32 ms·

Three-day no-meeting schedule for engineers

263 points by luord 9y ago

vincentmarle 9y ago
When trying to minimize meetings across my team, I have found Google Calendar to be the enemy. Anyone in the company (or even externally) can just put an event on your calendar, the default is 1 hour, and expect people to attend the meeting because “it’s on the calendar”. There is no way to enforce some kind of policy (no-meeting hours/days, max time, max attendees). Any tips for restricting GC?
- sigfubar 9y ago
  The “Decline” button is there for a reason. You can configure Google Calendar to delete declined events from your calendar. Your response will show up on the other participants’ calendars as well, so they’ll know that you’re not coming and will either proceed without you or reschedule. You can also propose an alternate time, which can be seen as less standoffish.
  - vincentmarle 9y ago
    > You can configure Google Calendar to delete declined events from your calendar. Ah that would be very helpful. The thing is, as engineering manager and gatekeeper to my team, I would like to make those RSVP decisions for people on my team. We can solve this with organizational/communication policies, but was hoping to enforce within GC as well.
    - sigfubar 9y ago
      I’ve been in your shoes. Hats off to you for trying to do right by your team. I’ve had success with coaching my employees to refuse any meeting invite that would not directly help them do a better job. We’ve come up with verbiage to help redirect meetings to me so that no hard feelings could crystallize on the other side. This works except in a small minority of cases: some individual contributors enjoy their meetings. It’s not my place to stop them.
      - wastedhours 9y ago
        > This works except in a small minority of cases: some individual contributors enjoy their meetings. Also in a small minority of cases breaking up a developer flow to provide on the ground context in a meeting is better for the organisation than keeping the developer in-flow for another hour. Rarely, I'll concede, but it's worth remembering that few developers are paid to "code", but to create value for the organisation. The vast majority of the time that's done by coding, but sometimes (in those rare moments) that value is derived from a meeting.
- sincerely 9y ago
  make your own events on the calendar during the time you don’t want to be in meetings
  - wastedhours 9y ago
    Yep, schedule "work blocks" in the calendar - it's usually a good way to combat frivolous meetings, and if something's important, then they'll probably schedule it over anything in any case.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Maybe the company needs a positive consent policy, only persons who respond "going" will be assumed to be present?
hammerbrostime 9y ago
Alternatively, I schedule 9-2 for every day as programming time. A company-wide policy though would be great, and having entire days blocked on or off for programming sounds like it would work much better than my method across timezones. However, having a couple of hours at the end of each day is super useful to keep collaboration with non engineers humming too.
- pc86 9y ago
  The vast majority of individual contributor developers do not have the freedom to simply block off two thirds of their time at work from meetings. Company cultures differ widely - I've worked places where each of the following were true: - Meeting organizers actively used the scheduling assistant to determine the best time and room for a meeting - Meeting organizers picked whatever time and/or location was most convenient for them and whoever made it made it - Meeting organizers picked whatever time and/or location was most convenient then threw a fit if you declined due to another commitment If you're a junior dev and your lead schedules a meeting for 11am you'd be hard pressed to tell them to pound sand because that's your programming time. Seniors have more leeway but I'm sure seniors at Facebook or Microsoft still probably aren't declining meetings with their boss because it's programming time.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    I would submit that a) given the hot job market, ICs have more freedom to improve work practices than they think, and b) changes like this get much easier if they are done collectively. As we see in this case, it started with one team. A junior dev can't unilaterally change the schedule, but they can certainly point out the problem, see if others are feeling the pain of too many meetings, and propose an experiment to improve productivity. And then if a whole teams says, "Manager, we are eager to be more productive, so we are trying X," it's going to be pretty hard for a manager to say, "No, productivity isn't important here."
    - pc86 9y ago
      But it would also be easy for the manager to say "No, meetings are the tax you pay for being part of the organization." I am moving teams at the end of the month and I look forward to suggesting this to my new manager, perhaps just a day or two to start and review the VCS after a few weeks to see how much more gets done on those day(s). I just think it would be very easy for a manager, especially a non-technical one, to disregard this entirely.
sigfubar 9y ago
There’s only one day per week when I get absolutely nothing done: the day I have to leave home and spend half an hour commuting to work. The sense of dislocation caused by this journey is palpable. I lose context and my thoughts become scattered. I feel overwhelmed and can’t help but watch my worries come to the fore. By contrast, working from the comfort of my home is pure bliss. I have my standing desk and large monitor. I have natural sunlight filtering in through the window. I see some trees and hear the sounds of my quiet residential street. The rhythmic cadence of my mechanical keyboard soothes me and quietes my nerves. I’m focused and ready to take on a challenge of any size or complexity. Meetings while WFH are not a major distraction. The other participants are cleanly separated from my world. I have a high-quality headset and microphone, which takes away the stress of being misunderstood. I can easily show my screen, or say nothing at all while tuning out a meeting that isn’t helping me get my job done. I for one am waiting with bated breath for the world to catch up with the idea that some types of work are best done from home. Offices are the true black holes into which human productivity disappears.
- Balero 9y ago
  I'm someone that struggles to work from home, and who really likes having the dislocation. It helps me get into work mode, and back out again, it helps me separate my life and my work. I like being in place with everyone working, and much prefer being physically present at a meeting. So basically your opposite. I think the key take away is that there should be options, what works for one doesn't for others.
  - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
    >I think the key take away is that there should be options, what works for one doesn't for others. Pretty much the same for technical interviewing as well IMO. We'd probably like it a bit more if we at least got to choose the format.
    - hashkb 9y ago
      Candidates aren't supposed to like interviews. That's like saying you're supposed to like final exams at school. They should be fair, but you have no rights beyond that.
skrebbel 9y ago
Please please please let that mean "no meetings and no slack". Otherwise what's the point?
- sigfubar 9y ago
  Try this neat trick: disable push notifications for email, Slack, HipChat and any other communications except emergency channels such as PagerDuty. This will do wonders for your productivity. I’ve faced some blowback from people who expected me to respond immediately in real time, but I’ve assuaged their concerns by explaining my focus model and the need to eliminate distractions. In my experience, my correspondents actually enjoy receiving a thoughtful reply composed in my own time rather than a snap reaction fired off just to get the sender off my lawn.
  - wgerard 9y ago
