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Meetings are forcing functions

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Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#101

Post by andrewflnr »

ttoinou wrote: post #68
abc123abc123 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the way! I run a remote only company, and when the game is on, one meeting per week, 30-60 minutes (at most!) is essential! However... there has to be an agenda, the agenda needs to be followed, and meeting monopolizers need to be cut short. (americans are very good at expanding meeting participation and to take up all the time, care needs to be taken with them. This is cultural, they love to talk.) That's ab…

I also run an online company but I dont like meetings it is always re hashing things already shared and written before. But it seems like a lot of humans absolutely need meeting to properly collaborate. Why ?

Among other factors, lots of people don't read "things already shared and written before". Like, ever.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#102

Post by msteffen »

msteffen wrote: post #34

IMO this is such a manager-brained take. If your long-term strategic goals aren't being advanced, you have to figure out why. Talk to your team and figure out what the deal is. Talk to other teams too, while you're at it. You might accidentally solve a problem. The number of managers who've successfully convinced themselves that knowing things and making decisions aren't part of their job, and just fill their days wi…

My point being, in case it’s still unclear, that “I’ll create pressure on everyone and then progress will happen,” is IMO bad management.

Sometimes the problem is not enough motivation, though I think that if you hire well, that’s rare—the best engineers are intrinsically creative and motivated. Often, lack of progress is due to some other organizational problem—too much toil, unclear priorities, conflict, etc—and just adding pressure until progress happens is the manager equivalent of whining until your sister does your chores for you.

Even if it works, either

1. the team is working around the problem (which the manager doesn’t know about or understand, and isn’t dealing with it) and will eventually get fed up and leave, or

2. someone pushes extra hard and solves the problem for everybody else. Now, that person the de-facto leader, though they’re not recognized, and in fact are often penalized for getting distracted from the paper priorities, since the managers who do this are rarely interested in the mechanics of how their problem was solved. Respect for management is lost, because they don’t understand what’s happening. Eventually everyone gets fed up and leaves.

Managers can’t solve every problem themselves, of course, but the manager needs to understand what the problems are, explicitly set the priority of solving them, and understand and celebrate the solutions when they’re found.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#103

Post by mwigdahl »

ralferoo wrote: post #56
katzgrau wrote: post #12

There’s a lot of meeting hate here and as a developer, I used to feel the same. But after bootstrapping a SaaS company and at times struggling through cross-team execution, I’ve come around. A short weekly standing meeting, like the one described in the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution, is actually a powerful tool. Without it, maintenance, admin, and firefighting will expand to fill the entire week. The meeting fo…

> A short weekly standing meeting The problem is that management will see that it's useful, and embrace this meeting. It doesn't take long until the meeting is no longer short, switches up to daily, isn't standing because there's too many people and/or everyone is WFH. I think one of the biggest problems in management is that managers are super focused on making their management tasks easier at the expense of their r…

I manage teams and a standup with 20+ attendees sounds like hell to me. We keep standups to team scope and 10 minutes long (20 minutes in the case of our largest team, but it almost never goes the full time).

We have some larger meetings that are closer to what you are describing, but they are for higher-level management, not line engineers.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#104

Post by ttoinou »

andrewflnr wrote: post #101
ttoinou wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also run an online company but I dont like meetings it is always re hashing things already shared and written before. But it seems like a lot of humans absolutely need meeting to properly collaborate. Why ?

Among other factors, lots of people don't read "things already shared and written before". Like, ever.

Someone in the meeting has to do this though ? for the meeting to be useful

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#105

Post by theptip »

superxpro12 wrote: post #92
katzgrau wrote: post #12

There’s a lot of meeting hate here and as a developer, I used to feel the same. But after bootstrapping a SaaS company and at times struggling through cross-team execution, I’ve come around. A short weekly standing meeting, like the one described in the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution, is actually a powerful tool. Without it, maintenance, admin, and firefighting will expand to fill the entire week. The meeting fo…

I have a theory that these short meetings are not the root cause, assuming a trustworthy team. Having these standups... weekly, daily, whatever-y... it forces the PM to track deliverables. Which means you have to DEFINE the deliverables. And it sort of trickles from there. The actual hard part is doing the PM Work. Defining deliverables, making tasks in jira (or excel :p), estimating work, and assigning reasonable du…

Yes, and - there is also something about the visceral feeling you get when your turn comes up in standup and you didn’t update any tasks and you don’t know the status of the thing you promised for this week.

