To be blunt, this looks like a feel-good piece from someone who spent an ungodly amount of time in shitty meetings but have no agency on the situation, will vent with diagrams as they can't tackle the actual issues of the org not giving a shit about their time.
If your calendar looks like the one the slides, you're spending half of your time reading meeting agendas and refusing meetings right and left, which is also should not a be good use of your time. At that point you're already trapped.
Sure, that mess was for comedic purpose, but the crux of the issue is usually not how shitty your meetings are.
It will be either coworkers looking at your agenda and deciding to add one more meeting to the pile and/or overriding the time blocks you've set up. At that point they already don't care about you, and your team is hell on earth either way. They might as well write bullshit agendas if that helps them.
Or your whole org just generates streams of group meeting, and nobody higher up seems to care about productivity. Which is also the hallmark of shitty org you'll be fighting at every turn to just do your job.
Or a mix of both.
Refusing meetings won't save you. You're still dealing with job nobody seems to care about.
That requires your boss to be good at meetings, and in particular to take extra care of preparing meetings with well crafted agendas and not just setting up random spots where they spend the first 5min remembering the actually ultra important thing they needed to discuss with you.
I've never seen an org where that applies to most higher ups. In particular for stuff they don't want to leave in writing or are delicate subjects.
I assume this works nice to get you out of any meeting they didn't want you to attend, but couldn't just remove you from.
If they plan to move resources out of your team but need highers approval, having a meeting that you refused to attend sounds like a good first step. You might be there on the next one, but the terrain is already prepared. And as it's a sensitive subject, a vague agenda would also be natural enough.
"Go to every meeting that has a vague agenda just in case it's the one where they talk about their plan to downsize your team" is not a good strategy. (And probably by the time it's come to a meeting that you're invited to there's already nothing you can do)
Someone explicitely asked for your input, you refused and they fucked up. Your head might nor roll, but you won't be unscaved either. If it's not as your responsibility, it will be by the size and impact of the fuckup.
IMHO it'l should be the same approach as any other human communication: not everything can be fixed, and at some point you'll need to compromise.
Some people talk slowly, will you refuse to listen to them if they don't speed up to some given wpm ? Some take time to come to their actual point. It might be utterly uncomfortable, but if they actually tend to have very good points, you'll probably bear with it.
Most of my South American buyers on Bricklink have me ship to one of the freight forwarders in Miami. Not complicated for me as a seller and it probably makes things simpler for the buyer too.
Paris being 5th when biking there is pure chaos compared to many Asian cities makes the ranking look capricious. Paris's City hall is definitely pro bike and a lot of money and effort was poured into infrastructure, but that dosn't suddenly makes it safe or largely adopted.
More generally, infrastructure isn't everything. Tokyo small streets with absolutely no markings can be way safer and bike friendlier than a bright lane in the middle of constant car traffic.
I'll note the company doing the ranking is based on Paris, so familiarity might hide many of the flaws.
I didn't even feel particularly safe as a pedestrian in Tokyo or Osaka. Despite the good public transport, Japanese cities have cars absolutely everywhere, even in tiny streets that should really be pedestrian zones. Paris is much better in my opinion.
Tokyo fundamentally doesn't define pedestrian only zones except in very specific conditions.
I get why you'd feel unsafe, but IMHO it's the exact opposite effect: 99% of the streets don't have a sidewalk or anything specific for pedestrian, and thus are pedestrian first.
Small kids, dogs, cats, elderlies will be walking in the middle of the street. As a result cars drive way slower than they'd do in Paris and they need to be way more alert to what's happening. Every small street is basically the same as the pedestrian zone in the middle of Paris.
Came here to say that. I've lived a long time in both Amsteram and Paris, and seeing those two cities close in that ranking call the whole thing into question. For sure, cities couldn't game the metrics used by tha ranking, but I'm sure the metrics definitions have been gamed to make some cities look better.
"Usage and Reach" is ranked better for Paris than Amsterdam? But in Amsterdam I can safely and efficiently bicycle from anywhere to anywhere, including across the rings, to the countryside and even to the sea, with the kids, and no fear. In Paris, I would not dare to venture outside of the touristic city center, and even there I would keep an eye on kids.
> It is no surprise, somehow they need to earn money
I kinda hate that a move needs to be surprising to be noteworthy or critiqued. If tomorrow Meta leaks all data of all users I really wish the reactions aren't "not surprised" and instead "hang them and tar them".
Same way, the need to earn money shouldn't be an excuse for whatever a company does. I'd be a lot more interested in knowing if/why you think it will be a net positive for society and why it should be left to happen.
I don't get your point here. User targeted ads are the main business model of the internet? Yes, few days ago it was revealed how billions of user data points could be gathered from Meta [1], did anybody care, outside a small privacy community? So indead these things are not surprising... My thoughts don't go so far to consider the effects on society, idk, do you?
> User targeted ads are the main business model of the internet?
Ads helped the internet get up and expand, but it went to a degree that now plagues most aspect of our online life.
Google being first and foremost an ad company is an issue we're tackling, from the search engine becoming dog shit, to Google subsidizing Apple to not compete with them, online content getting shaped to fit advertisers' needs etc.
Another potential tech giant adopting the most toxic business model is IMO something to be pissed about.
IMHO most companies encourage public-first conversation, but still end up with DM-first as their employees don't have enough trust in how their messages will be received.
It requires to be comfortable exposing lack of knowledge or saying weird things to peers, and be confident it will be taken in good faith. As you point out, that requires a whole level of culture building.
If your calendar looks like the one the slides, you're spending half of your time reading meeting agendas and refusing meetings right and left, which is also should not a be good use of your time. At that point you're already trapped.
Sure, that mess was for comedic purpose, but the crux of the issue is usually not how shitty your meetings are.
It will be either coworkers looking at your agenda and deciding to add one more meeting to the pile and/or overriding the time blocks you've set up. At that point they already don't care about you, and your team is hell on earth either way. They might as well write bullshit agendas if that helps them.
Or your whole org just generates streams of group meeting, and nobody higher up seems to care about productivity. Which is also the hallmark of shitty org you'll be fighting at every turn to just do your job.
Or a mix of both.
Refusing meetings won't save you. You're still dealing with job nobody seems to care about.
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