    Another neat trick I've picked up on from other people use is to use DND mode on Slack when you're focusing. That way if it's actually critical to get a hold of you in real time (but not so critical that it warrants a page) there's an option to do that. People are surprisingly respectful of it, and unlike just going dark it signals to people that you're available if need be but focused on something.
    - character0 9y ago
      I just got the new touchbar MacBook — making DND a primary shortcut was an easy way of making this completely frictionless.
- mazeminder 9y ago
  I agree with this sentiment. In smaller startups, I feel like the bigger distraction is Slack. I've found that closing Slack for a few hours a day results in me having a more productive day. Note: notifications are disabled on Slack, but it still causes distractions.
- antongribok 9y ago
  I came here to ask about this exact same thing... How do they address the onslaught of Slack interruptions?
lukethomas 9y ago
It sounds like the meetings are compressed into the other two days of the week, which also sounds quite miserable. I'd love to see an app that analyzes the internal meetings that happen inside a company and flags the repeat offenders. I've always found that a small percentage of people hold the most meetings. It also can be a bit awkward to reject their meeting invites constantly. Leaders should remind people about the time-cost of meetings (here's a calculator to help: https://hbr.org/2016/01/estimate-the-cost-of-a-meeting-with-this-calculator https://hbr.org/2016/01/estimate-the-cost-of-a-meeting-with-...). There are meetings that can be beneficial for alignment, but then there are the reoccurring ones where people just want to know what you're working on. Anyways, I'm working on a tool to help cut down on the "what's going on" meetings: https://www.fridayfeedback.com https://www.fridayfeedback.com
- wpietri 9y ago
  The compression is surely miserable to start, but I hope people stick with it to see what happens next. In Lean Manufacturing, a common process improvement technique is to tighten some constraint. E.g., if you normally have 10 boxes of parts in play, you drop it to 9 and see what happens. Probably something will happen, as they ended up at 10 for a reason. But then you consciously solve issues until 9 is as smooth as 10. The metaphor they use is ships in channels: if you lower the water level a bit, it will expose rocks, which you remove. Then you lower the water level a bit more. My guess is that if these teams are doing weekly retros, they'll feel the pain of compression. People will then brainstorm ways to make the least useful meeting unnecessary. Or to make a longer meeting shorter, and therefore more efficient. First they'll start with the easy things, but eventually they may move on to rearranging workflows, cross-training, and maybe even swapping people among teams. It's really weird to me that in office-work meetings take priority over direct value-generating work. Compare that with a factory floor or a restaurant, for example, where everybody gets that it's bad to randomly stop direct productivity. Hopefully having clear time constraints will help reverse that.
  - hinkley 9y ago
    People exhausted by all day meetings aren’t in a good mental space to solve the problem (often the retro is at the end, after all, when everyone wants to just gtfo)
heckanoobs 9y ago
At my workplace we have a daily DMZ (De-Meetinged Zone) from 11 to 3. Since engineers tend to roll in btwn 10 and 11 and most product ppl work normal hours and leave by 6, you end up with a lot of meetings btwn 3 and 6. But at least they aren't methodically fracturing your entire day anymore. Care is needed when scheduling. Standard parallelization stuff. If all your sub teams want to have sub team meetings (retro, planning, blah blah), try to parallelize those meetings so there's more time on the clock for cross team meetings. If you don't do this, manager schedule ppl will start violating the DMZ. To manage Slack interruptions disable whatever your personality is distracted by. For me I turn off all notifs that aren't direct messages to me or @mentions. I hide chat rooms with no unread messages. And most importantly I don't keep Slack on top 24/7 on some second monitor. When ppl need me the client grabs my attention and I answer. The rest of the chatter can be read at my leisure. We use emojis in our engineering channels to make it easy to scan for action items like code reviews and we use threads for replying to ppl so the channel is like the top level view of a message board. This is functioning fairly well with ~30 engineers at the org but i think we will need to more consciously manage the 3-6 window if we doubled in size again. Fred Brooks stuff, the 3 hour window is fixed but as teams grow so does the communication overhead.
jasonmaydie 9y ago
it's a bit absurd if you ask me. Have meeting when you need to. avoid useless meetings.
- wpietri 9y ago
  That sounds nice, but doesn't work in practice. When it only takes one person to call a meeting, the larger your company gets, the more likely it is that somebody will think a meeting is useful. This is made worse by the way larger companies tend to rely more on power structures, so it's considered bad for a low-status person to say no to a high-status person.
- LandR 9y ago
  There are certain people in companies who if they aren't in meetings all the time, would probably have very little to actually do. I think for those people meetings are saving their job.
coolguycomment 9y ago
How do you run stand-ups with no meetings whatsoever? Is the hope that you get asynchronous communication through slack?
- wpietri 9y ago
  One team I worked on distinguished "meetings" from "conversations". The former being formal, scheduled things with agendas, and the latter being people on the team talking about things as needed, with people showing up if they wanted. We had very few meetings. Technically the stand-up would have been a meeting. But since it was our choice, we would have probably considered it a conversation, as it was not some uncontrollable schedule bomb, but our way of getting the day started.
- majewsky 9y ago
  When I was in a team that did stand-ups, I convinced them to do it in Slack vs. via phone (in-person was not possible because the team was distributed). We set up a daily channel reminder in Slackbot that contains the traditional standup questions.
coolguycomment 9y ago
how do you manage stand-ups with this schedule? Just try to check-in/co-ordinate informally via Slack?
- LandR 9y ago
  Do you find standups actually useful? Or are you doing them because agile companies do standups? I've never found any utility in standups at all, and the days we missed the standups were no different to the days we have the standups.
  - djohnston 9y ago
    i used to find standups to be useless hurdles put on the track by my manager. now i find them more useful, or less useless, because after 10 minutes have passed i just start coding again.
TallGuyShort 9y ago
My company has a designated no-meeting-day for engineers and it's been good for the reasons in the article - I'd love to see it expand. It's also nice to have a designated day that everyone gets errands done. Need an oil change and they're only open during business hours? Great - everyone gets it done at the same time when they're not trying to contact each other - no need to coordinate. The other thing has been as a last-resort day for meetings that really need to happen soon, but half the people you need to get in the room are just in meetings all the time except that one special day, so you make a special one-time exception when you really need to. I suspect that this is just a band-aid though - those people can't be as productive as they think they are if they can't control their schedule more.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  This is great if the whole company agrees on the no meeting day. If every team has a different day, and I have to hold a cross-team meeting, then at least one person will have to violate their no-meeting day. I try my best to respect people’s preferences but if by some miracle I’ve found a time slot that is actually free for the other 6 participants but happens on your “no meeting day” I’m going to regrettably have to schedule it then.
graeme 9y ago
