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How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

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Re: How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

#11

Post by gwbas1c »

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.

Re: How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

#12

Post by Fripplebubby »

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.

Re: How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

#15

Post by joncrocks »

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.

Re: How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

#16

Post by tiltowait »

4hg4ufxhy wrote: post #6

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

We had "no meeting Fridays", which were always my most meeting-heavy days, because that's when everyone has a clear schedule!

Re: How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

#17

Post by ghaff »

4hg4ufxhy wrote: post #6

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

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.

Re: How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

#18

Post by internet101010 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #11

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 als…

> 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.

Re: How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

#19

Post by Tao3300 »

> 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".

Re: How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

#20

Post by Aurornis »

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.

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