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Meetings are forcing functions

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Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#71

Post by tpoacher »

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…

meetings are a tool, and when used properly, an indispensible one at that. meetings bloody meetings by John Cleese is an absolute must-watch for conducting great meetings.

however, if all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail: it's when meetings are used inappropriately or to solve the wrong problem that it becomes an issue, and many people make this mistake, which is why meetings end up so universally despised and get such a bad rep

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#73

Post by watwut »

tikhonj wrote: post #27

I've gone in the opposite direction: on projects I've led, I decided to have no recurring meetings at all, very much going against the flow of the broader organization. Instead, I would set up a time when we had something specific to talk about. I wrote a short but hopefully clear description of what we needed to cover on each event that I scheduled. I found this worked really well in practice. We actually talked mor…

We had that and major part of communication just stopped. People stopped talking about issues or solving them, unless those were super large. The bar to "and now trigger meeting in a team where manager seems to dislike" was too high.

Communication larger died, except a smaller "friendship minigroup".

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#75

Post by stronglikedan »

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…

> management will see that it's useful, and embrace this meeting.

Only if you let them. We don't let management attend our weekly. They have nothing to contribute anyway. Just set boundaries.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#76

Post by xtiansimon »

axus wrote: post #9

To get the mathematical analogy back off track, some meeting series are "off-resonance" and result in lower amplitude. I'd have titled this "Weekly Meetings are Motivational".

> “To get the mathematical analogy back off track…”

I too thought the math analogy was quite interesting. Add some recursion and we can have GEB for meetings. Ha!

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#77

Post by maccard »

Nathanba wrote: post #48
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 think it seems tautological to us because it's obvious to us. But other people do not understand or care to understand or even care to think about it. You can see it in this very comment section that there are people swearing how amazingly helpful fixed standups supposedly are even on a whole org level. It's obviously absurd but they have different jobs and priorities, they don't have to understand the inner workin…

I’ve been on both sides of this. Engineers who complain loudest about the waste of time from too many meetings will also complain the loudest about how they feel disconnected from the decisions and from the product IME.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#78

Post by aeon_ai »

smcin wrote: post #39
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.

> In others, clarity comes from making the point and assuming above average intelligence of the readers to know that context is always relevant. It's not cool to insult the readers' intelligence when someone makes a shaky overly broad claim. Better to retract or modify the claim. The headline "Meetings are forcing functions" is borderline clickbait. Most of us here have been in companies that meeting'd themselves to…

“Water is critical to life”

‘Well, achshully, too much water can drown someone, so it’s not a universally true statement that it’s critical to life’

Meetings are forcing functions. They force me to sit in stupid recurring nightmares that are wastes of time, in many cases.

In the right context, as the author has called out, they offer a rhythm to work that drives behaviors.

You are tying meetings to all the woes of the modern white collar job, and raising ill-constructed arguments that don’t pass muster.

“Meetings are forcing functions” - Clickbait?! “The Secret to Driving 10x Better Work” is clickbait. The title is as succinct a summary of the work as one might endeavor toward.

You are acting the fool, my man.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#79

Post by Hendrikto »

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 […] is actually a powerful tool.

The problem is they never stay short, they never stay on topic, they always expand beyond one a week.

Then managers want everybody to say something, so they feel in the know and in control, even when most of the time they are not. So it devolves into everybody just saying something useless to make the manager happy, and nobody listening anymore, because they know that 90% of what is said is just noise.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#80

Post by GS_Projects »

Working solo right now. The bit this misses is that meetings are forcing functions for OTHER people, not just yourself, which is half the reason they exist.

When you're alone you can cosplay urgency for weeks without actually shipping. A weekly check-in with literally anyone external is the only real deadline that bites.

Tried public commits as the substitute. "Shipping X by Friday" tweets, working in public, that whole genre. Doesn't work for me. You end up optimising for the post not the ship. Worse outcome than no deadline at all.

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