I may try this myself. I work on my own. But, I find stuff like appointments, phone calls, errands, occasional tutoring, etc really slows down work. Even the gym, which I do MWF. So, Tuesday-Thursday might me an ideal set of days to schedule nothing. It still leaves two days to schedule external things. I tried a one day system before but it was too rigid.
icedchai 9y ago
Sounds wonderful! I look forward to those days where I am not interrupted by a useless meeting or conference call. Unfortunately, they are rare.
dahart 9y ago
During my career, other individual engineers interrupting me while I’m working has had a far greater impact on my time than scheduled meetings. What I’ve been dreaming of is an app for interrupting someone that delays requests and batches them up. No walking up to someone at any time and saying “just a quick question”, plan and expect to wait a few minutes.
- bachmeier 9y ago
  Email?
  - andonisus 9y ago
    No, it's 2018, we need some new app to disrupt the tried-and-true method of message delivery.
  - tonyarkles 9y ago
    > "I hate email. Sometimes I won't get an answer for a few hours, or sometimes until the next day" -- Coworker It's definitely a culture thing. I've worked with teams across the spectrum, and, personally, I definitely lean far towards async communication being the best most of the time. There's times when you can't beat a whiteboard session, but those are the exception for me.
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      E-mail should be this tool but yes, it’s use is way too company culture dependent. Some places/people treat reading/answering email as optional. Some batch it up and “do Email” 1 day a week or so. I wish there were a better work communication tool with the response expectation of chat plus the asynchronousity of Email.
      - 3pt14159 9y ago
        If someone at my company routinely doesn't answer internal emails then they should be fired.
crazygringo 9y ago
I love the sentiment, but I feel like this imposes significant costs on non-engineers, and ultimately on the whole team. Product managers, UX, and others need significant input from the engineering team to make good decisions (i.e. not design un-buildable things). And the idea that they can go for 3 business days a time without that input seems... unrealistic and/or counterproductive. But of course meetings should be limited as much as possible... include just the relevant engineer(s)... and trying to cluster meetings instead of spreading them throughout the whole day...
- hashkb 9y ago
  This might make sense if your engineering team finishes the roadmap and then reduces tech debt to a level they are comfortable with... but since I'm sure that's not the case, you should be happy with 2/5ths of their time.
- amiga-workbench 9y ago
  Meetings are usually a poor way to gather information. I really wish people would send me a well thought out email with clear questions before they fall back on bringing everything to a grinding halt so they can talk in person.
hoorayimhelping 9y ago
Maybe I'm off base here, but to me, meetings are not nearly as big a disruption to my IC work as random interruptions from teammates. Meetings are usually planned and able to be worked around and scheduled for. There is typically an agenda, and if there isn't, it's very simple to ask for one. If it's not valuable, don't go, or leave. If you must go, you can often get the meeting rescheduled - people in engineering organizations are surprisingly accommodating of the maker's schedule. A random interruption by an engineer when you're trying to focus is much more disruptive because it's unplanned and often pulls you right out of the zone. Often times, especially for more senior engineers, an enormous amount of patience has to be practiced as you listen to someone ramble on as the context in your head flutters away, while they go in circles explaining the problem to themselves. This is all part of the job though. People don't have all the answers and the questions are often poorly defined. My skills wouldn't be nearly as valuable if the problems were so cut and dry that I could just program a solution straight through without interrupting anyone for clarity. I don't quite get the hang wringing over being interrupted. It happens, and it happens especially more as you get more senior. Some of the best solutions to problems I've come up with have not been technical, but have come about by talking to people and realizing that maybe the technical solution we were pursuing wasn't the best one, and we could save a lot of time and money by solving the problem a different way.
- yoodenvranx 9y ago
  A loooong time ago I worked in an open office space with the following rules: - no headphones: you can talk to me - headphone covers one ear: you can talk to me if it is important - headphone covers both ears: only talk to me when the building is burning It's not perfect by any means but it worked quite well.
- lovich 9y ago
  The individual meetings aren't a big interruption on their own, but their scheduleing is usually the problem. I frequently will have half hour meetings in a day but sprinkled throughout the day, which means I am always just getting back into the zone when trying to work. When you combine that with coworker interruptions and the need to eat I can end up with an entire day where I can't solve anything more than trivial problems. I can always stay late or work on the weekends but I don't really have any desire to eat into my free time because management wants to constantly hear updates from me every day about how the very work they are interrupting is going
marsrover 9y ago
Lately it feels like all I do are meetings. I never feel like I'm doing any work.
jillesvangurp 9y ago
The only meetings engineers should have are 1) regular status/planning meetings and other agile related meetings. It's a good idea to block these in a single time block. 2) one on ones with managers. These are short meetings and can be planned well in advance or be very adhoc. 3) whiteboard meetings for problem solving. Everything else tends to be a waste of time. 4) very infrequent all hands type meetings. Since leaving the corporate world, I've been doing startups and freelance work. I tend to not use a calendar for meetings because they are so rare these days. Likewise, I've all but eliminated email from my life. It's just not a thing anymore to read and write lengthy emails. We use slack to replace both meetings and email.
kthejoker2 9y ago
If you are in control of your own calendar, don't wait for your org to do something like this: just block off your own productive time and decline all meetings during it.
chriskanan 9y ago
I have about 20 hours worth of meetings per week. I've been arranging my meetings into as few days a week as possible, and it helps a lot, but eventually there always ends up being overflow into other days. I've also gotten complaints that I'm not flexible. Lastly, I've found these days to be utterly exhausting where by the end of the day I'm non-functional. It is much better than constant interruptions, though.
speby 9y ago
The biggest problem for corporate meetings and perhaps why there are so many of them, why they're so frequent, and why they're so long: * Meeting initiator fails to really consider if everyone on the invite list needs to be there. * Meeting initiator fails to consider if a meeting will have all the necessary people in attendance in order to have the meeting (and furthermore, what if a required attendee can't make it? Can you still have the meeting? If so, they probably didn't need to be there in the first place) * Meeting initiator does not have much of an agenda or firm outcome in mind when organizing the meeting (other than some topic or 2... i.e. "Discuss new feature X") * Meeting initiator and/or attendees don't take any notes at all and then don't distribute the notes to people who may want to be informed but simply did not need to be in attendance. There are other issues with why there are so many meetings, too, such as the structure of the organization and/or project being worked on, whether the culture of the company hinges on having "buy-in" from many different stakeholders, or a consistent "ask for permission" kind of culture. Also, a culture where people don't interact well between groups (marketing and engineering, product management and QA, and so on) or have poor relationships between these groups. Meetings serve as a more formal proxy in order to get people informed or consensus on things between disparate groups in the organization. These are additional factors that seem to play into the need for more meetings.
