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Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

bbc.com

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Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#211

Post by mr-ron »

GordonS wrote: post #134

True story: A project I was on earlier in the year was full on Agile, with constant meetings - daily standups, weekly retrospectives, weekly scrum-of-scrums, weekly reviews/demos, bi-weekly product backlog refinements, weekly story refinements, weekly product backlog planning, weekly sprint planning, frequent meetings about git branching strategies and near daily "way of working" meetings. And of course there were so…

All those meetings are necessary if you do by the book scrum. But usually it's the tech lead role that's most important to have attend. Did the whole team attended each of these?

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#212

Post by GordonS »

mr-ron wrote: post #211
GordonS wrote: post #134

True story: A project I was on earlier in the year was full on Agile, with constant meetings - daily standups, weekly retrospectives, weekly scrum-of-scrums, weekly reviews/demos, bi-weekly product backlog refinements, weekly story refinements, weekly product backlog planning, weekly sprint planning, frequent meetings about git branching strategies and near daily "way of working" meetings. And of course there were so…

All those meetings are necessary if you do by the book scrum. But usually it's the tech lead role that's most important to have attend. Did the whole team attended each of these?

Often, yes, or if not the whole team it was most of it.

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#213

Post by journalctl »

throwaway713 wrote: post #175

This is probably controversial, but I generally disagree with the popular HN sentiment that great progress is accomplished by groups of people working together in teams. My view is that the greatest work is done in isolation by individuals, with the occasional conference to stay up-to-date on new ideas. This isn’t to say that individuals accomplish great feats entirely on their own (which undoubtedly is almost never…

I work with people like that. They’re extremely siloed and they make decisions in a vacuum. It always ends up creating problems for everyone else. Then when we actually do have meetings, they don’t want to collaborate or discuss, they just want everything immediately, end of discussion. It doesn’t work.

If you don’t want to work with other people, move out into the woods.

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#214

Post by journalctl »

robotmay wrote: post #28

This sounds accurate to my now recently-ex company. The number of meetings have soared, to the point where they probably spend 2-3 days per two week "sprint" (it's really more of a hobbled walk) in project meetings. Not just the absurd number of project managers (currently 1 PM to every 2 programmers, I believe), but the whole team. And what's weird is that when you're in the office, it doesn't feel out of place, but…

Lots of meetings can also be a sign of churn. If people can’t make decisions, or consistently flip flop on decisions, it can be reflected in lots of (ultimately pointless) meetings.

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#215

Post by jk20 »

username90 wrote: post #196
earthboundkid wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't mean that isn't what people are calling a "standup". More seriously, even if standup actually were 5 minutes like it should be according to theory, no interruption takes less than half an hour to recover from and resume flow.

> standup actually were 5 minutes like it should be according to theory Jeff Sutherland who invented scrum thinks it should be 15 minutes, so according to theory they should be 15 minutes: > The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team. The Daily Scrum is held every day of the Sprint. At it, the Development Team plans work for the next 24 hours. This optimizes team collaboration and perfor…

Scrum, Agile etc. is a nonsense which should be ended. The one reason why it is so popular is that it provides managers with opportunity to organize meetings - stand ups, planning, retrospectives,... Why in the world would anyone reach out to other people to figure out what to do in the next 24 hours? The development of even a minor feature takes longer than that, and contrary to Agile principles cannot be arbitrarily split into smaller parts.

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#216

Post by rjkeck2 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #9

One of my employers actively discouraged meetings and phone calls. They wanted everything done through Slack and email. It felt great at first. Having a wide-open calendar and knowing that random managers can’t pull you into a waste of time meeting seems like a dream come true. However, we quickly learned that removing meetings doesn’t removed the need for communication. Instead of scheduled meetings, our Slack chann…

The issue is for whatever reason even data-driven people don’t measure anything around meetings. Since almost no one has had proper training and have no feedback loop, it becomes very difficult to identify what is necessary v. what isn’t. Meetings shouldn’t be removed altogether, they should be measured for effectiveness and then tools can be implemented to run them properly.

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#217

Post by potta_coffee »

stingraycharles wrote: post #163
potta_coffee wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most work places are heavily dominated by the extroverts. The sales and executive teams are all extroverts. So is the marketing team. IMO it's fair to consider the other side of the coin, there's virtually no way that extroverts aren't going to continue to rule the workplace.

Playing the devil’s advocate, if what you say is true, that most of an organization is extroverted, why would you want to optimize your feedback process for the introverts? Is the reason that you believe the extroverts’ voice is already heard?

Extroverts are over-represented because they're the loudest voices. Introverts have a lot to offer but they're pushed aside.

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#218

Post by xxs »

phonypc wrote: post #203
xxs wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>12:00-12:30 Lunchbreak Too short. An hour or bust. Actually, I am quite serious about. It's great to have time, go out and eat - business lunch in the area are decent to put it mildly.

For perspective: the people cooking your business lunch probably don't get a break of any kind, let alone a 30 or 60 minute lunch.

My experience is that they do get/eat food at the places they work. Much shorter breaks of course but the point "any kind" doesn't stand. They also work shifts, often times 12h ones. They also likely earn less as well. (side note: it's wrong to assume everyone lives in NA; tipping is rather rare here)

Also perspective: staying overnight, while uncommon, to address production issues doesn't translate, either.

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#219

Post by Bartweiss »

dredmorbius wrote: post #179
triceratops wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how many people would want to pay to do their own jobs.

Allocating and drawing down a meeting budget pool might assist with this. As a positive incentive, a countering "attending" pool, also budgetable. Meetings with strong appeal would be compensated from that. Not sure what to do with the Imaginary Meeting Points at the end of the year, though possibly use it as the basis of some sort of merit award or bonus.

At a bare minimum, teams that plan via "story points" or other time units ought to count meetings in those scores. When they don't, you start getting teams that either "get nothing done" or have to work nights and weekends because planning meetings are displacing all their intended work.

For actually tracking Meeting Points, one option might be to make them a project metric? As in: "We predict our project will consume 21 Meeting Points, if we go over 25 that's a failure to be analyzed afterwards like overruning schedule or budget, if we're under 15 we're probably budgeting wrong".

Re: Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy'

#220

Post by thewileyone »

patcon wrote: post #177
altacc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true! I work across Scandinavia and there are definitely more consensus forming meetings in Sweden than elsewhere, even. Having previously worked in US & UK companies I'm still not used to it and I often feel like banging my head against the table and crying out "Will somebody please make a decision!". But of course this is Sweden, no single person will make a decision. I'm sure they think I'm terribly rude.

Heh sounds like you've maybe run across something quantified in the Hofstede leadership studies, commissioned by IBM when they first wanted to become an international globocorp. What you're feeling is the difference between a collectivist leadership culture and an individualist leadership culture. Collectivist cultures value leaders who generate power through _maintaining relationships_, whereas individualist leaders…

https://www.hofstede-insights.com/product/compare-countries/

Here's the source data updated.

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