yep, did the same for my team at one place "[IMPORTANT] CUSTOMER OUTAGE" (or something similar).

We had a publicly viewable calendar policy. And I couldn't believe the audacity of people in other areas to take it upon themselves to just book over the top of existing meetings because they had decided their meeting was more important. And I'm not talking a group meeting where it's hard to find a gap that works for everyone, these were essentially 1:1 meetings where the organizer was someone with a little more seniority. No polite ask/DM first if it's ok, or a note in the invite to explain. Just see "focus time - no meetings" or something else _they_ deemed not important and they'd schedule it in that block and assume the IC wouldn't challenge their authority.

So had to play them at their own game to give my team their time back. The meeting was as much as an invite to them to challenge my authority as their previous attempts were. Conveniently it worked and nobody would book over my meeting. I do not miss working for larger companies.

I've been fully remote fo a long time now, but I used to do this with my team and other colleagues. We'd book a conference room and create a 'meeting', but it was just a bunch of us quietly working on our laptops in the conference room (no audio, no calls was the rule), uninterrupted for a few hours at a go. It was quite popular.

This is brilliant, excellent example of the ideal of "management as shielding devs from higher-level corporate shenanigans" in action.

I do this to make sure I get time for lunch— I mean, time for Daily Nutrition Sync lol

I have done the same. FWIW, a 2-3 hour block seems to be the sweet spot, as far as keeping it off the radar goes. Ironically, having multiple a week doesn’t seem to raise an eyebrow.

Our product security and engineering teams do the same thing to defend against the project managers - an 8am-2pm product sync every monday and friday. Its worked for years now.

I've done this, but IMO one of the nicest things about it is that people have the option to use it as an actual meeting place. It's like taking over an open conference room where people can wander in & out at will -- except invited members of the team are the only ones who can actually get in. Do your collaboration and then wander off, or just take your headphones off. There have been many times I've joined the meeting and there are two or three people in there just silently working. They just wanted to be near each other and hide from everybody else! Adorable.

> My solution was to create a weekly "team meeting" from 8am to 11am every Friday and invite all of them to it.

I've been part of these and the focus time is nice.

It doesn't address the root problem, though. If engineers are being bombarded with meetings, those meetings just get squished into the afternoon time slot.

The secondary problem was that some people started treating the blocked-out time as their only work time. Once that dedicated block came to an end, they mentally switched out of work mode and were not going to do any more work until the next morning. Before all of the "nobody can do more than 3 hours of good work per day" replies, this was a real problem because people also used this time for discussion things with each other on the team, actual team meetings, and various things other than heads-down work, leaving less than the allotted time for actually working. It was also a problem when something would come up at 2:30PM and the person responsible would defer it to next morning's work session instead of taking an hour to do the work. This might all sound like minor annoyances and it was only some people doing it, but the theme repeated itself so much that many of us soured on the idea over time.

The bigger problem was that it didn't address the real issue. Every situation is different and in my case the manager was part of the problem. His solution to everything and answer to every question was to get two people talking. He thought of himself as a switchboard, routing people to other people on our team.

Blocking out meeting time helped a little, but what we really needed was an active manager who was handling communications himself and only bringing the team in when needed. We also needed him to have our backs when we declined meetings or asked if they could be an e-mail.

The healthier managers I've had take a constant, active interest in keeping their teams' meeting workloads down and rooting out interruptions and distractions. They also empower their team to forward meeting requests to the manager to evaluate and ask that external requests at least cc them for visibility. Every time I've had a manager like that, I haven't felt the need for blocked out focus time.

I once worked on a team of SREs where the workload was so atrocious that we had HR make up new virtual employees Team On-call Primary and Team On-call Secondary and, other than the manager, they were the only accessible team members. We gave these virtual employees their own laptops and phones. When your shift ended, or you needed a break, you handed the gear to the next guy. We didn't have a formal schedule because it was common to get burned out in just three or four days, or if it was a rare calm period you might hang on to the laptop a bit longer until you got a chance to get properly throttled.

