One of the reasons I left a company recently, despite it getting better, was how it took over a year before I could start working on SSO (despite it being critical, super-duper-high priority item) because it took 3/4ths of a year before we started getting user data necessary, then I spent fixing stuff that atrophied due to similar issues.

We were also over a year into "how do we setup direct access between on-prem and cloud" where I stopped attending meetings because within two or three meetings we always got back to starting point, whereas I joined the first meeting with reasonable, implementable solution.

> where I stopped attending meetings because within two or three meetings we always got back to starting point

This is a reliable litmus test for company dysfunction: how many people are in meetings & do meetings end with clear, concrete decisions?

I repeat these exact same words on each retrospective of my new scrum team with 16 people. The amount of overhead is insane and I've simply started not showing up to some meetings and just asking for conclusions. Usually, there aren't any or it has been concluded that another meeting is neccessary.

I remember a certain retrospective and being called out for not participating enough.

I was one of the few people dealing with outage at the time, which was known to project management... (And we had to deal with said outage with laptops on knees in overfilled conference room)

At a previous employer we had an extremely urgent escalation from a very large customer which had made its way even to the CEO given the visibility. Meeting is scheduled with customer, problem reviewed, initial action items identified.

Also, the next sync up meeting is scheduled by the customer... for about 5 month later! So much for urgency.

OTOH, there's great life balance when everything isn't a mad rush to complete everything by tomorrow. A lot to be said for a sustainable pace of work that can be maintaned for an entire career, instead of the agile sprint model where you're expected to be running at 100% mental utilization forever. Which isn't sustainable by any human, so just leads to burnout in a year or three.

impressive!

Whrereas I (alone) finished two client projects this month (programming) and am starting the third. Help colleagues with their stuff, and am supposed to work on an internal project ( client projects are merely a distraction from the internal project ). I'm also supposed to make a certification ( I'm not sure whether in my free time or not ). I'm paid for 24h a week. And I have bad concience every standup because I didn't manage to finsih more the day before.

It took us five years to get our customer (the Oligarchic Cell Phone Companies) to add some additional information to one SIP header we consume.