whiddershins 9y ago
Why just engineers. What about the designers? Does anyone really love meetings?
- djohnston 9y ago
  people who can't contribute anything individually
rb808 9y ago
We work quite closely with the team in Europe so usually all meetings are in the morning and afternoons are always free. Its a great way to work. The suggested having days on and days off I've learned leaves the problem that its often impossible to code 10 hrs straight. Having blocks each day is my preference.
markbnj 9y ago
We do this, with Mondays and Fridays being commit/celebrate days respectively (work still gets done on those days but the meetings that set/review the sprint goals are held on them), and the three middle days of the week being "focus" days. It's worked well for us so far.
parvenu74 9y ago
The idea of mental multi-tasking as a productivity killer makes me wonder if people with ADHD would function better in a team lead role (eg: they have to go to All The Meetings) rather than a role where locking down and focusing for 12 hours at a time is needed. I have enough ADHD that I appreciate the interruption of flow that meetings allow me... or am I just weird?
peterwwillis 9y ago
So I have to wait three days to discuss something of substance with an engineer? Sure, I didn't need to get anything done this week.
skadamat 9y ago
I highly highly recommend everyone read Deep Work by Cal Newport - http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/ http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/ The key concept Cal talks about that's relevant for this discussion is "attention residue". When you switch from low-stimuli, high-value work that requires deep focus to high-stimuli, shallower work (like meetings), it can take up to 30 minutes to really switch back to focus mode again. Relevant excerpt on attention residue - https://hackernoon.com/excerpted-from-deep-work-by-cal-newport-9c0633d7b8c5 https://hackernoon.com/excerpted-from-deep-work-by-cal-newpo...
javiramos 9y ago
Reminded me Paul Graham's Maker's Schedule: http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
- sfpwork 9y ago
  Of course it does. It's quoted and linked right at the beginning of the article :)
- michaelcampbell 9y ago
  Did you read the article? That is referenced, and quoted, several times, starting in paragraph 3.
jarsin 9y ago
Meeting # 1: How many images can we fit on the page? Meeting # 2: No seriously, how many more images can we fit on the page? Same meeting every week at pininterest
- bthdonohue 9y ago
  Hahaha, meetings on my team at Pinterest are a little more substantial than that, but maybe it varies team to team?
- commandlinefan 9y ago
  "Can you join a call to talk about how many images we can fit on a page? I know it's 9 PM, but we'll time-box it so the call lasts no later than 1 AM"
trcollinson 9y ago
I got to work for a few years with pivotal labs in the Bay Area. They had a policy called “just don’t have f&$@ing meetings.” At first I thought this was a bit crazy. How could we work without meetings? Then I realized that product owners, actual 10 minute stand ups, and a 30 minute weekly planning meeting was all we really needed to make amazing products. I’ve keep that philosophy ever since and it has worked very well in big and small organizations.
- dasmoth 9y ago
  Pivotal is clearly a style that works well for some people. But couldn’t you categorise the constant pairing as a form of ongoin meeting? It doesn’t seem like the place to go if you want to be left alone...
  - trcollinson 9y ago
    I absolutely agree with you that it is not the sort of place you want to go if you'd like to be left alone. No doubt there. However, I would say that constantly pairing really is nothing like an ongoing meeting either. A really good paired programming environment, if you like that sort of thing and work well in that sort of environment, is very effective for writing and deploying fantastic products and features. I find meetings are very not effective for writing and deploying fantastic products and features. I'd really rather not say there is a "Pivotal" style as much as an Extreme Programming paradigm. Extreme Programming says that an environment is better when you work normal hours. It states that an environment is better when there are fewer meetings. It states that an environment is better when you try paired programming, test driven development, continuous processes, simple design, good communication, etc etc etc. I think all of these things are very good. I also believe a few of these principles don't work well for specific individuals. There are principles that effect the business (fewer meetings, sustainable pace, continuous practices). So far I have always seen those principles as good. There are also principles that effect the individuals (paired programming, test driven development, close proximity for communication). I have seen those not work well for some individuals and should be adjusted to your individual employees.
- wdr1 9y ago
outside2344 9y ago
I would rather see a stripe through my schedule, say 1pm-3pm everyday, that could be used for meetings. I actually enjoy the break sometime and the sidebars on the way to and after the meeting are sometimes great ways to get micromeetings done. Having the rest blocked gives me a two solid blocks of three hours to do stuff.
satokema 9y ago
My previous company was awful about scheduling meetings. They had a strong propensity to throw big timewasters right in the middle of the most focused part of my day, like sprint planning and all-hands meetings. Probably part of the reason I'm gone now, but it is incredibly annoying to be in a groove and forcibly interrupted in the middle of it for an managerial ego-stroking session. (Also, you're paying me a decent chunk of change to sit there bored out of my skull).
ralphc 9y ago
What killed me was that people wouldn't schedule back-to-back meetings because of stragglers to the second one, cutting into it. This meant that there would be an hour meeting, then an hour gap, then another hour meeting. Never enough time to get back into "the zone" in the code.
- Johnny555 9y ago
  The last company I was at set the meeting times to end 5 minutes before the end of the hour (or half hour) to prevent this issue. It helped but wasn't completely effective since we were split over 3 floors of a building (floor 4, 20 and 21), so it could take over 5 minutes to get from room to room.
tomohawk 9y ago
We broke the time up into mornings and afternoons. Most mornings and afternoons were "no meetings" time. If there was a meeting scheduled in a morning or afternoon, then that became the prioritized time to schedule any other meetings that came up. Worked great. Most people aren't willing to skip meetings, or walk out of meetings when they realize the meeting is unproductive. Both are productive behaviors.
jlg23 9y ago
Besides the actual topic of the post, there is one gem that, IMHO, every manager should realize: > As engineering managers, it’s our job to provide the space and support needed to help our engineers deliver great software. The best managers I encountered were not telling the team what to do, but enabling them to do what needs to be done.
rajacombinator 9y ago
I’ve worked on some pretty complex stuff in my time and I can only think of maybe one time where it was necessary to have a ‘meeting’ (which was more like an impromptu ‘let’s get 3 people to whiteboard this instead of 2’). I find the concept baffling and assume it’s for the benefit of people who don’t do anything to feel good about themselves. (Especially the “daily stand up” concept.) Anything complicated enough to require input from multiple parties is usually better discussed asynchronously via email. But I also don’t find interruptions to be particularly distracting so maybe I just don’t get it.