It worked exceptionally well because then the other employees were unable to individually bother team members. The team name in the HR directory was something vague and reported to the skip level, so unless you were in the know, we were totally invisible to the rest of the org. For some context we were keeping many millions of dollars of daily transactions afloat and it was not unusual to receive death threats from business folks when they couldn't do their jobs.

I don't miss it remotely, but I sometimes miss being a member of an invisible force with superuser privileges, with the blessing to unfuck anything we saw fit.

Weaponizing meetings for defensive purposes. I love it.

Working in education I am glad that this is not a problem where I am. As government employees we are all understaffed and overworked, and all meetings are short and to the point, because they are good when you need them, but most of the time you don't and a well written Email or a phone call is enough.

For people without adblocker the trick will be ruined at some point by something like loud enthusiastic ClickUp ad.

Are they monetizing it? If not they are missing out!

Why don't you just decline calls with text messages, or just ignore them, or simply mute your phone?

Definitely AI slop speak though. Nobody talks lke that.

I think Sierra games like Leisure Suit Larry had that (F11) if I recall correctly. Priceless.

https://hackertyper.com/ and others. Full screen code stream

This was tickling something in my brain and this was it! Thank you.

There's a few that don't work, I was able to get the some of the "scoping" meetings to play the audio.

Yes, because that's exactly what offices are for. I wouldn't do it if I had to sit out in the bullpen with the commoners though.

Unless you have good ANC headphones, or find something like pink noise that fits you, you're still dealing with all the talking to microphone of your colleagues.

Going to the office to have a remote meeting is pretty awful.

Yeah we need a dial to mix accents and dialects, and level of English fluency. I could want 50% English, maybe some Northern English, Welsh or Scottish, and mix in Indian accents, various American, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Scandinavian, the odd token Aussie. Etc.

That I could enable more South African, or Middle East accents in some meetings would be true to real life as well.

Not Finnish. The silence would not work :)

Same, console says something about missing or "unsuitable" audio resources.

Sad, I wanted the international broken Zoom call

Thanks, British scoping meeting worked on iOS. Probably would pass muster with family. Even a little laugh in there I heard after a joke.

Same here - Brave browser. Only British works

Same in Chrome and Firefox for me

I wondered why it didn't work. Chrome here, same experience. British is fine.

Computer-Aided Boundaries? Social Assistive Software?

I'd say a quintessentially British, tactical-yet-polite social interaction deterrent

It's because it's a new domain. Very common in corporate IT.

[flagged]

No audio on Safari mobile either

try the British voices.

Same, wonder if that’s an ADD thing. Because most people don’t seem to have the same issue

New domain registrations typically aren't on a list yet, which, in itself gets blocked.

Depends on the company. At my last job it was rare for anyone to have video on in remote meetings, and at my current job it's rare for anyone to have video off.

It's normal in many places for the only video to be shared screen

Pretty normal. Camera's usually stay off unless it's a 1-1, presentation, or maybe a VP level call.

If you find use for this tool, chances are good that you're in an place where all the participants would be audio only

Depends on the company, the team, the agenda etc

Totally normal. The only time I ever used my camera is conducting interviews.

update: just realized there IS an Accents selector- excellent

I disagree. I think many of the audio elements are highly believable for lay people.

Takes me back. I remember there was a version of the fake Windows 8 update sequence that had it infinitely loop between "Working on updates..." and the frowny-face :( BSOD

I have that but I think translations and dialect will make it sound less convincing … I can always add it as a beta

takes notes thank you for the UAT

Yes we need Zoom/Gmeet/Teams UI options!!

I want to be far away from places where they ask if they answered my question.

There’s American accents ! Come on, day one it’s fun, if it gets legs I’ll add as much preferences as I can muster up

Because it’s interesting and useful (and if it isn’t, then a handcoded bespoke design wasn’t going to make it useful)

You go first.