A post encouraging more performative behavior at work, as if there wasn't enough already. By the way, my scrum update is yesterday I was mostly in meetings.
"My scrum update is: I spent all day in meetings" can be both true and performative. We don't care what your meetings were about, so you're performing the "meetings are a waste of my time" geek trope. For comparison you wouldn't say "I spent all day at a desk" you'd say "I fixed a race condition" or "I designed the Foo service". You might say "I spent all day driving" and not "I drove 50 miles on I40 and waited 20 minutes at junctions", because the details of driving are unimportant. But presumably the people asking for your update do care about the work being discussed in meetings and want to know things about them.
There's a choice there, and the choice to wrap meetings into "I spent all day in meetings" is to communicate that meetings are as much of a timewaste as driving is, and not as respectable as real work. Which is a tired geek trope. Why wouldn't you say what the meetings were about? What was decided? What couldn't be decided? How it influenced the team? How you spread what the team were doing to the other meeting participants? How you shielded the team from bullshit during the meetings? How the projects are looking after the meetings? because you're performing weaponised incompetence "I hate meetings so I'm going to be a stroppy teenager and if you're going to force me into meetings, I'm going to make it painful for you to get information from me about them. Harumph". and hoping HN will upvote it because "Does Anyone Else think meetings are bad? right guys??"
You know what "spent all day in meetings" communicates on HN or in tech circles, that's why you chose to say that, and why you chose to phrase it that curtly.
> Why wouldn't you say what the meetings were about?
In a scrum update? Usually because the meetings in question have no bearing on tasks in the sprint, and daily scrum isn't a generic rambling all-topics team chat session it is a very short timeboxed focused update on sprint tasks and the only reason to mention meetings not directly related to sprint tasks is to provide context for the absence of progress on sprint tasks.
The performance isn't there, it's here. Why is that person telling HN "my update is: I spent all day in meetings"? What value or contribution or discussion does it serve on HN in a topic about rambling while being remote?
If they were genuinely in meetings, and respect that as real work, and that's the right thing to say in the scrum update, then ... why is it noteworthy enough to comment here, and what do they "really mean it"?