If the PM does the task list and then chases the engineers 1:1, it’s a different chimpanzee brain mechanism at play. Very easy to forget/ignore you are letting down a whole team in this mode.

(And the flip side is true too, shared victory is more motivating.)

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#106

Post by skydhash »

theptip wrote: post #105
superxpro12 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a theory that these short meetings are not the root cause, assuming a trustworthy team. Having these standups... weekly, daily, whatever-y... it forces the PM to track deliverables. Which means you have to DEFINE the deliverables. And it sort of trickles from there. The actual hard part is doing the PM Work. Defining deliverables, making tasks in jira (or excel :p), estimating work, and assigning reasonable du…

Yes, and - there is also something about the visceral feeling you get when your turn comes up in standup and you didn’t update any tasks and you don’t know the status of the thing you promised for this week. If the PM does the task list and then chases the engineers 1:1, it’s a different chimpanzee brain mechanism at play. Very easy to forget/ignore you are letting down a whole team in this mode. (And the flip side i…

> there is also something about the visceral feeling you get when your turn comes up in standup and you didn’t update any tasks and you don’t know the status of the thing you promised for this week.

Never really experienced this. But daily are boring when it goes past the act of sharing updates and into musings by the PM, design discussions with a few of the team while the rest idle…

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#107

Post by m3kw9 »

katzgrau wrote: post #12

There’s a lot of meeting hate here and as a developer, I used to feel the same. But after bootstrapping a SaaS company and at times struggling through cross-team execution, I’ve come around. A short weekly standing meeting, like the one described in the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution, is actually a powerful tool. Without it, maintenance, admin, and firefighting will expand to fill the entire week. The meeting fo…

accountability is the main thing here. Daily stand up is where the problems are, it dilutes your senses

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#108

Post by Brystephor »

I have recently began driving projects with multiple contributors that are following a plan I laid out and got buy-in on.

I attempted to run the project entirely asynchronous, where we had a slack channel, ICs had their section of goals and milestones, and I was there for them to consult with, provide feedback, unblock obstacles, and proactively come up with interfaces across the objectives. I thought this would be a nice high trust method of doing things that gave people ownership over their respective parts.

What happened was one person made an AI copy of the doc I had and began vending that out to everyone else, progress was quite slow and really complex in original proposed PRs (unsure if thats AI or author doing that), people did not really follow through with their implementations and it all ended up taking longer than I expected for no good reason. In the end, I lost trust in these ICs as I now feel the need to chase them and have low desire to work with them.

For the next XFN project, I will be driving a brief weekly meeting. Unfortunately the pressure seems to be important. I think there are things I could've done better communication wise at the beginning and throughout as well, but overall I felt disappointed that I had to check in to see progress.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#109

Post by jmye »

wiseowise wrote: post #60
aeon_ai wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes, although not always, it might be (but certainly could never be) wise to hedge, maybe. In others, clarity comes from making the point and assuming above average intelligence of the readers to know that context is always relevant. We can be assured that assumption incorrect, in this case.

You don’t make a confident statement and then dismiss critique with “te-he, I could be wrong, Baka”.

You can make a confident statement and assume your readers are smart enough to understand it as "this may not be true in all situations always" but then they may be so desperate to insert stupid memes into their responses that they miss the point entirely, anyway.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#110

Post by helle253 »

I've been working on a side project with 2 other people for a few months and i inevitably reach out to them to meet for an hour (which always turns into 2-3+ hours) to brainstorm next steps.

I think this experience has taught me a lot about the POTENTIAL value of meetings. We meet up when one of us feel 'stuck' or are spinning our wheels or getting lost in the sauce, and it ALWAYS helps clarify immediate next steps.

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