Corporate Culture

One of the worst things I have experienced is to attend any meeting or any conference calls with the leads. The basic reason behind this is that the technical knowledge they have over the topic under discussion is far more than what we have and the time they have to discuss is far less than what we have. We get some 10-15 doubts per slide if they are explaining through a ppt and the leads will be happily listening, if we interrupt that will kill the precious time of the meeting for them but if we do not interrupt then we won’t understand anything else afterwards. Ultimately what these people will be discussing will impact more for developers only and not the leads. Same thing happened in today’s meeting. We had some live meeting with an enterprise architect who is in UK now. He was going through a ppt and was explaining the concept of internationalization. in the beginning of the session only I got a doubt but in that conference room I did not interrupt and kept quite thinking of clearing the doubt with our lead later, but after that I lost the interest in that session every other slide was revolving around the basic doubt I had. I did not care as usual and opened my cell and started browsing. I was reading an article in cricinfo.com about today’s finals. I was completely into the cell when one of the leads who was sitting beside me tapped my back and asked whether I understood everything or whether everything was an open issue. I just smiled and at him and told I have loads of doubts and asked whether the session will be conducted again for us for which he just nodded and told forget conducting the same session again. I did not replied but just closed the browser and slide back the cell into my pocket and started looking at the screen. It was hard for almost 90-95% of the folks present there but still nobody interrupted the session in between. Once in one of the sessions I interrupted asking some doubts which all leads felt silly I suppose. I was told by my lead that he will clear my doubt later and told them to continue with the session. That was the first and last time I interrupted anyone. In these situations I am not blaming anybody since they will all be so busy that even a minute will matter much for them. But at least our immediate leads should conduct sessions exclusively for us so that we can understand what is happening in our project and stuff like that.