8 ms·

How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

85 points by brikelly 3y ago

jollyoldpirate 3y ago
So.. uhh, I’m just.. D-Do we need a meeting for this? Do we want something weekly or?
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  My favorite is "I hate to add another meeting to our calendars, but..."
maayank 3y ago
“An engineer’s impact during a meeting is less tangible compared to coding” The common disdain to meetings is that in many meetings no one has a tangible impact while an engineer can create tangible value in their “regular” stated mission. If reading this makes you feel offended then don’t worry, it’s surely not your meetings… only those organized by functionaries whose sole contribution is organizing open ended meetings with no impact.
- slowmovintarget 3y ago
  This is not because of the nature of meetings, but because people seem to have lost the skills to have effective meetings. Start by sharing an agenda. List the very few things you need to discuss and decide up front. Provide review materials for those who actually prep. During the meeting, record notes on the conversation, record decisions made, and record action items, and publish these records. If you're not prepared to do this, you aren't prepared to meet. You're just having a chat. That can be done ad-hoc. Call it a chat. Have it over Slack or one-on-one. More than one person requires an agenda, and should result, at a minimum, in a document that adds to the organization's knowledge (even if only of decisions or disagreements).
lrivers 3y ago
“How do we know when we’re finished” is the most important question maybe ever.
4hg4ufxhy 3y ago
Have weekdays where booked meetings are not allowed. This gives you a ground truth to compare meeting heavy days against.
- tiltowait 3y ago
  We had "no meeting Fridays", which were always my most meeting-heavy days, because that's when everyone has a clear schedule!
  - baq 3y ago
    If they were the most productive meetings of the week… sounds not bad at all ^_^
- ghaff 3y ago
  At some point during the pandemic, it feels like Friday became that at a lot of places. I hesitate about even sending chats or emails at this point.
tjpnz 3y ago
One of the first things I do as an IC when joining a team is establish whether law of two feet applies. That is, if you're in a meeting which you can't contribute anything to you get up and leave. Even better is to have this conversation at a time when everyone's present so there's no ambiguity. When the answer's not yes it's almost always a signal of bad things over the horizon.
shadowtree 3y ago
Isn't pair programming just one, endless meeting?
- willsmith72 3y ago
  have you tried pair programming? because no..
  - vundercind 3y ago
    If it’s regularly-scheduled rather than need-driven: then yes.
    - willsmith72 3y ago
      done right it's terrible, done properly in the right team it's amazing. it's just 1 work technique. but i've never been in a team where it felt like a meeting. you're literally writing code together, i've never done that in a meeting
      - vundercind 3y ago
        Done well but not on an as-needed basis, it bears a lost-productivity and energy-draining similarity to meetings. Done poorly and not as-needed, it’s a living hell (but then, many business-things are when done poorly)
        willsmith72 3y ago
        where does your "as-needed" idea come from? again, it's lost productivity and energy-draining when done poorly. it seems like you haven't experienced a team doing pair programming well, meaning full buy-in and pairing-trained. some of the most productive teams i've been on worked 5 hours of pairing 4 days/week
        vundercind 3y ago
dfxm12 3y ago
I actively fight against meeting hell. If I get a meeting request without a specific agenda (I don't split hairs with the definition of "agenda" or "outcome" like the article though), I ask for one and don't accept it otherwise. If the agenda makes it clear that this can be answered via email, I answer it and decline. If I'm in a meeting that seemed reasonable for me to attend, but I'm not adding/receiving value, or the meeting is straying from the agenda topics, I'll ask what input is needed from me or leave a message in the chat that I'm dropping and to ping me when needed. I also decline meeting requests outside of my working hours (unless it's with someone too many time zones away for our workdays to overlap). My favorite was when someone set up a meeting with me on Friday after I went home for the weekend and when I didn't attend, they added me to a meeting on Monday morning before my work day started. They were angry at me for not attending either meeting. Of course, I never even saw the invites. I think most people get is, but the point it, we have to set these boundaries for ourselves, and I'm sure it's not just engineers who want to avoid meeting hell.
- frakt0x90 3y ago
  We are 100% on the same page. All of these send a message and are professional
- ryandrake 3y ago
  > If the agenda makes it clear that this can be answered via email, I answer it and decline. You're one of the good ones. The retort to "This meeting could have been an E-mail" is "But, do you respond to your E-mail?" Sometimes we really do need an answer/decision/action, and not everyone has good E-mail hygiene. I have worked with a non-trivial number of people who don't read their E-mail and/or don't respond to it. And when you don't respond, I have no idea whether you even read it, so I have to assume you didn't. When I need someone to do/say something, I will reach for E-mail as a first try, but if you don't respond, I have to put on my Disappointed Face and schedule a meeting :(
  - geor9e 3y ago
    >not everyone has good E-mail hygiene This is so true at my workplace, thinking back. The folks with unreplied emails cluttering their inboxes are exactly who get pulled into meetings. It's basically an emergency handholding step to get them to actually do some work. The folks who clearly reach inbox zero once or twice a day, I honestly barely remember their faces because folks don't dare waste their time with meetings.
Kalibr 3y ago
Title says “engineer” but article is solely about computer programmers? Isn’t that computer science? I don’t remember there being a coding engineer at my college…
- SuperCuber 3y ago
  "Software Engineer" is a pretty commonly used title for programmers
  - kube-system 3y ago
    It is, especially in the US, but the title "engineer" is protected by law in some jurisdictions.
- bitcharmer 3y ago
  You're trolling, aren't you
gwbas1c 3y ago
As a lead I used to tick a few people off by occasionally declining meetings. The result is that I developed a mystique, and when I needed to get peoples' attention, I could get it. As an engineer it's important to feel comfortable occasionally declining BS meetings: it reflects more poorly on the person who can't get people to come to their meetings than on you. (Even though people might appear mad at you.) It's also critical to decline project kick-off meetings unless you've been explicitly informed about the project by your manager. Sometimes people play power games or bypass roadmaps. Other times your manager forgets to tell you you're on a project. Either way, it again makes the meeting organizer look bad if you aren't there.
