doing something exactly the way the customer (in my case, the product management department in the same company) wants only to find that I have to redo the whole backend because they didn't tell me of a "tiny" feature they totally need in advance, that's anti-progress. I'd rather sit in countless useless meetings than either create a patchwork solution I don't understand myself or redo the thing from scratch time upon time.
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Your reply touched a nerve for me too. I am tired of hearing "Well, I believe that everyone should expect that if I said I wanted "Feature A", that it also meant I wanted "Feature B".
When I ask for specific written instructions I get "Well, I can't do that!"
I am a single programmer working in a small company, directly for the owner of said company. 
It would be so much easier if they knew, or at least thought about what they asked for up front.
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I take it upon myself to ask those detailed questions up front - and keep asking them until I get an answer in writing. Then I at least have CYA'd myself. It also helps if the developer knows the industry really well, because then you can tell the customer that they didn't think of this feature or that consequence. I understand that not all developers have the luxury of being experts in some random other field, but it does help.
Bond
Keep all things a simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
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Hey, thanks, you actually help me feeling better about this nonsense, I'm not a lone!  Did you also have situations where you get a "spec" which is a prosaic description of what they want to be able to do, reply with a stiff spec of what you're going to build, they say "Yup, that's exactly what I want", you build it and back comes "but I can't do X" with X being explicitly forbidden by the spec they agreed to?
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Yes. Repeatedly since 1978 when I first started working professionally.
I believe that most users do not have a clue of what they want until they see part of it.
Ours is not the reason why, ours is but to do and die...
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Yeah... I just wish they were honest for once. Instead of an "Yup, that's how I want it" and a "No, redo it" afterwards, an "I am not sure if that's exactly it, points 1 and 2 I like, the rest no idea" would have spared me countless wasted hours. That, and I think it's a linguistical issue at times. I had repeated cases of someone agreeing to me suggesting handling certain stuff implicitly while describing how they want it to be done in a rather explicit way. Literally "Yes, that's exactly how I want it. Also, add X" with X meaning the exact opposite of what I just said. I wonder if it's really people understanding words differently or just not thinking in the ifrst place.
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Many years ago I worked with Visual Studio pre .NET using Basic and C++. Please remember that Windows forms is a code generator. Sometimes it would generate buggy code and crash your work and the graphic design.
I finally got out from under legacy programs. I worked in other IDEs for several years. When I got back to VS I switched to .NET, C# and WPF in one large step. I was satisficed with this environment for several years.
I just started a new job with a program that was started a year ago. To my surprise it uses C# with Windows Forms. Guess what??? The code generator still crashes the program.
So many years of programming I have forgotten more languages than I know.
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I've been using this designer for many years, and when it crashes it is always because I did something silly (deleting a resource used by a control, for example).
I would not blame the designer at first; most of the time the issue began between the chair and the keyboard.
while (!(success = Try()));
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i've had the designer crap itself without my help before but it's rare and usually easy to fix
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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3rd party or composite controls also tend to make the designer a tad mental.
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That so often depends on how they're written. Of course it would help if microsoft would document the designer API better
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Everything will be fine as soon as .Net Core 3.0 will be released, it's a magic bullet that will make all your pains go away !
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What? Instead of shooting myself in the foot I can now shoot myself in the head?
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Quote: An angel's smile is what you sell
You promise me heaven, then put me through hell
Chains of love got a hold on me
When passion's a prison, you can't break free
Oh, you're a loaded gun, yeah
Oh, there's nowhere to run
No one can save me
The damage is done
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I could crash the WPF designer just by looking at it.
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Are you really that ugly? 
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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