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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

#91

Post by [deleted] »

efitz wrote: post #25
ungreased0675 wrote: post #24

There are some who believe that meetings are work. If those people are in charge of an organization, there will be tension with people who have real tasks and deliverables. My preferred approach is not to modify the meetings to make them more efficient, but to go on an extremist crusade against all meetings. Insist on asynchronous communication. Create dashboards with whatever metrics are discussed at status update m…

There are some who believe that meetings never accomplish anything. If those people are in positions of power in an organization, there will be tension with people who use meetings effectively to coordinate, communicate and drive decision making with all stakeholders present.

[deleted]

Re: How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

#92

Post by RajT88 »

theideaofcoffee wrote: post #87
RajT88 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then it's a management failure where the importance of this particular thing wasn't communicated or emphasized before and how the individuals' inputs matter. Yes. And you can't fix those as an IC, so you just have to work around them. This is like complaining about the direction of the company and advising to fix the root cause of whatever corporate drama - not wrong, just not helpful or practical advice. > why sho…

> Yes. And you can't fix those as an IC, so you just have to work around them. Sure you can and no you don't have to, you can say so publically, which may give others the courage to do the same, at which point 'management' may see one of two things: there's a critical mass of people that disagree with how we are doing things and move to correct course, or the rabble-rousers are fired. I have personally taken the pers…

> Because it's now become a performance.

Being accountable is arguably a performance.

Job performance.

> You sure?

Yes.

Re: How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

#93

Post by theideaofcoffee »

ryandrake wrote: post #37
dfxm12 wrote: post #9

I actively fight against meeting hell. If I get a meeting request without a specific agenda (I don't split hairs with the definition of "agenda" or "outcome" like the article though), I ask for one and don't accept it otherwise. If the agenda makes it clear that this can be answered via email, I answer it and decline. If I'm in a meeting that seemed reasonable for me to attend, but I'm not adding/receiving value, or…

> If the agenda makes it clear that this can be answered via email, I answer it and decline. You're one of the good ones. The retort to "This meeting could have been an E-mail" is "But, do you respond to your E-mail?" Sometimes we really do need an answer/decision/action, and not everyone has good E-mail hygiene. I have worked with a non-trivial number of people who don't read their E-mail and/or don't respond to it.…

If people aren't responding to emails that are supposedly important, then the incentive structures aren't aligned so that they do respond. I wouldn't say that not having a meeting is an incentive to reply, the incentive is having your opinion heard and considered in future discussions.

Also if there are the occasional emails that actually do need an answer/decision/action Right This Second or whatever and people aren't, then the expectation that people reply isn't being sufficiently set and carried out. Add that to the cornucopia of BS that is management mismanagement.

Re: How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

#94

Post by Aurornis »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #56
efitz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some who believe that meetings never accomplish anything. If those people are in positions of power in an organization, there will be tension with people who use meetings effectively to coordinate, communicate and drive decision making with all stakeholders present.

>There are some who believe that meetings never accomplish anything. No there aren't. If you are consistently getting push backs on meetings within your org it's not that the teams or IC's believe that meetings are useless (what a silly thing to say) it's a sign that they don't have faith in the organization structure to concretely do anything with the information or provide valuable input. If you try to setup a meet…

> No there aren't.

Reading other comments in this thread will reveal a lot of them. :)

I've worked remote and across time zones for a while. I've encountered a few too many engineers who think any form of meeting or even communication is an unnecessary burden. They just want a queue of perfectly defined tickets to pull from and nobody to bother them until it's done at whatever pace they feel like working that week.

Strangely, being in a low-meeting company seems to make it worse, because meetings are so few and far between that some people get unreasonably upset when their week goes from 1 meeting to 2 meetings because we dared double their meeting load this week.

Re: How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

#95

Post by willsmith72 »

vundercind wrote: post #49
willsmith72 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

done right it's terrible, done properly in the right team it's amazing. it's just 1 work technique. but i've never been in a team where it felt like a meeting. you're literally writing code together, i've never done that in a meeting

Done well but not on an as-needed basis, it bears a lost-productivity and energy-draining similarity to meetings. Done poorly and not as-needed, it’s a living hell (but then, many business-things are when done poorly)

where does your "as-needed" idea come from?

again, it's lost productivity and energy-draining when done poorly. it seems like you haven't experienced a team doing pair programming well, meaning full buy-in and pairing-trained.

some of the most productive teams i've been on worked 5 hours of pairing 4 days/week

Re: How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

#96

Post by jjk166 »

People complain about meandering discussion meetings and how to avoid them, but those are the only things that actually should be meetings. If you know what information you need to get out of people, just ask them to send that info in an email. If you know what decisions you need made, send the decision makers the information and ask them to make a call. If you know what people need to be informed about, again you just send it out. All of this should be done asynchronously.