- internet101010 3y ago
  > Sometimes people play power games or bypass roadmaps. The people that do this are the same people that send the same request to several different people in hopes that one of them will do it, resulting in duplicate effort.
- gwill 3y ago
  i'll add that there you can avoid making people mad at you by communicating why you’re cancelling. you don't need to be mean, just explain that your contribution wont be valuable and the task your working on has higher priority etc.
  - gwbas1c 3y ago
    > cancelling I didn't cancel, I declined meetings. There is a very important difference. > i'll add that there you can avoid making people mad at you by communicating why I usually gave a reason, but when there was a large invite list, or no notice, I did not. The one time I "got into trouble" was when I gave a reason: "I am declining this meeting because there is no agenda." My manager told me to just have him intervene instead of declining the meeting.
- gav 3y ago
  In a previous role I was responsible for developing architecture that supported a bunch of different teams, so I started being pulled into a lot of meetings as the easy option for them was asking me. I ended up having 6-8 hours of meetings a day on top of my actual workload. My solution was to not accept meetings and have a PM go grab me if they really needed me, that was enough friction to allow me time to get work done. As in your case, this created a bunch of mystique as I was now that guy that showed up in the middle of a meeting, said a bunch of smart things (hopefully!) and then left. One of the difference about the new Zoom-centric world is that it's zero effort to add an somebody to a meeting "just in case". I push my leads to decline meetings where there is no clear agenda and/or clear idea of the value they can provide. It's ok that your default isn't to hit "accept", it's the meeting organizer's job to convince you that it's worth attending over other priorities.
Fripplebubby 3y ago
The concept of "decision meetings" is a really tricky one to master. I think: Good: Put a meeting on a calendar in the future in order to force all discussion and investigation to happen before that meeting and keep things moving. Bad: Adding a "decision meeting" doesn't make a decision any easier or harder than before, and doesn't make the research and investigation take any less time than before, and often we don't know what we don't know, so beginning research leads to more research... I think it is really useful for making decisions that people just don't care that much about and aren't that invested in, since it motivates a timeline for those decisions. Otherwise, it just creates an arbitrary deadline. Why are you working late on a Friday night? Oh, well, my manager created this deadline on Monday morning to make this decision.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  The article doesn't mention the problem of people not preparing for a meeting. It's possible to follow all the author's suggestions about meetings and still end up wasting time because people show up unprepared. Someone doesn't read the agenda or doesn't know or understand the desired outcome or decision to be made. If that is a pattern for someone, they not only are under-performing, they are hurting the performance of everyone involved.
skhameneh 3y ago
> Meetings are interruptions that cause context switches This. I find it very difficult to get into a "flow state". Simple meetings such a a standup are highly interruptive for me, especially when time zones push "morning" meetings mid day.
- slingnow 3y ago
  And someone in a "flow state", headed in the wrong direction, is even more wasted time than a meeting to coordinate efforts in the right direction.
  - skhameneh 3y ago
    If you are experiencing this frequently, your team may have general communication and planning issues.
  - FalconSensei 3y ago
    a slack message can solve that
joncrocks 3y ago
Every meeting should have: * an agenda, so people know what is going to be discussed and the right people can be in the meeting, and how long it might take * expected outcomes - e.g. Are we just discussing something, are we deciding something If those two things aren't done, it's likely not to be an effective meeting.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Let me add: A notetaker and published minutes, so everything discussed and decided can be referenced later.
  - joncrocks 3y ago
    Indeed, and actions assigned to accountable individuals etc. How to run an effective meeting is another topic entirely :-)
- teeray 3y ago
  Also: * a moderator, a role that can be held by literally anyone. The goal of the moderator is to keep everyone to the agenda, manage time and handle Q&A.
Tao3300 3y ago
> run a super fast retro with a couple of questions like these: “Was this meeting needed?” We just got through a ridiculous slog of PI planning meetings, for which the plans have already been wrecked. This was the one vital question that didn't appear in the retro, instead it was all sickly positive questions like "what went well? what can we do better? what was missing?" and at no point was the floor open to say "this was a big fucking waste of time".
Aurornis 3y ago
We tried variations of some of these concepts at a previous company that was stuck in meeting hell. The result, sadly, was: More meetings and more process! The people responsible for all of the meetings kind of understood the problem, but they only had one tool in their toolbox: Meetings! So they started putting together meetings to discuss the issue Meetings to come up with solutions. Meetings to present new frameworks for meetings. Meetings to look at metrics for meeting time. Meetings to discuss the new system we were using to poll engineers about their feelings about meetings so we could quantify the progress we were making on meetings. The underlying problem was one of incentives. These people were engaged in a battle of visibility, and their way to staying visible was to call more meetings and generate more activity. The more activity they generated, the more visible they were, and the more important executives thought they looked. I think the suggestions in the article are great for companies with a mild case of meeting excess, but if a company is so deep in meeting hell that managers don't know how to accomplish anything without calling a lot of big meetings then there's a deeper incentives problem that needs to be addressed.
HermitX 3y ago
I'm curious about what everyone considers to be a high frequency of meetings. Two 1-hour team meetings per week, along with a daily 15-minute stand-up meeting. Do you think this frequency is high?
- vdqtp3 3y ago
  If everyone is meeting daily, why would you also need to meet twice a week? That seems insane to me.
- moepstar 3y ago
  I don't think the frequency or duration of meetings is the (biggest) problem - it is the undefined scope, undefined outcome, unnecessary attendants and dragging along for much longer than needed that actually block some people achieving their goals and doing their work, which may or may not overlap with the organizer or other participants.
- gedy 3y ago