263 points by luord 9y ago

When trying to minimize meetings across my team, I have found Google Calendar to be the enemy. Anyone in the company (or even externally) can just put an event on your calendar, the default is 1 hour, and expect people to attend the meeting because “it’s on the calendar”. There is no way to enforce some kind of policy (no-meeting hours/days, max time, max attendees). Any tips for restricting GC?

sigfubar 9y ago
The “Decline” button is there for a reason. You can configure Google Calendar to delete declined events from your calendar. Your response will show up on the other participants’ calendars as well, so they’ll know that you’re not coming and will either proceed without you or reschedule. You can also propose an alternate time, which can be seen as less standoffish.
- vincentmarle 9y ago
  > You can configure Google Calendar to delete declined events from your calendar. Ah that would be very helpful. The thing is, as engineering manager and gatekeeper to my team, I would like to make those RSVP decisions for people on my team. We can solve this with organizational/communication policies, but was hoping to enforce within GC as well.
  - sigfubar 9y ago
    I’ve been in your shoes. Hats off to you for trying to do right by your team. I’ve had success with coaching my employees to refuse any meeting invite that would not directly help them do a better job. We’ve come up with verbiage to help redirect meetings to me so that no hard feelings could crystallize on the other side. This works except in a small minority of cases: some individual contributors enjoy their meetings. It’s not my place to stop them.
    - wastedhours 9y ago
      > This works except in a small minority of cases: some individual contributors enjoy their meetings. Also in a small minority of cases breaking up a developer flow to provide on the ground context in a meeting is better for the organisation than keeping the developer in-flow for another hour. Rarely, I'll concede, but it's worth remembering that few developers are paid to "code", but to create value for the organisation. The vast majority of the time that's done by coding, but sometimes (in those rare moments) that value is derived from a meeting.
sincerely 9y ago
make your own events on the calendar during the time you don’t want to be in meetings
- wastedhours 9y ago
  Yep, schedule "work blocks" in the calendar - it's usually a good way to combat frivolous meetings, and if something's important, then they'll probably schedule it over anything in any case.
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
Maybe the company needs a positive consent policy, only persons who respond "going" will be assumed to be present?

hammerbrostime 9y ago

Alternatively, I schedule 9-2 for every day as programming time. A company-wide policy though would be great, and having entire days blocked on or off for programming sounds like it would work much better than my method across timezones. However, having a couple of hours at the end of each day is super useful to keep collaboration with non engineers humming too.

pc86 9y ago
The vast majority of individual contributor developers do not have the freedom to simply block off two thirds of their time at work from meetings. Company cultures differ widely - I've worked places where each of the following were true: - Meeting organizers actively used the scheduling assistant to determine the best time and room for a meeting - Meeting organizers picked whatever time and/or location was most convenient for them and whoever made it made it - Meeting organizers picked whatever time and/or location was most convenient then threw a fit if you declined due to another commitment If you're a junior dev and your lead schedules a meeting for 11am you'd be hard pressed to tell them to pound sand because that's your programming time. Seniors have more leeway but I'm sure seniors at Facebook or Microsoft still probably aren't declining meetings with their boss because it's programming time.
- wpietri 9y ago
  I would submit that a) given the hot job market, ICs have more freedom to improve work practices than they think, and b) changes like this get much easier if they are done collectively. As we see in this case, it started with one team. A junior dev can't unilaterally change the schedule, but they can certainly point out the problem, see if others are feeling the pain of too many meetings, and propose an experiment to improve productivity. And then if a whole teams says, "Manager, we are eager to be more productive, so we are trying X," it's going to be pretty hard for a manager to say, "No, productivity isn't important here."
  - pc86 9y ago
    But it would also be easy for the manager to say "No, meetings are the tax you pay for being part of the organization." I am moving teams at the end of the month and I look forward to suggesting this to my new manager, perhaps just a day or two to start and review the VCS after a few weeks to see how much more gets done on those day(s). I just think it would be very easy for a manager, especially a non-technical one, to disregard this entirely.

sigfubar 9y ago

There’s only one day per week when I get absolutely nothing done: the day I have to leave home and spend half an hour commuting to work. The sense of dislocation caused by this journey is palpable. I lose context and my thoughts become scattered. I feel overwhelmed and can’t help but watch my worries come to the fore. By contrast, working from the comfort of my home is pure bliss. I have my standing desk and large monitor. I have natural sunlight filtering in through the window. I see some trees and hear the sounds of my quiet residential street. The rhythmic cadence of my mechanical keyboard soothes me and quietes my nerves. I’m focused and ready to take on a challenge of any size or complexity. Meetings while WFH are not a major distraction. The other participants are cleanly separated from my world. I have a high-quality headset and microphone, which takes away the stress of being misunderstood. I can easily show my screen, or say nothing at all while tuning out a meeting that isn’t helping me get my job done. I for one am waiting with bated breath for the world to catch up with the idea that some types of work are best done from home. Offices are the true black holes into which human productivity disappears.

Balero 9y ago
I'm someone that struggles to work from home, and who really likes having the dislocation. It helps me get into work mode, and back out again, it helps me separate my life and my work. I like being in place with everyone working, and much prefer being physically present at a meeting. So basically your opposite. I think the key take away is that there should be options, what works for one doesn't for others.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  >I think the key take away is that there should be options, what works for one doesn't for others. Pretty much the same for technical interviewing as well IMO. We'd probably like it a bit more if we at least got to choose the format.
  - hashkb 9y ago
    Candidates aren't supposed to like interviews. That's like saying you're supposed to like final exams at school. They should be fair, but you have no rights beyond that.

skrebbel 9y ago

Please please please let that mean "no meetings and no slack". Otherwise what's the point?

sigfubar 9y ago
Try this neat trick: disable push notifications for email, Slack, HipChat and any other communications except emergency channels such as PagerDuty. This will do wonders for your productivity. I’ve faced some blowback from people who expected me to respond immediately in real time, but I’ve assuaged their concerns by explaining my focus model and the need to eliminate distractions. In my experience, my correspondents actually enjoy receiving a thoughtful reply composed in my own time rather than a snap reaction fired off just to get the sender off my lawn.
- wgerard 9y ago
  Another neat trick I've picked up on from other people use is to use DND mode on Slack when you're focusing. That way if it's actually critical to get a hold of you in real time (but not so critical that it warrants a page) there's an option to do that. People are surprisingly respectful of it, and unlike just going dark it signals to people that you're available if need be but focused on something.
  - character0 9y ago
    I just got the new touchbar MacBook — making DND a primary shortcut was an easy way of making this completely frictionless.
mazeminder 9y ago
I agree with this sentiment. In smaller startups, I feel like the bigger distraction is Slack. I've found that closing Slack for a few hours a day results in me having a more productive day. Note: notifications are disabled on Slack, but it still causes distractions.
antongribok 9y ago
I came here to ask about this exact same thing... How do they address the onslaught of Slack interruptions?

