3 ms·

I dont understand why people hate meetings so much. Meetings are bad only if you are mentally absent in it. If you "decide" to actively participate you can so

by vcool07 10y ago

I dont understand why people hate meetings so much. Meetings are bad only if you are mentally absent in it. If you "decide" to actively participate you can soak in so much of knowledge in such short time. There was times at the beginning of my career when I used to sneak into adhoc meetings of senior tech guys in my team, and got away with quite a lot of info (including some odd stares and "yes, you want anything"? as well !)

Matthias247 10y ago
Meetings are ok if they have a clear agenda, a goal what should be decided in the meeting and a small focused group of attendants. If all this is true meetings can be very helpful to get some decisions or a better common understanding for a project. However often meetings are called in without a real goal - just for the sake of having a meeting. Or a large group of people is invited which don't necessarily contribute to the outcome. If any of those are true the meetings can feel like a giant waste of time for the participants. If people feel they are in a waste-of-time meeting they start working on other things in it, e.g. replying to email, .... This makes the attendant group even less focused and the decreases the outcome even more. These kind of meetings often happened to me in bigger projects in corporate environments, where there were weekly meetings scheduled for almost everything.
- vcool07 10y ago
  I'm in a lead role now, and I tried my best to do away with meetings keeping in line the general resentment for meetings among the devs. But, I often see that it's counter productive for the team as a whole in the long run. Without meetings, cross functional discussions screeched to an almost halt, most guys would get deep into their silos not caring about the big picture etc etc. Also, it was a huge pain keeping track of open tickets/tasks as most fail to update progress on a regular basis. In short, I feel, having periodical meetings is far better in the long run for the health of the team as a whole, at-least in practice.
douche 10y ago
I dislike meetings because they are wildly unproductive most of the time. The vast majority of the time, you could just send a couple emails, rather than disrupting everyone for a half-hour meeting. Also meetings generate a lot of false urgency and stress, which is counter-productive.

by vcool07 10y ago

Matthias247 10y ago

Meetings are ok if they have a clear agenda, a goal what should be decided in the meeting and a small focused group of attendants. If all this is true meetings can be very helpful to get some decisions or a better common understanding for a project. However often meetings are called in without a real goal - just for the sake of having a meeting. Or a large group of people is invited which don't necessarily contribute to the outcome. If any of those are true the meetings can feel like a giant waste of time for the participants. If people feel they are in a waste-of-time meeting they start working on other things in it, e.g. replying to email, .... This makes the attendant group even less focused and the decreases the outcome even more. These kind of meetings often happened to me in bigger projects in corporate environments, where there were weekly meetings scheduled for almost everything.

vcool07 10y ago
I'm in a lead role now, and I tried my best to do away with meetings keeping in line the general resentment for meetings among the devs. But, I often see that it's counter productive for the team as a whole in the long run. Without meetings, cross functional discussions screeched to an almost halt, most guys would get deep into their silos not caring about the big picture etc etc. Also, it was a huge pain keeping track of open tickets/tasks as most fail to update progress on a regular basis. In short, I feel, having periodical meetings is far better in the long run for the health of the team as a whole, at-least in practice.

douche 10y ago

I dislike meetings because they are wildly unproductive most of the time. The vast majority of the time, you could just send a couple emails, rather than disrupting everyone for a half-hour meeting. Also meetings generate a lot of false urgency and stress, which is counter-productive.