  It depends on the meeting, I had serious issues at a previous company where the non-engineers were “planning ahead” and wanting discussion, details and estimates for work we were not thinking of or looking at. I’m big on: when in doubt, prototype, investigate, etc. This was very disruptive to our current work trying to do this in parallel.
- icedchai 3y ago
  I do. At a previous company, we had 1 meeting per week max. Your manager was a more senior engineer. There were no standups, no 1:1's or other extra bull. If you had a question or concern, you just walked into their office and discussed it like an adult. Most of my early career was like this actually. It wasn't until we hit 2010 or so that agile/scrum took over.
- Kluggy 3y ago
  I have two daily stand-ups (30 minutes) with different teams I’m a part of A weekly status meeting (1 hr) Three weekly status meeting update planning meetings (1 hr each) Sprint planning every other week (2 hr) Demo and retros every other week (2 hr) Eight 1:1 weekly meetings (4 hrs) That’s 12.5 hours per week so far without even counting any real project meeting where we solve anything. I’m generally around 16 hours a week in meetings and I’m not even a lead or anything. Just a standard coder at a small company. And our velocity shows it. We’re slow at getting stuff done cause we just don’t have windows of time to focus. When meetings are only an hour apart, I rarely get to do anything productive between them. So two hour meetings can eat three hours+ of productivity.
ungreased0675 3y ago
There are some who believe that meetings are work. If those people are in charge of an organization, there will be tension with people who have real tasks and deliverables. My preferred approach is not to modify the meetings to make them more efficient, but to go on an extremist crusade against all meetings. Insist on asynchronous communication. Create dashboards with whatever metrics are discussed at status update meetings. Have people write memos explaining new proposals. Some meetings will survive the crusade, and that’s ok. All meetings aren’t actually bad, but that should be the default.
- efitz 3y ago
  There are some who believe that meetings never accomplish anything. If those people are in positions of power in an organization, there will be tension with people who use meetings effectively to coordinate, communicate and drive decision making with all stakeholders present.
  - gustavus 3y ago
    I've seen this argument often but I'd guess 50-75% of the meetings in my organization could've been handled in an email. Often times the only reason we have a meeting in the first place instead of an email is because of the politics around things, which to me is a sign of inefficiency in the 1st place.
    - ASalazarMX 3y ago
      I've seen that different teams have different priorities, and while emails do help avoid many meetings, there's nothing like an in-person meeting to coordinate efforts. Also, the more your meeting goes beyong half an hour, the less fruitful it becomes. Half-hour meetings are the most productive, one-hour meetings are understandable, multi-hour meetings are dreadful.
  - whoknowsidont 3y ago
    >There are some who believe that meetings never accomplish anything. No there aren't. If you are consistently getting push backs on meetings within your org it's not that the teams or IC's believe that meetings are useless (what a silly thing to say) it's a sign that they don't have faith in the organization structure to concretely do anything with the information or provide valuable input. If you try to setup a meeting and get push back you should _immediately_ ask yourself why the other person feels that way about the people involved or even yourself.
jjtheblunt 3y ago
You know how you do this? You keep the org not as flat as possible, but flatter. People find one another dynamically to share understanding. Would be middle managers join your competitors, to your org's competitive advantage. Disclaimer: I am relaying what i learned working years in Apple engineering (as above) and Motorola Labs (above) versus ridiculous Amazon etc.
start123 3y ago
Meetings are the only way to grow your career unfortunately. Nobody really cares how shiny your code is.
- 65 3y ago
  Depends on the meeting. A demo for clients or higher ups? Sure. A stategy meeting that you don't have anything to contribute to? No. A meeting going over an email, that itself should've just been an email? Definitely not.
- bitcharmer 3y ago
  This is hilariously incorrect. There are plenty of organizations where delivery is the ultimate indicator of value.
onetimeusename 3y ago
I think meetings are almost always unnecessary. They are something that project managers and managers like to have because it gives them work to appear to be doing. They can say they have done meetings to justify themselves. There is another reason to have meetings which is basically to spy on employees. To me a stand up meeting feels more like management attempting to assess the workforce's compliance more so than trying to learn what is going on. A slack message could have done it all for less.
bigbacaloa 3y ago
[dead]
wenc 3y ago
Paul Graham wrote an article about the difference between a Maker’s schedule vs a Manager’s schedule. [1] Powerful people are on a manager’s schedule. Meetings are a unit of work for a manager, and they freely schedule meetings because there’s very little cost to them. The advantage of this schedule is you can have speculative meetings that potentially open up new opportunities. This is very costly on a Maker’s schedule. PG suggests partitioning the day to AM being maker’s schedule and PM being manager’s schedule. (A form of office hours). This works if you have power and can swing this. But I’d be curious to hear what ICs do. I personally just block off my calendar and decline meetings (with reasons given, always politely). I also entertain speculative meetings — I never want to shut myself off to new ideas. Most of my career has been built on serendipitous meetings by people who want to share a crazy idea. [1] https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
- eschneider 3y ago
  Weirdly, being remote with a VERY geographically distributed team makes this easier. Meetings mostly need to fall into a fairly narrow range of time slots to be reasonable for everyone. That means almost all meetings land in a 2 hr time slot each day and the number than can be scheduled are limited so if it doesn't have to be a meeting, it isn't.
  - dusanh 3y ago
    Or someone gets the short end, like me a European, who has to be on meetings with the US in the late afternoon. I do have the mornings free of meetings, so that's nice at least.
- DesiLurker 3y ago
  personally as a senior engineer & tech-lead in many past jobs I am very bothered by fragmentation of my time. I NEED a block of time to get serious work done especially if its not fully defined yet (i.e.. not like go code this function but more like add a service component). I have not yet read PG's blog on that but its something similar to what I track as in devtime-fragmentation-index. I wish there was a calendar plugin that tracks something like this as there is one to report total meeting time already. Problem is its hard to convince managers that there was minimal work done this week because I did 3 hours of meetings each day but it was all spread out. its worse with non-technically sound managers because they need constant Q&A. There was a time when I was working super late because of all the meetings and slack discussions in day time then to do actual coding work I had to find time later in night and my sleep schedule was getting messed up. this persisted until I introduced some hard boundaries. all in all I recommend blocking off time in schedule but thats not a scalable solution unless whole team agrees to it. plus dont get me started on different timezones working together.