lukethomas 9y ago

It sounds like the meetings are compressed into the other two days of the week, which also sounds quite miserable. I'd love to see an app that analyzes the internal meetings that happen inside a company and flags the repeat offenders. I've always found that a small percentage of people hold the most meetings. It also can be a bit awkward to reject their meeting invites constantly. Leaders should remind people about the time-cost of meetings (here's a calculator to help: https://hbr.org/2016/01/estimate-the-cost-of-a-meeting-with-this-calculator https://hbr.org/2016/01/estimate-the-cost-of-a-meeting-with-...). There are meetings that can be beneficial for alignment, but then there are the reoccurring ones where people just want to know what you're working on. Anyways, I'm working on a tool to help cut down on the "what's going on" meetings: https://www.fridayfeedback.com https://www.fridayfeedback.com

wpietri 9y ago
The compression is surely miserable to start, but I hope people stick with it to see what happens next. In Lean Manufacturing, a common process improvement technique is to tighten some constraint. E.g., if you normally have 10 boxes of parts in play, you drop it to 9 and see what happens. Probably something will happen, as they ended up at 10 for a reason. But then you consciously solve issues until 9 is as smooth as 10. The metaphor they use is ships in channels: if you lower the water level a bit, it will expose rocks, which you remove. Then you lower the water level a bit more. My guess is that if these teams are doing weekly retros, they'll feel the pain of compression. People will then brainstorm ways to make the least useful meeting unnecessary. Or to make a longer meeting shorter, and therefore more efficient. First they'll start with the easy things, but eventually they may move on to rearranging workflows, cross-training, and maybe even swapping people among teams. It's really weird to me that in office-work meetings take priority over direct value-generating work. Compare that with a factory floor or a restaurant, for example, where everybody gets that it's bad to randomly stop direct productivity. Hopefully having clear time constraints will help reverse that.
- hinkley 9y ago
  People exhausted by all day meetings aren’t in a good mental space to solve the problem (often the retro is at the end, after all, when everyone wants to just gtfo)

heckanoobs 9y ago

At my workplace we have a daily DMZ (De-Meetinged Zone) from 11 to 3. Since engineers tend to roll in btwn 10 and 11 and most product ppl work normal hours and leave by 6, you end up with a lot of meetings btwn 3 and 6. But at least they aren't methodically fracturing your entire day anymore. Care is needed when scheduling. Standard parallelization stuff. If all your sub teams want to have sub team meetings (retro, planning, blah blah), try to parallelize those meetings so there's more time on the clock for cross team meetings. If you don't do this, manager schedule ppl will start violating the DMZ. To manage Slack interruptions disable whatever your personality is distracted by. For me I turn off all notifs that aren't direct messages to me or @mentions. I hide chat rooms with no unread messages. And most importantly I don't keep Slack on top 24/7 on some second monitor. When ppl need me the client grabs my attention and I answer. The rest of the chatter can be read at my leisure. We use emojis in our engineering channels to make it easy to scan for action items like code reviews and we use threads for replying to ppl so the channel is like the top level view of a message board. This is functioning fairly well with ~30 engineers at the org but i think we will need to more consciously manage the 3-6 window if we doubled in size again. Fred Brooks stuff, the 3 hour window is fixed but as teams grow so does the communication overhead.

jasonmaydie 9y ago

it's a bit absurd if you ask me. Have meeting when you need to. avoid useless meetings.

wpietri 9y ago
That sounds nice, but doesn't work in practice. When it only takes one person to call a meeting, the larger your company gets, the more likely it is that somebody will think a meeting is useful. This is made worse by the way larger companies tend to rely more on power structures, so it's considered bad for a low-status person to say no to a high-status person.
LandR 9y ago
There are certain people in companies who if they aren't in meetings all the time, would probably have very little to actually do. I think for those people meetings are saving their job.

coolguycomment 9y ago

How do you run stand-ups with no meetings whatsoever? Is the hope that you get asynchronous communication through slack?

wpietri 9y ago
One team I worked on distinguished "meetings" from "conversations". The former being formal, scheduled things with agendas, and the latter being people on the team talking about things as needed, with people showing up if they wanted. We had very few meetings. Technically the stand-up would have been a meeting. But since it was our choice, we would have probably considered it a conversation, as it was not some uncontrollable schedule bomb, but our way of getting the day started.
majewsky 9y ago
When I was in a team that did stand-ups, I convinced them to do it in Slack vs. via phone (in-person was not possible because the team was distributed). We set up a daily channel reminder in Slackbot that contains the traditional standup questions.

coolguycomment 9y ago

how do you manage stand-ups with this schedule? Just try to check-in/co-ordinate informally via Slack?

LandR 9y ago
Do you find standups actually useful? Or are you doing them because agile companies do standups? I've never found any utility in standups at all, and the days we missed the standups were no different to the days we have the standups.
- djohnston 9y ago
  i used to find standups to be useless hurdles put on the track by my manager. now i find them more useful, or less useless, because after 10 minutes have passed i just start coding again.

TallGuyShort 9y ago

My company has a designated no-meeting-day for engineers and it's been good for the reasons in the article - I'd love to see it expand. It's also nice to have a designated day that everyone gets errands done. Need an oil change and they're only open during business hours? Great - everyone gets it done at the same time when they're not trying to contact each other - no need to coordinate. The other thing has been as a last-resort day for meetings that really need to happen soon, but half the people you need to get in the room are just in meetings all the time except that one special day, so you make a special one-time exception when you really need to. I suspect that this is just a band-aid though - those people can't be as productive as they think they are if they can't control their schedule more.

ryandrake 9y ago
This is great if the whole company agrees on the no meeting day. If every team has a different day, and I have to hold a cross-team meeting, then at least one person will have to violate their no-meeting day. I try my best to respect people’s preferences but if by some miracle I’ve found a time slot that is actually free for the other 6 participants but happens on your “no meeting day” I’m going to regrettably have to schedule it then.

