Do you brag about your long hours, or do you complain about the lack of predictability from management? Only the former matches the statement in the quote.
This was the norm in Portugal when I visited in 2010 at least. In my childhood theater in rural Norway there was always an intermission as well, because they didn’t have dual projectors. Hot-swapping projectors was the only way to avoid one in the analog film days, as we all learned from Fight Club.
See, those are needed for compliance/CYA. That has business value, so I can work with that. What I’m referring to here is just training on useless stuff for the sake of racking up points.
Sure, if there’s a business need for cleaning the office toilets I’ll stop coding and do it for a day.
In this case it’s “everyone needs to spend a few weeks getting points in the training portal, we don’t care what you do in there as long as you get points”. This clearly doesn’t fulfill any business need, people just do whatever BS is the least effort per point. And as you might expect from an internal training portal, spending 20 minutes in that thing makes me want to stab myself.
Again, if there’s a business need for it that’s a different story, but useless mandates just to jerk people around are a deal breaker.