tekla 3y ago
Stop equating engineers with web developers. Some engineers go to meetings because coordinating complex projects is hard. I really didn't like 6 hour meetings, but when you have a expensive engine project, you have to. Why is this industry filled with children? If you are sure you don't need to be in a meeting, decline. Why do these children need blog posts to be a bare minimum adult?
- diracs_stache 3y ago
  I'm guessing you're in in automotive or aerospace based off the engine piece. I agree, but I would presume a day long meeting leading up to a wind-tunnel test for example would have a full agenda of presentations based off simulations performed, set-up/teardown overview, scheme of testing to be performed, facility status, emergencies, data acquisition, etc. For this all the relevant teams would expect to have significant engagement and contributions. I think this is different from what people complain about. I work in satellite ops and we suffer from those types of issues (unnecessary stand-ups, status reports that could be an email etc.) despite the need to sober up and have runs where it's a lot closer to the former than the latter.
Guid_NewGuid 3y ago
Counterpoint. Engineers created meeting hell. You know what's a bad meeting? Any Scrum meeting or status 'sync'. Meetings are invaluable. Get together frequently to talk about what you're actually trying to build with the stakeholders and you don't need process, you barely even need tickets. But you have to be present, involved and responsive to jump on a quick call. Instead engineers whine about context switching and how the business context of their work is irrelevant "just put it in a ticket". So now we have micromanagement up the wazoo with execrable Scrum type meetings. I love meetings and feel a lot of anger to the type of engineer who thinks it's beneath them. Equally I detest all 'ceremonies', absolute time wasting dregs.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  Or you know, the impact of context switching on you and on most other engineers is not the same. But no, that's not possible, everyone is exactly just like you, they're all just whiners.
- icedchai 3y ago
  Yes. We didn't used to have all this ceremonial crap. I remember having good planning sessions, we'd talk about what were actually going to do, then we'd do it (with some conversations in between as needed), then meet up in a week to see where we were. None of this micromanagement BS.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  Well those scrum meetings (back before people capitalized scrum) were owned by self-organizing teams whose agile (which used to also be lower-case) methods were to fit those meetings and all other structure to their needs, adding or discarding freely. Then came the consultants selling books and then training. And then the Scrum Masters with their certificates. And somehow the whole thing morphed from self-managing teams into externally micromanaged teams. Hint: the engineers were not consultants nor were they Scrum Masters because they already had plenty of work to do.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
BirAdam 3y ago
The most productive meetings I have are never the ones scheduled, they’re impromptu between myself and another engineer just chatting. Sometimes, one of us mentions a problem and the other offers an idea that pushes toward the solution. Every other meeting I have is pointless and the “leader” should have just sent an email.
jjk166 3y ago
People complain about meandering discussion meetings and how to avoid them, but those are the only things that actually should be meetings. If you know what information you need to get out of people, just ask them to send that info in an email. If you know what decisions you need made, send the decision makers the information and ask them to make a call. If you know what people need to be informed about, again you just send it out. All of this should be done asynchronously. The purpose of gathering people together is for handling the situations where you don't know a priori what is needed. For example someone suggests a course of action and someone who knows better can chime in and say "no, we're not doing that for reasons X, Y and Z" which both the person making the suggestion and the person organizing the meeting may have been completely unaware of. Or similarly someone might describe a problem they're having which others might have experience with handling. In the extreme you obviously have situations like brainstorming. Yes, these are interruptions that cut into peoples' productivity, but they're the price you pay for having a team that is more than the sum of its parts. If you're not willing to spend burn a lot of time with a meeting, it's probably not something you should be having a meeting on at all. The problem is middle managers trying to use meetings to do all of their work for them. Stand up meetings stop being about making sure everyone has situational awareness and instead become a substitute for progress reports. Decision meetings stop being about making sure leaders have all the information they need and become a means for managers to offload responsibility for a decision (and often the blame for any negative consequences)_to the group. Instead of reviewing people's performance and giving useful feedback, managers rely on employees to self regulate based on perceived peer performance norms. Who needs a schedule with strategic goals when you have the action items from last week's minutes? Management is not supposed to be a cushy reward for employees who put in a lot of time and effort, it's a vital part of an efficient team which should have a lot of work to do, and that work should not be done in meetings.
sys_64738 3y ago
A meeting without an agenda isn't a meeting. I can give you a status report via email so don't need a meeting for that. I might not give you a status report because I don't want to. Any meeting an hour long is a waste of time. If it can't be said in 30 mins max then you're wasting my time. I don't need 10 mins of meet and greet. Get into the topic. Make decisions and move on. Don't invite people to meetings who are not key stakeholders in decision making. Meetings are not there for observers and you only get invited in you contribute and have value.
dave333 3y ago
Most successful org I was involved with was a tiny startup that had daily 15 minute max face to face stand up meetings right after lunch with 3 items on the agenda: Wins, Blockers, Next Steps. Detailed status was done with a weekly email that got archived in a visible project history.
ProxCoques 3y ago
Being an anti-meeting crusader is great, but if you don't step up to monitor and properly respond in all async channels, then know that your behaviour in the eyes of a lot of people who matter is straight up career-limiting. Do not do that.