The purpose of gathering people together is for handling the situations where you don't know a priori what is needed. For example someone suggests a course of action and someone who knows better can chime in and say "no, we're not doing that for reasons X, Y and Z" which both the person making the suggestion and the person organizing the meeting may have been completely unaware of. Or similarly someone might describe a problem they're having which others might have experience with handling. In the extreme you obviously have situations like brainstorming. Yes, these are interruptions that cut into peoples' productivity, but they're the price you pay for having a team that is more than the sum of its parts. If you're not willing to spend burn a lot of time with a meeting, it's probably not something you should be having a meeting on at all.

The problem is middle managers trying to use meetings to do all of their work for them. Stand up meetings stop being about making sure everyone has situational awareness and instead become a substitute for progress reports. Decision meetings stop being about making sure leaders have all the information they need and become a means for managers to offload responsibility for a decision (and often the blame for any negative consequences)_to the group. Instead of reviewing people's performance and giving useful feedback, managers rely on employees to self regulate based on perceived peer performance norms. Who needs a schedule with strategic goals when you have the action items from last week's minutes? Management is not supposed to be a cushy reward for employees who put in a lot of time and effort, it's a vital part of an efficient team which should have a lot of work to do, and that work should not be done in meetings.

Re: How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

#97

Post by acdha »

RajT88 wrote: post #84
acdha wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I like the idea of making meetings have some nominal cost - a lot of organizations won’t even blink at letting anyone schedule meetings which cost thousands of dollars per hour but will need three levels of sign-off for a $50 purchase. It feels like there could be a middle ground where you basically get reminded of the cost to the organization. I’ve seen some people who will fill the week up with Groundhog’s Da…

> three levels of sign-off for a $50 purchase. Christ almighty it's so hard to get one-off software purchases approved, no matter how trivial. And so easy to get approved for hiring more people at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The corporate world is crazy town sometimes.

Conferences can be interesting, too. I know people who got screwed over trying to get $100 for an unrecognized local open source conference while the PMs were all going to Aruba for Agile training because that had a certification so it was obviously a legit educational experience.

Re: How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

#98

Post by sys_64738 »

A meeting without an agenda isn't a meeting. I can give you a status report via email so don't need a meeting for that. I might not give you a status report because I don't want to. Any meeting an hour long is a waste of time. If it can't be said in 30 mins max then you're wasting my time. I don't need 10 mins of meet and greet. Get into the topic. Make decisions and move on. Don't invite people to meetings who are not key stakeholders in decision making. Meetings are not there for observers and you only get invited in you contribute and have value.

Re: How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

#99

Post by slowmovintarget »

maayank wrote: post #4

“An engineer’s impact during a meeting is less tangible compared to coding” The common disdain to meetings is that in many meetings no one has a tangible impact while an engineer can create tangible value in their “regular” stated mission. If reading this makes you feel offended then don’t worry, it’s surely not your meetings… only those organized by functionaries whose sole contribution is organizing open ended meet…

This is not because of the nature of meetings, but because people seem to have lost the skills to have effective meetings.

Start by sharing an agenda. List the very few things you need to discuss and decide up front. Provide review materials for those who actually prep. During the meeting, record notes on the conversation, record decisions made, and record action items, and publish these records.

If you're not prepared to do this, you aren't prepared to meet. You're just having a chat. That can be done ad-hoc. Call it a chat. Have it over Slack or one-on-one. More than one person requires an agenda, and should result, at a minimum, in a document that adds to the organization's knowledge (even if only of decisions or disagreements).

Re: How to keep engineers out of meeting hell

#100

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

ryandrake wrote: post #79
geor9e wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>not everyone has good E-mail hygiene This is so true at my workplace, thinking back. The folks with unreplied emails cluttering their inboxes are exactly who get pulled into meetings. It's basically an emergency handholding step to get them to actually do some work. The folks who clearly reach inbox zero once or twice a day, I honestly barely remember their faces because folks don't dare waste their time with meetin…

I remember hauling someone into a meeting because they wouldn't answer a question over E-mail, and after the question was answered, we went on to another topic where he had to present something by sharing his screen. Looked down at the MacOS dock and his E-mail client had one of those red bubbles that shows how many unread E-mails he had, and it was six digits. 241,995 unread E-mails or some ridiculous shit. Like, du…

A big reason for people having tons of unread emails is a poor signal-to-noise ratio of incoming email. When there are multiple useless mailing lists, notifications sent in email, emails where all the important information is in the subject line, etc, and a tiny fraction of actually important emails that require a response, it's much easier to lose track of what's going on. It's even easier to lose track if there are other commonly-used communication mechanisms for important things (e.g. Slack or meetings). That's not to say that 200k unread emails is acceptable, it's well worth periodically deleting all the crap, but the "red bubble" notification count is useless if too much of email is noise.
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