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Meetings are forcing functions

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Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#61

Post by philipwhiuk »

thenewwazoo wrote: post #29
majorbugger wrote: post #21

As a developer I have absolutely no qualms with the weekly meetings and since we're fully remote, it's actually nice to be in touch with my team mates, even if they talk about the part they're doing right now for a while. What I had issues with in the past is forced daily meeting (on top of other meetings) that just created stress and fatigue for me. Starting my day with a standup was literally the worst way to start…

In contrast, I always advocated for my teams to stand up in the morning as a way to set the agenda for the day and make sure everyone was clear about what they were going to work on, as well as have an opportunity to schedule meetings with each other if needed. After that, we were done and the rest of the day was yours.

> as well as have an opportunity to schedule meetings with each other if needed.

Ah yes, because sending meeting invites is such a burden you need another meeting to do it in, wasting the time of everyone else involved.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#62

Post by abc123abc123 »

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…

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 about all that is necessary. Then individual syncs can be done per email the rest of the week, or phone in case of emergencies.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#63

Post by ap99 »

bonesss wrote: post #46
solatic wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no doubt that this approach works better than recurring meetings, but I do want to point out the trade-off, which is that this approach requires much more management attention and energy to keep their finger on the pulse and ensure all concerns are handled, compared to their time management being on autopilot with recurring meetings. So it's a bit of a tautology. Managers who manage time better are more effect…

I’d also give some pushback based on scheduling: fixed meetings are a known quantity people can schedule around. For coders and people with lives, knowing what their week looks like is critical to planning and stress management (ie in X work hours topic Y will be landed, I have X - 2 hours to have my facts in line; daily 9:15 meeting ends at 9:30, everything after 9:30 is a predictable block I manage). Now, to the is…

This sounds horrible to me.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#64

Post by philipallstar »

abc123abc123 wrote: post #62
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…

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 agree (except about Americans) but would add that the agenda should be published up front, e.g. in the meeting invitation.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#65

Post by philipallstar »

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”.

The criticism is just "you dared to be confident in expressing your view". It's metacriticism, not criticism of the view itself. That makes a metacriticism level response legitimate.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#66

Post by adrian_b »

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…

Weekly meetings and weekly activity reports are typically fine and useful.

What is bad is that there are plenty of companies that want daily meetings and/or daily activity reports, which always greatly reduce the productivity of developers/designers for no benefits.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#67

Post by tpoacher »

Whenever I hear people talk about meetings and / or (internal / arbitrary) deadlines as a scheduling / productivity tool, I can't shake the thought these people have probably never even heard of concepts like scheduling optimization, bottleneck / queing theory, or async event-loop pipelines.

Deadlines don't make things more efficient by definition, unless it's a case of "within-task" inefficiency (i.e. "laziness"). But while this is almost always assumed to be the case by managers, it almost never is the case on the ground. And then you get into this hare-brained vicious cycle of "oh we're falling behind despite the deadlines (read "context-switching interruptions with non-trivial overhead enforcing suboptimal task selection"), we should probably add more!" [facepalm]

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#68

Post by ttoinou »

abc123abc123 wrote: post #62
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…

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 ?

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#69

Post by adrian_b »

philipallstar wrote: post #64
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 agree (except about Americans) but would add that the agenda should be published up front, e.g. in the meeting invitation.

I strongly agree that the agenda must be published upfront.

Moreover, when something more substantial must be discussed, e.g. the accomplishment of some project milestone, or a work plan or a proposal for new features or for a new project, a document should be prepared and sent in advance to the participants with the description of the obtained results or of a plan or of a proposal, enabling them to prepare suggestions for improvements or for alternatives, or criticism.

Nonetheless, I may agree with what the previous poster said about Americans and conciseness in meetings (i.e. the lack of thereof).

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#70

Post by ArcHound »

moron4hire wrote: post #28

I work at a (ahem) war contractor and at least 50% of my calendar in any week is filled with meetings. As the week progresses, the incidental meetings that people throw at me the day before fill up at least another 25%. I am the chief architect for two major projects, but it does leave me wondering when I'm supposed to be doing any architecting. Oh, and half the company leadership expects me to also stand up a profes…

Hello. For what it's worth, I'm in a similar role (Security Architecture) in a different sector. It's the same here.

The trick is to block your calendar with 30min slots to approx. 80% of capacity. If your calendar is private, these won't be challenged. This leaves you some space to do the work, some other space to get random meetings in and if you're lucky, everyone is happy.

I think this is the price to pay for a high-profile role.

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