An engineer's 30 minutes is time the client is paying for 🐧
I once got seriously scolded, just for wanting to chat 🐧
Before that, let me tell you the background.
It was a multinational team, but the client, the president and my boss were all Japanese. The person at the top was Japanese.
It didn't feel that way in the office, but I felt the Japanese and the Filipinos split a little. I felt, on my own, an air of holding back a little toward the Japanese, who were in higher positions.
This wasn't only that company. When I interned at a language school in the Philippines, I felt something similar. The people who built the school were in higher positions, so people held back a little.
The local engineers listened really well to us Japanese, and they properly took in our opinions.
But because of that, I felt a wall: "maybe they are a little afraid of us, because we are Japanese."
With that wall, when something urgent or an error happened, they might not escalate it to me. That scared me the most.
So I wanted a relationship where we could talk frankly, and I set up a 30-minute chat called "Casual MTG."
When it ended, a senior bridge SE called me over.
"An engineer's time is time the client is paying for."
"If that 30 minutes delays the work, the client is the one in the most trouble."
Until then, I lightly thought: if we miss the deadline, we can just work overtime.
I thought man-days and man-months were just units. But they are an engineer's 8 hours a day, exactly.
Since then, when workload comes up, I straighten up a little.