85 points by brikelly 3y ago

jollyoldpirate 3y ago

So.. uhh, I’m just.. D-Do we need a meeting for this? Do we want something weekly or?

iancmceachern 3y ago
My favorite is "I hate to add another meeting to our calendars, but..."

maayank 3y ago

“An engineer’s impact during a meeting is less tangible compared to coding” The common disdain to meetings is that in many meetings no one has a tangible impact while an engineer can create tangible value in their “regular” stated mission. If reading this makes you feel offended then don’t worry, it’s surely not your meetings… only those organized by functionaries whose sole contribution is organizing open ended meetings with no impact.

slowmovintarget 3y ago
This is not because of the nature of meetings, but because people seem to have lost the skills to have effective meetings. Start by sharing an agenda. List the very few things you need to discuss and decide up front. Provide review materials for those who actually prep. During the meeting, record notes on the conversation, record decisions made, and record action items, and publish these records. If you're not prepared to do this, you aren't prepared to meet. You're just having a chat. That can be done ad-hoc. Call it a chat. Have it over Slack or one-on-one. More than one person requires an agenda, and should result, at a minimum, in a document that adds to the organization's knowledge (even if only of decisions or disagreements).

lrivers 3y ago

“How do we know when we’re finished” is the most important question maybe ever.

4hg4ufxhy 3y ago

Have weekdays where booked meetings are not allowed. This gives you a ground truth to compare meeting heavy days against.

tiltowait 3y ago
We had "no meeting Fridays", which were always my most meeting-heavy days, because that's when everyone has a clear schedule!
- baq 3y ago
  If they were the most productive meetings of the week… sounds not bad at all ^_^
ghaff 3y ago
At some point during the pandemic, it feels like Friday became that at a lot of places. I hesitate about even sending chats or emails at this point.

tjpnz 3y ago

One of the first things I do as an IC when joining a team is establish whether law of two feet applies. That is, if you're in a meeting which you can't contribute anything to you get up and leave. Even better is to have this conversation at a time when everyone's present so there's no ambiguity. When the answer's not yes it's almost always a signal of bad things over the horizon.

shadowtree 3y ago

Isn't pair programming just one, endless meeting?

willsmith72 3y ago
have you tried pair programming? because no..
- vundercind 3y ago
  If it’s regularly-scheduled rather than need-driven: then yes.
  - willsmith72 3y ago
    done right it's terrible, done properly in the right team it's amazing. it's just 1 work technique. but i've never been in a team where it felt like a meeting. you're literally writing code together, i've never done that in a meeting
    - vundercind 3y ago
      Done well but not on an as-needed basis, it bears a lost-productivity and energy-draining similarity to meetings. Done poorly and not as-needed, it’s a living hell (but then, many business-things are when done poorly)
      - willsmith72 3y ago
        where does your "as-needed" idea come from? again, it's lost productivity and energy-draining when done poorly. it seems like you haven't experienced a team doing pair programming well, meaning full buy-in and pairing-trained. some of the most productive teams i've been on worked 5 hours of pairing 4 days/week
        vundercind 3y ago

dfxm12 3y ago

I actively fight against meeting hell. If I get a meeting request without a specific agenda (I don't split hairs with the definition of "agenda" or "outcome" like the article though), I ask for one and don't accept it otherwise. If the agenda makes it clear that this can be answered via email, I answer it and decline. If I'm in a meeting that seemed reasonable for me to attend, but I'm not adding/receiving value, or the meeting is straying from the agenda topics, I'll ask what input is needed from me or leave a message in the chat that I'm dropping and to ping me when needed. I also decline meeting requests outside of my working hours (unless it's with someone too many time zones away for our workdays to overlap). My favorite was when someone set up a meeting with me on Friday after I went home for the weekend and when I didn't attend, they added me to a meeting on Monday morning before my work day started. They were angry at me for not attending either meeting. Of course, I never even saw the invites. I think most people get is, but the point it, we have to set these boundaries for ourselves, and I'm sure it's not just engineers who want to avoid meeting hell.

frakt0x90 3y ago
We are 100% on the same page. All of these send a message and are professional
ryandrake 3y ago
> If the agenda makes it clear that this can be answered via email, I answer it and decline. You're one of the good ones. The retort to "This meeting could have been an E-mail" is "But, do you respond to your E-mail?" Sometimes we really do need an answer/decision/action, and not everyone has good E-mail hygiene. I have worked with a non-trivial number of people who don't read their E-mail and/or don't respond to it. And when you don't respond, I have no idea whether you even read it, so I have to assume you didn't. When I need someone to do/say something, I will reach for E-mail as a first try, but if you don't respond, I have to put on my Disappointed Face and schedule a meeting :(
- geor9e 3y ago
  >not everyone has good E-mail hygiene This is so true at my workplace, thinking back. The folks with unreplied emails cluttering their inboxes are exactly who get pulled into meetings. It's basically an emergency handholding step to get them to actually do some work. The folks who clearly reach inbox zero once or twice a day, I honestly barely remember their faces because folks don't dare waste their time with meetings.

