2 Root 2 Over 2
Chanelle Glugla
I am having a hard time figuring how to loop over a tree and print out one of the entries. This seems like it should be an exceptionally simple thing to do since I can see exactly what I wan
t with TTree::Scan.
Yes, I am fully aware of the documentation referenced by that thread and found it to be of no help. I have made a class for a TTree in the past using one of those tools. I am looking to do something far more simple. All I would like to do is to loop over a TTree and print one of the leaves. Is it not possible to do this in only a few simple lines?
I have all the reservations about AI that other smart people do, but one of its real potentials is summarizing meetings in a way that makes people feel like they understood what happened and whether or not their input is needed after the fact without having to attend the actual meeting.
Even before the pandemic, we were so obsessed with the performance of productivity (meetings, of course, plus myriad other ways of LARPing your job) that most workers had very little blank time in their days. And as the sheer number of meetings (and messaging) has increased, that small amount of blank space has decreased even further.
And yes, of course, people should allow rest for many other reasons, but sometimes we have to deal with the ossified boss mindsets in front of us. Plus, maybe (MAYBE) these stats will also help convince more junior employees to not work themselves into a fine pulp before figuring out that working-all-the-time-without-ceasing is neither the guarantee against precarity they think it is nor sustainable in the long-term.
I don't mean this as a personal attack on any individual people manager, but I think a huge part of the issue is that many (most?) current mid-level people managers are not good at managing people; probably because they never had good people managing them to model on. They've never been trusted to do the job and let the results/output speak for itself, so they have no mechanism for establishing that trust, working within a system that allows for that, and coaching people on how to work in that system. They're repeating the same "look busy, look busy" model they came up in, and that requires a lot more effort (on everyone's part) when you're remote.
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Apart from the fact that this office is straight out of the 2014 \u201Ccool start-up\u201D playbook, it really does feel like most companies will do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING to avoid 1) paying their employees more; 2) doing the hard of examining the actual utility of their offices; or 3) actually listening to their employees about what they want and need, because the answer is very rarely AN OFFICE I WANT TO PHOTOGRAPH. (Also, as someone who used to go into an \u201CInstagrammable\u201D office every day, I can tell you that they are rarely cozy or conducive to collaboration).
The \u201Ccool office\u201D solution also misses the point. It misunderstands why workers are reticent to come back in (usually: because their workplace hasn\u2019t actually given them a good reason to) and it distracts from the very real problems beguiling most workplaces. Those problems can\u2019t be solved by commissioning an interior design firm. They have to do with sustainable work load, the expanding job, inequitable hiring and promotional practices, the wages of overwork\u2026\u2026and meetings. Fucking meetings. That\u2019s what we\u2019re going to talk about today.
Meetings are out of control. I don\u2019t know how else to say it. Whether you\u2019re mostly in-person or hybrid or remote, you\u2019re probably grappling with this problem and it also probably feels intractable. This stat below is from Microsoft\u2019s Work Index report in 2022 and it\u2019s haunted me for the past year:
252% increase in time spent in meetings! And yes, of course, some of that increase has to do with the fact that \u201Cdrive-by\u201D interactions are a lot more difficult when not everyone\u2019s in the office, but this meeting glut is also the result of poorly considered meetings, a culture that considers meetings to be the clearest sign of productivity and engagement, micro-management, and general workplace FOMO. (What if someone talks to someone else about a project you\u2019re working on and you\u2019re not in the meeting? Did you ever even complete the project at all?)
You put time on someone\u2019s calendar so they know you\u2019re working\u2026.OR you have a simple question for someone but they\u2019re so overloaded with communications that the only way for you to get an answer is by scheduling a meeting\u2026..OR everyone has too many meetings so they don\u2019t read their emails so the only way to get people to pay attention to anything is to have an actual meeting and read what could easily have been sent in an email.
All of this is fundamentally the same problem, right? Or at least two intertwined problems. People feel insecure in their job and productivity (even if they might not admit as much) and want/need to perform their engagement for their peers and superiors\u2026..and because of that need, people\u2019s schedules are so overfilled that they don\u2019t come prepared to meetings, which then creates the need for more meetings. This is over-meeting culture, and once it starts, it\u2019s very, very difficult to prune back.
To be clear: meetings can be GREAT. They can be hugely collaborative and helpful. Some are absolutely necessary. But if you\u2019re not in the C-suite, you probably shouldn\u2019t have more than two hours of meetings a day. If you have more, it\u2019s an indication that you or your organization is using meetings to solve every workplace problem\u2026..and the meetings have themselves become a problem.
So what do you do about it? Address productivity anxiety. According to Microsoft\u2019s Work Trend Index, which combines a survey of over 20,000 people in 11 countries with over a trillion signals from Microsoft 365 users, 87% of employees (anonymously) report that they are productive at work. And yet: just 12% of leaders say they\u2019re confident that their workers are productive. (49% of hybrid managers say they struggle to trust their employees to do their best work \u2014 compared to 36% of those managing fully in-person).
To me, this is a pretty stunning illustration of what\u2019s going on in today\u2019s workplace: you have a whole bunch of people who feel like they\u2019re just as productive if not more so than before\u2026.and then a whole bunch of managers and leaders who feel in the dark about what their teams are doing. That\u2019s how you get Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff declaring that he has a sense that productivity is down, and casting about in a company-wide Slack channel for what it might be. He doesn\u2019t have hard evidence. Instead, he\u2019s operating on the same thing a lot of leaders use as their guide: feel. It feels like people are producing less.
Economists have a straightforward theory of what\u2019s going on here. If you\u2019re working from home, you\u2019re not commuting to and from the office. For most workers, that means saving anywhere from ten minutes to two hours a day: instead of leaving the house at, say, 8 am and getting home at 6 pm\u2026.working a ten hour day\u2026.you\u2019re working nine to five, a solid eight hours. And maybe you average one day at home a week or three, but whatever it is, that\u2019s real time. You\u2019re getting the same (or about the same) amount of work done\u2026.over less time. You\u2019re more productive!
But now consider this set-up from the perspective of a manager or a member of the exec team. They\u2019re thinking about their teams\u2019 work day. And from their vantage point, it\u2019s still the same 8 hours as it always was. When their team was fully in the office, managing probably felt straightforward. Most people managed by, well, looking and walking around. That was the heart of it. Now, figuring out what your team is doing, and how they feel about doing it, it\u2019s a lot more work. So managers not only feel like they\u2019re doing more work \u2014 and less productive themselves, as workers \u2014 but they also feel like they\u2019re doing a worse job, and have less insight into what their reports are doing.
This is a fundamental disconnect! You have a bunch of people who have one understanding of their performance, and a bunch of people \u2014 who are in charge of their fate at the company, and who also have a lot of say in policy \u2014 with a very different understanding. If you\u2019re drowning in meetings, this disconnect is probably part of your problem.
The big picture fix sounds easy. Leaders have to trust their workers more \u2014 and communicate that trust. In practice, that\u2019s hard. If you don\u2019t know what that looks like, try: \u201CYou\u2019re doing a really good job and I\u2019m very happy with your work and I trust you to do it well.\u201D That\u2019s a start! And if you\u2019re a leader who thinks your employees should just intuit that you trust them, well, we\u2019ve all been through a bunch of precarious shit, so it makes sense that our resting state is \u201Canxious about productivity.\u201D Especially during periods like the last five years, you have to reassure us. Clearly. A lot.
More talk about prioritization = more manager confidence (that their reports are doing the things that matter most) and more employee confidence (that they\u2019re doing what they should be doing). It\u2019s difficult to understate just how powerful this sort of clarity can be.
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