graeme 9y ago

I may try this myself. I work on my own. But, I find stuff like appointments, phone calls, errands, occasional tutoring, etc really slows down work. Even the gym, which I do MWF. So, Tuesday-Thursday might me an ideal set of days to schedule nothing. It still leaves two days to schedule external things. I tried a one day system before but it was too rigid.

icedchai 9y ago

Sounds wonderful! I look forward to those days where I am not interrupted by a useless meeting or conference call. Unfortunately, they are rare.

dahart 9y ago

During my career, other individual engineers interrupting me while I’m working has had a far greater impact on my time than scheduled meetings. What I’ve been dreaming of is an app for interrupting someone that delays requests and batches them up. No walking up to someone at any time and saying “just a quick question”, plan and expect to wait a few minutes.

bachmeier 9y ago
Email?
- andonisus 9y ago
  No, it's 2018, we need some new app to disrupt the tried-and-true method of message delivery.
- tonyarkles 9y ago
  > "I hate email. Sometimes I won't get an answer for a few hours, or sometimes until the next day" -- Coworker It's definitely a culture thing. I've worked with teams across the spectrum, and, personally, I definitely lean far towards async communication being the best most of the time. There's times when you can't beat a whiteboard session, but those are the exception for me.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    E-mail should be this tool but yes, it’s use is way too company culture dependent. Some places/people treat reading/answering email as optional. Some batch it up and “do Email” 1 day a week or so. I wish there were a better work communication tool with the response expectation of chat plus the asynchronousity of Email.
    - 3pt14159 9y ago
      If someone at my company routinely doesn't answer internal emails then they should be fired.

crazygringo 9y ago

I love the sentiment, but I feel like this imposes significant costs on non-engineers, and ultimately on the whole team. Product managers, UX, and others need significant input from the engineering team to make good decisions (i.e. not design un-buildable things). And the idea that they can go for 3 business days a time without that input seems... unrealistic and/or counterproductive. But of course meetings should be limited as much as possible... include just the relevant engineer(s)... and trying to cluster meetings instead of spreading them throughout the whole day...

hashkb 9y ago
This might make sense if your engineering team finishes the roadmap and then reduces tech debt to a level they are comfortable with... but since I'm sure that's not the case, you should be happy with 2/5ths of their time.
amiga-workbench 9y ago
Meetings are usually a poor way to gather information. I really wish people would send me a well thought out email with clear questions before they fall back on bringing everything to a grinding halt so they can talk in person.

hoorayimhelping 9y ago

Maybe I'm off base here, but to me, meetings are not nearly as big a disruption to my IC work as random interruptions from teammates. Meetings are usually planned and able to be worked around and scheduled for. There is typically an agenda, and if there isn't, it's very simple to ask for one. If it's not valuable, don't go, or leave. If you must go, you can often get the meeting rescheduled - people in engineering organizations are surprisingly accommodating of the maker's schedule. A random interruption by an engineer when you're trying to focus is much more disruptive because it's unplanned and often pulls you right out of the zone. Often times, especially for more senior engineers, an enormous amount of patience has to be practiced as you listen to someone ramble on as the context in your head flutters away, while they go in circles explaining the problem to themselves. This is all part of the job though. People don't have all the answers and the questions are often poorly defined. My skills wouldn't be nearly as valuable if the problems were so cut and dry that I could just program a solution straight through without interrupting anyone for clarity. I don't quite get the hang wringing over being interrupted. It happens, and it happens especially more as you get more senior. Some of the best solutions to problems I've come up with have not been technical, but have come about by talking to people and realizing that maybe the technical solution we were pursuing wasn't the best one, and we could save a lot of time and money by solving the problem a different way.

yoodenvranx 9y ago
A loooong time ago I worked in an open office space with the following rules: - no headphones: you can talk to me - headphone covers one ear: you can talk to me if it is important - headphone covers both ears: only talk to me when the building is burning It's not perfect by any means but it worked quite well.
lovich 9y ago
The individual meetings aren't a big interruption on their own, but their scheduleing is usually the problem. I frequently will have half hour meetings in a day but sprinkled throughout the day, which means I am always just getting back into the zone when trying to work. When you combine that with coworker interruptions and the need to eat I can end up with an entire day where I can't solve anything more than trivial problems. I can always stay late or work on the weekends but I don't really have any desire to eat into my free time because management wants to constantly hear updates from me every day about how the very work they are interrupting is going

marsrover 9y ago

Lately it feels like all I do are meetings. I never feel like I'm doing any work.

jillesvangurp 9y ago

The only meetings engineers should have are 1) regular status/planning meetings and other agile related meetings. It's a good idea to block these in a single time block. 2) one on ones with managers. These are short meetings and can be planned well in advance or be very adhoc. 3) whiteboard meetings for problem solving. Everything else tends to be a waste of time. 4) very infrequent all hands type meetings. Since leaving the corporate world, I've been doing startups and freelance work. I tend to not use a calendar for meetings because they are so rare these days. Likewise, I've all but eliminated email from my life. It's just not a thing anymore to read and write lengthy emails. We use slack to replace both meetings and email.

kthejoker2 9y ago

If you are in control of your own calendar, don't wait for your org to do something like this: just block off your own productive time and decline all meetings during it.

chriskanan 9y ago

I have about 20 hours worth of meetings per week. I've been arranging my meetings into as few days a week as possible, and it helps a lot, but eventually there always ends up being overflow into other days. I've also gotten complaints that I'm not flexible. Lastly, I've found these days to be utterly exhausting where by the end of the day I'm non-functional. It is much better than constant interruptions, though.

speby 9y ago

The biggest problem for corporate meetings and perhaps why there are so many of them, why they're so frequent, and why they're so long: * Meeting initiator fails to really consider if everyone on the invite list needs to be there. * Meeting initiator fails to consider if a meeting will have all the necessary people in attendance in order to have the meeting (and furthermore, what if a required attendee can't make it? Can you still have the meeting? If so, they probably didn't need to be there in the first place) * Meeting initiator does not have much of an agenda or firm outcome in mind when organizing the meeting (other than some topic or 2... i.e. "Discuss new feature X") * Meeting initiator and/or attendees don't take any notes at all and then don't distribute the notes to people who may want to be informed but simply did not need to be in attendance. There are other issues with why there are so many meetings, too, such as the structure of the organization and/or project being worked on, whether the culture of the company hinges on having "buy-in" from many different stakeholders, or a consistent "ask for permission" kind of culture. Also, a culture where people don't interact well between groups (marketing and engineering, product management and QA, and so on) or have poor relationships between these groups. Meetings serve as a more formal proxy in order to get people informed or consensus on things between disparate groups in the organization. These are additional factors that seem to play into the need for more meetings.