Kalibr 3y ago

Title says “engineer” but article is solely about computer programmers? Isn’t that computer science? I don’t remember there being a coding engineer at my college…

SuperCuber 3y ago
"Software Engineer" is a pretty commonly used title for programmers
- kube-system 3y ago
  It is, especially in the US, but the title "engineer" is protected by law in some jurisdictions.
bitcharmer 3y ago
You're trolling, aren't you

gwbas1c 3y ago

As a lead I used to tick a few people off by occasionally declining meetings. The result is that I developed a mystique, and when I needed to get peoples' attention, I could get it. As an engineer it's important to feel comfortable occasionally declining BS meetings: it reflects more poorly on the person who can't get people to come to their meetings than on you. (Even though people might appear mad at you.) It's also critical to decline project kick-off meetings unless you've been explicitly informed about the project by your manager. Sometimes people play power games or bypass roadmaps. Other times your manager forgets to tell you you're on a project. Either way, it again makes the meeting organizer look bad if you aren't there.

internet101010 3y ago
> Sometimes people play power games or bypass roadmaps. The people that do this are the same people that send the same request to several different people in hopes that one of them will do it, resulting in duplicate effort.
gwill 3y ago
i'll add that there you can avoid making people mad at you by communicating why you’re cancelling. you don't need to be mean, just explain that your contribution wont be valuable and the task your working on has higher priority etc.
- gwbas1c 3y ago
  > cancelling I didn't cancel, I declined meetings. There is a very important difference. > i'll add that there you can avoid making people mad at you by communicating why I usually gave a reason, but when there was a large invite list, or no notice, I did not. The one time I "got into trouble" was when I gave a reason: "I am declining this meeting because there is no agenda." My manager told me to just have him intervene instead of declining the meeting.
gav 3y ago
In a previous role I was responsible for developing architecture that supported a bunch of different teams, so I started being pulled into a lot of meetings as the easy option for them was asking me. I ended up having 6-8 hours of meetings a day on top of my actual workload. My solution was to not accept meetings and have a PM go grab me if they really needed me, that was enough friction to allow me time to get work done. As in your case, this created a bunch of mystique as I was now that guy that showed up in the middle of a meeting, said a bunch of smart things (hopefully!) and then left. One of the difference about the new Zoom-centric world is that it's zero effort to add an somebody to a meeting "just in case". I push my leads to decline meetings where there is no clear agenda and/or clear idea of the value they can provide. It's ok that your default isn't to hit "accept", it's the meeting organizer's job to convince you that it's worth attending over other priorities.

Fripplebubby 3y ago

The concept of "decision meetings" is a really tricky one to master. I think: Good: Put a meeting on a calendar in the future in order to force all discussion and investigation to happen before that meeting and keep things moving. Bad: Adding a "decision meeting" doesn't make a decision any easier or harder than before, and doesn't make the research and investigation take any less time than before, and often we don't know what we don't know, so beginning research leads to more research... I think it is really useful for making decisions that people just don't care that much about and aren't that invested in, since it motivates a timeline for those decisions. Otherwise, it just creates an arbitrary deadline. Why are you working late on a Friday night? Oh, well, my manager created this deadline on Monday morning to make this decision.

cratermoon 3y ago
The article doesn't mention the problem of people not preparing for a meeting. It's possible to follow all the author's suggestions about meetings and still end up wasting time because people show up unprepared. Someone doesn't read the agenda or doesn't know or understand the desired outcome or decision to be made. If that is a pattern for someone, they not only are under-performing, they are hurting the performance of everyone involved.

skhameneh 3y ago

> Meetings are interruptions that cause context switches This. I find it very difficult to get into a "flow state". Simple meetings such a a standup are highly interruptive for me, especially when time zones push "morning" meetings mid day.

slingnow 3y ago
And someone in a "flow state", headed in the wrong direction, is even more wasted time than a meeting to coordinate efforts in the right direction.
- skhameneh 3y ago
  If you are experiencing this frequently, your team may have general communication and planning issues.
- FalconSensei 3y ago
  a slack message can solve that

joncrocks 3y ago

Every meeting should have: * an agenda, so people know what is going to be discussed and the right people can be in the meeting, and how long it might take * expected outcomes - e.g. Are we just discussing something, are we deciding something If those two things aren't done, it's likely not to be an effective meeting.

ryandrake 3y ago
Let me add: A notetaker and published minutes, so everything discussed and decided can be referenced later.
- joncrocks 3y ago
  Indeed, and actions assigned to accountable individuals etc. How to run an effective meeting is another topic entirely :-)
teeray 3y ago
Also: * a moderator, a role that can be held by literally anyone. The goal of the moderator is to keep everyone to the agenda, manage time and handle Q&A.

Tao3300 3y ago

> run a super fast retro with a couple of questions like these: “Was this meeting needed?” We just got through a ridiculous slog of PI planning meetings, for which the plans have already been wrecked. This was the one vital question that didn't appear in the retro, instead it was all sickly positive questions like "what went well? what can we do better? what was missing?" and at no point was the floor open to say "this was a big fucking waste of time".

Aurornis 3y ago

We tried variations of some of these concepts at a previous company that was stuck in meeting hell. The result, sadly, was: More meetings and more process! The people responsible for all of the meetings kind of understood the problem, but they only had one tool in their toolbox: Meetings! So they started putting together meetings to discuss the issue Meetings to come up with solutions. Meetings to present new frameworks for meetings. Meetings to look at metrics for meeting time. Meetings to discuss the new system we were using to poll engineers about their feelings about meetings so we could quantify the progress we were making on meetings. The underlying problem was one of incentives. These people were engaged in a battle of visibility, and their way to staying visible was to call more meetings and generate more activity. The more activity they generated, the more visible they were, and the more important executives thought they looked. I think the suggestions in the article are great for companies with a mild case of meeting excess, but if a company is so deep in meeting hell that managers don't know how to accomplish anything without calling a lot of big meetings then there's a deeper incentives problem that needs to be addressed.

