Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meetings are forcing functions

mooreds.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 123 posts

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#91

Post by TimByte »

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…

The small standup you describe works because it is basically an interrupt router: say what you're doing, surface blockers, then move the real discussion to the relevant people

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#92

Post by superxpro12 »

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 due-dates.

Thats what these status meetings really do. Once you have that, and you track to it regularly, I would wager you could work asynchronously with a well disciplined team.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#93

Post by cube00 »

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…

> banks employ armies of software developers and they don't tend to underfund them

Depends on the bank, some certainly offshore and/or underfund their developers just as badly as any other industry can.

They may have all the money but stockholders demand a very high rate of return for that same reason.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#94

Post by TimByte »

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…

The worst pattern is having a calendar full of rituals and still never having the right conversation at the right time

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#96

Post by superxpro12 »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #3

"It’s easy for long-term strategic, high-impact work to sink to the bottom of everyone’s todo list." "[...] But one where the tasks to accomplish the project are not anyone’s full-time job." Sounds like the organization's leadership are incapable of balancing short term and long term goals, and it's falling to people who are paid less to "step up" and try to swim against the current for the good of the company. or Wh…

If it sinks to the bottom its because the work has not been sufficiently decomposed into its constituent, accomplish-able tasks.

It reminds me of the guy who recommended structuring software tasks to provide small regular dopamine hits rather than one large hit.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#98

Post by herbertl »

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…

Many times, across companies, sometime between the day and half an hour before a meeting, I see a flurry of actions—including responses, decisions, deliverables/drafts, etc. In that sense, I think a meeting works because people don't want to show up empty handed, so it adds psychological urgency.

I think small teams can be an exception here, but across most teams (particularly quickly growing ones) and across functions, a weekly sync is irritating but obvious, proven, solution to getting things done.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#99

Post by alistairSH »

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…

In general, they prefer a meeting with 20+ or 50+ engineers in one place, each giving 1 minute or longer feedback, because they can do that every day and in an hour, they know what everybody is doing. But they seem completely oblivious to the fact that now every engineer has an hour less time to do actual work, they've been taken out of their flow state to attend an hour long meeting of which maybe 2 or 3 minutes is relevant to them, and they've tuned out of everyone else's progress reports because it doesn't impact them at all. Management simply don't see that 16% of the productive day for the entire team is wasted, because it's made their job marginally more efficient.

Uh, I'm a manager and that meeting format gives me a visceral negative reaction.

I have a team of 15 directs (+ 2-3 on loan at any given time) and I would never require all of them to attend a single meeting with individual report-outs. What a waste of time for all.

Currently, the group is split in two. Out standup are are you describe in the last paragraph - what you did, are doing, and blockers. If there's need for deeper discussion, we table that to the end (or schedule a separate meeting), so anybody not required can get back to "real" work. On a good day, the meeting takes ~10 minutes (and that involves some chit-chat) and maybe once/week it take the full 30 minute block.

Maybe relevant - 4 of the 15 are right out of college, still learning the job, the daily meeting gives them an opportunity to discuss work without feeling like they're pestering anybody. If the team was more mature, I could see going to 3x/week stand-ups or similar.

Re: Meetings are forcing functions

#100

Post by TimByte »

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…

Daily is a very different psychological load. Even when it's "only 15 minutes" it can dominate the start of the day and make every morning feel like a small performance review...
Post reply on HN