whiddershins 9y ago

Why just engineers. What about the designers? Does anyone really love meetings?

djohnston 9y ago
people who can't contribute anything individually

rb808 9y ago

We work quite closely with the team in Europe so usually all meetings are in the morning and afternoons are always free. Its a great way to work. The suggested having days on and days off I've learned leaves the problem that its often impossible to code 10 hrs straight. Having blocks each day is my preference.

markbnj 9y ago

We do this, with Mondays and Fridays being commit/celebrate days respectively (work still gets done on those days but the meetings that set/review the sprint goals are held on them), and the three middle days of the week being "focus" days. It's worked well for us so far.

parvenu74 9y ago

The idea of mental multi-tasking as a productivity killer makes me wonder if people with ADHD would function better in a team lead role (eg: they have to go to All The Meetings) rather than a role where locking down and focusing for 12 hours at a time is needed. I have enough ADHD that I appreciate the interruption of flow that meetings allow me... or am I just weird?

peterwwillis 9y ago

So I have to wait three days to discuss something of substance with an engineer? Sure, I didn't need to get anything done this week.

skadamat 9y ago

I highly highly recommend everyone read Deep Work by Cal Newport - http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/ http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/ The key concept Cal talks about that's relevant for this discussion is "attention residue". When you switch from low-stimuli, high-value work that requires deep focus to high-stimuli, shallower work (like meetings), it can take up to 30 minutes to really switch back to focus mode again. Relevant excerpt on attention residue - https://hackernoon.com/excerpted-from-deep-work-by-cal-newport-9c0633d7b8c5 https://hackernoon.com/excerpted-from-deep-work-by-cal-newpo...

javiramos 9y ago

Reminded me Paul Graham's Maker's Schedule: http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

sfpwork 9y ago
Of course it does. It's quoted and linked right at the beginning of the article :)
michaelcampbell 9y ago
Did you read the article? That is referenced, and quoted, several times, starting in paragraph 3.

jarsin 9y ago

Meeting # 1: How many images can we fit on the page? Meeting # 2: No seriously, how many more images can we fit on the page? Same meeting every week at pininterest

bthdonohue 9y ago
Hahaha, meetings on my team at Pinterest are a little more substantial than that, but maybe it varies team to team?
commandlinefan 9y ago
"Can you join a call to talk about how many images we can fit on a page? I know it's 9 PM, but we'll time-box it so the call lasts no later than 1 AM"

trcollinson 9y ago

I got to work for a few years with pivotal labs in the Bay Area. They had a policy called “just don’t have f&$@ing meetings.” At first I thought this was a bit crazy. How could we work without meetings? Then I realized that product owners, actual 10 minute stand ups, and a 30 minute weekly planning meeting was all we really needed to make amazing products. I’ve keep that philosophy ever since and it has worked very well in big and small organizations.

dasmoth 9y ago
Pivotal is clearly a style that works well for some people. But couldn’t you categorise the constant pairing as a form of ongoin meeting? It doesn’t seem like the place to go if you want to be left alone...
- trcollinson 9y ago
  I absolutely agree with you that it is not the sort of place you want to go if you'd like to be left alone. No doubt there. However, I would say that constantly pairing really is nothing like an ongoing meeting either. A really good paired programming environment, if you like that sort of thing and work well in that sort of environment, is very effective for writing and deploying fantastic products and features. I find meetings are very not effective for writing and deploying fantastic products and features. I'd really rather not say there is a "Pivotal" style as much as an Extreme Programming paradigm. Extreme Programming says that an environment is better when you work normal hours. It states that an environment is better when there are fewer meetings. It states that an environment is better when you try paired programming, test driven development, continuous processes, simple design, good communication, etc etc etc. I think all of these things are very good. I also believe a few of these principles don't work well for specific individuals. There are principles that effect the business (fewer meetings, sustainable pace, continuous practices). So far I have always seen those principles as good. There are also principles that effect the individuals (paired programming, test driven development, close proximity for communication). I have seen those not work well for some individuals and should be adjusted to your individual employees.
wdr1 9y ago

outside2344 9y ago

I would rather see a stripe through my schedule, say 1pm-3pm everyday, that could be used for meetings. I actually enjoy the break sometime and the sidebars on the way to and after the meeting are sometimes great ways to get micromeetings done. Having the rest blocked gives me a two solid blocks of three hours to do stuff.

satokema 9y ago

My previous company was awful about scheduling meetings. They had a strong propensity to throw big timewasters right in the middle of the most focused part of my day, like sprint planning and all-hands meetings. Probably part of the reason I'm gone now, but it is incredibly annoying to be in a groove and forcibly interrupted in the middle of it for an managerial ego-stroking session. (Also, you're paying me a decent chunk of change to sit there bored out of my skull).

ralphc 9y ago

What killed me was that people wouldn't schedule back-to-back meetings because of stragglers to the second one, cutting into it. This meant that there would be an hour meeting, then an hour gap, then another hour meeting. Never enough time to get back into "the zone" in the code.

Johnny555 9y ago
The last company I was at set the meeting times to end 5 minutes before the end of the hour (or half hour) to prevent this issue. It helped but wasn't completely effective since we were split over 3 floors of a building (floor 4, 20 and 21), so it could take over 5 minutes to get from room to room.

tomohawk 9y ago

We broke the time up into mornings and afternoons. Most mornings and afternoons were "no meetings" time. If there was a meeting scheduled in a morning or afternoon, then that became the prioritized time to schedule any other meetings that came up. Worked great. Most people aren't willing to skip meetings, or walk out of meetings when they realize the meeting is unproductive. Both are productive behaviors.

jlg23 9y ago

Besides the actual topic of the post, there is one gem that, IMHO, every manager should realize: > As engineering managers, it’s our job to provide the space and support needed to help our engineers deliver great software. The best managers I encountered were not telling the team what to do, but enabling them to do what needs to be done.

rajacombinator 9y ago

I’ve worked on some pretty complex stuff in my time and I can only think of maybe one time where it was necessary to have a ‘meeting’ (which was more like an impromptu ‘let’s get 3 people to whiteboard this instead of 2’). I find the concept baffling and assume it’s for the benefit of people who don’t do anything to feel good about themselves. (Especially the “daily stand up” concept.) Anything complicated enough to require input from multiple parties is usually better discussed asynchronously via email. But I also don’t find interruptions to be particularly distracting so maybe I just don’t get it.