HermitX 3y ago

I'm curious about what everyone considers to be a high frequency of meetings. Two 1-hour team meetings per week, along with a daily 15-minute stand-up meeting. Do you think this frequency is high?

vdqtp3 3y ago
If everyone is meeting daily, why would you also need to meet twice a week? That seems insane to me.
moepstar 3y ago
I don't think the frequency or duration of meetings is the (biggest) problem - it is the undefined scope, undefined outcome, unnecessary attendants and dragging along for much longer than needed that actually block some people achieving their goals and doing their work, which may or may not overlap with the organizer or other participants.
gedy 3y ago
It depends on the meeting, I had serious issues at a previous company where the non-engineers were “planning ahead” and wanting discussion, details and estimates for work we were not thinking of or looking at. I’m big on: when in doubt, prototype, investigate, etc. This was very disruptive to our current work trying to do this in parallel.
icedchai 3y ago
I do. At a previous company, we had 1 meeting per week max. Your manager was a more senior engineer. There were no standups, no 1:1's or other extra bull. If you had a question or concern, you just walked into their office and discussed it like an adult. Most of my early career was like this actually. It wasn't until we hit 2010 or so that agile/scrum took over.
Kluggy 3y ago
I have two daily stand-ups (30 minutes) with different teams I’m a part of A weekly status meeting (1 hr) Three weekly status meeting update planning meetings (1 hr each) Sprint planning every other week (2 hr) Demo and retros every other week (2 hr) Eight 1:1 weekly meetings (4 hrs) That’s 12.5 hours per week so far without even counting any real project meeting where we solve anything. I’m generally around 16 hours a week in meetings and I’m not even a lead or anything. Just a standard coder at a small company. And our velocity shows it. We’re slow at getting stuff done cause we just don’t have windows of time to focus. When meetings are only an hour apart, I rarely get to do anything productive between them. So two hour meetings can eat three hours+ of productivity.

ungreased0675 3y ago

There are some who believe that meetings are work. If those people are in charge of an organization, there will be tension with people who have real tasks and deliverables. My preferred approach is not to modify the meetings to make them more efficient, but to go on an extremist crusade against all meetings. Insist on asynchronous communication. Create dashboards with whatever metrics are discussed at status update meetings. Have people write memos explaining new proposals. Some meetings will survive the crusade, and that’s ok. All meetings aren’t actually bad, but that should be the default.

efitz 3y ago
There are some who believe that meetings never accomplish anything. If those people are in positions of power in an organization, there will be tension with people who use meetings effectively to coordinate, communicate and drive decision making with all stakeholders present.
- gustavus 3y ago
  I've seen this argument often but I'd guess 50-75% of the meetings in my organization could've been handled in an email. Often times the only reason we have a meeting in the first place instead of an email is because of the politics around things, which to me is a sign of inefficiency in the 1st place.
  - ASalazarMX 3y ago
    I've seen that different teams have different priorities, and while emails do help avoid many meetings, there's nothing like an in-person meeting to coordinate efforts. Also, the more your meeting goes beyong half an hour, the less fruitful it becomes. Half-hour meetings are the most productive, one-hour meetings are understandable, multi-hour meetings are dreadful.
- whoknowsidont 3y ago
  >There are some who believe that meetings never accomplish anything. No there aren't. If you are consistently getting push backs on meetings within your org it's not that the teams or IC's believe that meetings are useless (what a silly thing to say) it's a sign that they don't have faith in the organization structure to concretely do anything with the information or provide valuable input. If you try to setup a meeting and get push back you should _immediately_ ask yourself why the other person feels that way about the people involved or even yourself.

jjtheblunt 3y ago

You know how you do this? You keep the org not as flat as possible, but flatter. People find one another dynamically to share understanding. Would be middle managers join your competitors, to your org's competitive advantage. Disclaimer: I am relaying what i learned working years in Apple engineering (as above) and Motorola Labs (above) versus ridiculous Amazon etc.

start123 3y ago

Meetings are the only way to grow your career unfortunately. Nobody really cares how shiny your code is.

65 3y ago
Depends on the meeting. A demo for clients or higher ups? Sure. A stategy meeting that you don't have anything to contribute to? No. A meeting going over an email, that itself should've just been an email? Definitely not.
bitcharmer 3y ago
This is hilariously incorrect. There are plenty of organizations where delivery is the ultimate indicator of value.

onetimeusename 3y ago

I think meetings are almost always unnecessary. They are something that project managers and managers like to have because it gives them work to appear to be doing. They can say they have done meetings to justify themselves. There is another reason to have meetings which is basically to spy on employees. To me a stand up meeting feels more like management attempting to assess the workforce's compliance more so than trying to learn what is going on. A slack message could have done it all for less.

bigbacaloa 3y ago

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wenc 3y ago

Paul Graham wrote an article about the difference between a Maker’s schedule vs a Manager’s schedule. [1] Powerful people are on a manager’s schedule. Meetings are a unit of work for a manager, and they freely schedule meetings because there’s very little cost to them. The advantage of this schedule is you can have speculative meetings that potentially open up new opportunities. This is very costly on a Maker’s schedule. PG suggests partitioning the day to AM being maker’s schedule and PM being manager’s schedule. (A form of office hours). This works if you have power and can swing this. But I’d be curious to hear what ICs do. I personally just block off my calendar and decline meetings (with reasons given, always politely). I also entertain speculative meetings — I never want to shut myself off to new ideas. Most of my career has been built on serendipitous meetings by people who want to share a crazy idea. [1] https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

eschneider 3y ago
Weirdly, being remote with a VERY geographically distributed team makes this easier. Meetings mostly need to fall into a fairly narrow range of time slots to be reasonable for everyone. That means almost all meetings land in a 2 hr time slot each day and the number than can be scheduled are limited so if it doesn't have to be a meeting, it isn't.
- dusanh 3y ago
  Or someone gets the short end, like me a European, who has to be on meetings with the US in the late afternoon. I do have the mornings free of meetings, so that's nice at least.
DesiLurker 3y ago
personally as a senior engineer & tech-lead in many past jobs I am very bothered by fragmentation of my time. I NEED a block of time to get serious work done especially if its not fully defined yet (i.e.. not like go code this function but more like add a service component). I have not yet read PG's blog on that but its something similar to what I track as in devtime-fragmentation-index. I wish there was a calendar plugin that tracks something like this as there is one to report total meeting time already. Problem is its hard to convince managers that there was minimal work done this week because I did 3 hours of meetings each day but it was all spread out. its worse with non-technically sound managers because they need constant Q&A. There was a time when I was working super late because of all the meetings and slack discussions in day time then to do actual coding work I had to find time later in night and my sleep schedule was getting messed up. this persisted until I introduced some hard boundaries. all in all I recommend blocking off time in schedule but thats not a scalable solution unless whole team agrees to it. plus dont get me started on different timezones working together.

