3 ms·

While meetings can be unproductive in the form of code, your mind shouldn't be unproductive. Often boring meetings are a good time to reflect and daydream and i

by mempko 9y ago

While meetings can be unproductive in the form of code, your mind shouldn't be unproductive. Often boring meetings are a good time to reflect and daydream and improve designs. Productivity is the greatest source of waste. Coding the wrong thing is worse than being in a long meeting which might have led you to code the right thing. And by write/wrong I mean for the user. Coding is the easy part of software creation. You can teach anyone any technical skill in a fairly short amount of time. Teaching someone systems thinking, and UI design, and just plain good taste is much harder.

PierceJoy 9y ago
You're assuming that the meeting will result in the correct thing being done. In my experience, that's not at all guaranteed. The most efficient path to doing the right thing for the user is just to do something, get feedback, and iterate quickly.
- mempko 9y ago
  I don't disagree, but often that "thing to just do" isn't code... Yes, sometimes the most efficient way to feedback is to not write code at all. Maybe it is a design document, maybe it's a prototype or mockups. Sometimes it's creating software that the user can actually control and understand and solve their own problems vs waiting for a developer to create that one feature they need. But that would require a little bit of thinking outside of code... Those boring meetings are a chance for your mind to wander and play around. The outcome of the actual meeting is less important.
CuriouslyC 9y ago
Ponderous meetings don't design good software. Every meeting heavy piece of software I worked on was hot garbage. You're much more likely to get good software if you have the engineers do the job themselves, then tell them to start automating. Once that's done, have the engineers train people to use what they've created full time, and watch them automate that (by simplifying and writing help docs) as well.
- mempko 9y ago
  No, good designers design good software. You aren't going to get good software with or without meetings if people making the software don't have the skills to do it. Garbage in, garbage out. Diving deep in code is an expensive way to find that out. I've also never met a good designer that just jumped in code without knowing the domain. Sometimes that requires them, gasp, meeting with people first to learn about the domain. But yes, most meetings are terrible, but you can't always know that ahead of time. Elon Musk is a perfect example of someone jumping head first without knowing to fill the pool first. Some of their production problems have been solved by other manufacturers a hundred years ago.

by mempko 9y ago

PierceJoy 9y ago

You're assuming that the meeting will result in the correct thing being done. In my experience, that's not at all guaranteed. The most efficient path to doing the right thing for the user is just to do something, get feedback, and iterate quickly.

mempko 9y ago
I don't disagree, but often that "thing to just do" isn't code... Yes, sometimes the most efficient way to feedback is to not write code at all. Maybe it is a design document, maybe it's a prototype or mockups. Sometimes it's creating software that the user can actually control and understand and solve their own problems vs waiting for a developer to create that one feature they need. But that would require a little bit of thinking outside of code... Those boring meetings are a chance for your mind to wander and play around. The outcome of the actual meeting is less important.

CuriouslyC 9y ago

Ponderous meetings don't design good software. Every meeting heavy piece of software I worked on was hot garbage. You're much more likely to get good software if you have the engineers do the job themselves, then tell them to start automating. Once that's done, have the engineers train people to use what they've created full time, and watch them automate that (by simplifying and writing help docs) as well.

mempko 9y ago
No, good designers design good software. You aren't going to get good software with or without meetings if people making the software don't have the skills to do it. Garbage in, garbage out. Diving deep in code is an expensive way to find that out. I've also never met a good designer that just jumped in code without knowing the domain. Sometimes that requires them, gasp, meeting with people first to learn about the domain. But yes, most meetings are terrible, but you can't always know that ahead of time. Elon Musk is a perfect example of someone jumping head first without knowing to fill the pool first. Some of their production problems have been solved by other manufacturers a hundred years ago.