tekla 3y ago

Stop equating engineers with web developers. Some engineers go to meetings because coordinating complex projects is hard. I really didn't like 6 hour meetings, but when you have a expensive engine project, you have to. Why is this industry filled with children? If you are sure you don't need to be in a meeting, decline. Why do these children need blog posts to be a bare minimum adult?

diracs_stache 3y ago
I'm guessing you're in in automotive or aerospace based off the engine piece. I agree, but I would presume a day long meeting leading up to a wind-tunnel test for example would have a full agenda of presentations based off simulations performed, set-up/teardown overview, scheme of testing to be performed, facility status, emergencies, data acquisition, etc. For this all the relevant teams would expect to have significant engagement and contributions. I think this is different from what people complain about. I work in satellite ops and we suffer from those types of issues (unnecessary stand-ups, status reports that could be an email etc.) despite the need to sober up and have runs where it's a lot closer to the former than the latter.

Guid_NewGuid 3y ago

Counterpoint. Engineers created meeting hell. You know what's a bad meeting? Any Scrum meeting or status 'sync'. Meetings are invaluable. Get together frequently to talk about what you're actually trying to build with the stakeholders and you don't need process, you barely even need tickets. But you have to be present, involved and responsive to jump on a quick call. Instead engineers whine about context switching and how the business context of their work is irrelevant "just put it in a ticket". So now we have micromanagement up the wazoo with execrable Scrum type meetings. I love meetings and feel a lot of anger to the type of engineer who thinks it's beneath them. Equally I detest all 'ceremonies', absolute time wasting dregs.

marcinzm 3y ago
Or you know, the impact of context switching on you and on most other engineers is not the same. But no, that's not possible, everyone is exactly just like you, they're all just whiners.
icedchai 3y ago
Yes. We didn't used to have all this ceremonial crap. I remember having good planning sessions, we'd talk about what were actually going to do, then we'd do it (with some conversations in between as needed), then meet up in a week to see where we were. None of this micromanagement BS.
drewcoo 3y ago
Well those scrum meetings (back before people capitalized scrum) were owned by self-organizing teams whose agile (which used to also be lower-case) methods were to fit those meetings and all other structure to their needs, adding or discarding freely. Then came the consultants selling books and then training. And then the Scrum Masters with their certificates. And somehow the whole thing morphed from self-managing teams into externally micromanaged teams. Hint: the engineers were not consultants nor were they Scrum Masters because they already had plenty of work to do.

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BirAdam 3y ago

The most productive meetings I have are never the ones scheduled, they’re impromptu between myself and another engineer just chatting. Sometimes, one of us mentions a problem and the other offers an idea that pushes toward the solution. Every other meeting I have is pointless and the “leader” should have just sent an email.

jjk166 3y ago

People complain about meandering discussion meetings and how to avoid them, but those are the only things that actually should be meetings. If you know what information you need to get out of people, just ask them to send that info in an email. If you know what decisions you need made, send the decision makers the information and ask them to make a call. If you know what people need to be informed about, again you just send it out. All of this should be done asynchronously. The purpose of gathering people together is for handling the situations where you don't know a priori what is needed. For example someone suggests a course of action and someone who knows better can chime in and say "no, we're not doing that for reasons X, Y and Z" which both the person making the suggestion and the person organizing the meeting may have been completely unaware of. Or similarly someone might describe a problem they're having which others might have experience with handling. In the extreme you obviously have situations like brainstorming. Yes, these are interruptions that cut into peoples' productivity, but they're the price you pay for having a team that is more than the sum of its parts. If you're not willing to spend burn a lot of time with a meeting, it's probably not something you should be having a meeting on at all. The problem is middle managers trying to use meetings to do all of their work for them. Stand up meetings stop being about making sure everyone has situational awareness and instead become a substitute for progress reports. Decision meetings stop being about making sure leaders have all the information they need and become a means for managers to offload responsibility for a decision (and often the blame for any negative consequences)_to the group. Instead of reviewing people's performance and giving useful feedback, managers rely on employees to self regulate based on perceived peer performance norms. Who needs a schedule with strategic goals when you have the action items from last week's minutes? Management is not supposed to be a cushy reward for employees who put in a lot of time and effort, it's a vital part of an efficient team which should have a lot of work to do, and that work should not be done in meetings.

sys_64738 3y ago

A meeting without an agenda isn't a meeting. I can give you a status report via email so don't need a meeting for that. I might not give you a status report because I don't want to. Any meeting an hour long is a waste of time. If it can't be said in 30 mins max then you're wasting my time. I don't need 10 mins of meet and greet. Get into the topic. Make decisions and move on. Don't invite people to meetings who are not key stakeholders in decision making. Meetings are not there for observers and you only get invited in you contribute and have value.

dave333 3y ago

Most successful org I was involved with was a tiny startup that had daily 15 minute max face to face stand up meetings right after lunch with 3 items on the agenda: Wins, Blockers, Next Steps. Detailed status was done with a weekly email that got archived in a visible project history.

ProxCoques 3y ago

Being an anti-meeting crusader is great, but if you don't step up to monitor and properly respond in all async channels, then know that your behaviour in the eyes of a lot of people who matter is straight up career-limiting. Do not do that.