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In my experience it's not that developers hate meetings, but they hate meetings that don't produce anything. You'll developers working out a spec on a white boa

In my experience it's not that developers hate meetings, but they hate meetings that don't produce anything. You'll developers working out a spec on a white board for hours on end — they do that because they love to do that. On the other hand bring them to a meeting about project management and they feel that you're cutting into code writing time.

bloggergirl 16y ago
That's an interesting insight. In my experience, very few meetings produce anything. If a company wants to keep its developers happy but needs to have a few of them in meetings (e.g., to answer questions, comment on process), what to do???
- 2muchcoffeeman 16y ago
  You can call staff in as needed, stick to the agenda and then let them leave when they are not needed anymore. Of course the bigger question is, why are you having meetings that produce nothing?
- makecheck 16y ago
  The net results of many meetings could be summed up in E-mail threads or things like wiki documents. So often the first step is to prefer those mechanisms. (Bonus points if people in the organization can be trained to be brief, so that threads and documents are focused.) The net contributions of many people in a one hour meeting could often be summed up in 30 seconds, and it's even worse when those people had no relation to anything else that was discussed (and therefore had no other reason to be there). So step 2 is to realize that either the meeting was meant for fewer people, or should have allowed attendees to speak for 30 seconds and then leave. The very worst possible meeting is one that is at preset intervals, for preset lengths, with no agenda (e.g. weekly one-hour meetings with 20 people), that starts late with phone and projector problems. That is essentially telling your employees that you don't care about their time.
thwarted 16y ago
I had a meeting this week, scheduled a day in advance and reserved a conference room, that lasted 5 minutes and resulted in me informing the other participant the issue at hand needed to be handled by a completely different department. This could have been done over IM a day earlier. My mistake was assuming that since it was scheduled, it was something that definitely required face to face interaction. Thankfully, I took the brunt of this nonsense and my team didn't get interrupted.

bloggergirl 16y ago

That's an interesting insight. In my experience, very few meetings produce anything. If a company wants to keep its developers happy but needs to have a few of them in meetings (e.g., to answer questions, comment on process), what to do???

2muchcoffeeman 16y ago
You can call staff in as needed, stick to the agenda and then let them leave when they are not needed anymore. Of course the bigger question is, why are you having meetings that produce nothing?
makecheck 16y ago
The net results of many meetings could be summed up in E-mail threads or things like wiki documents. So often the first step is to prefer those mechanisms. (Bonus points if people in the organization can be trained to be brief, so that threads and documents are focused.) The net contributions of many people in a one hour meeting could often be summed up in 30 seconds, and it's even worse when those people had no relation to anything else that was discussed (and therefore had no other reason to be there). So step 2 is to realize that either the meeting was meant for fewer people, or should have allowed attendees to speak for 30 seconds and then leave. The very worst possible meeting is one that is at preset intervals, for preset lengths, with no agenda (e.g. weekly one-hour meetings with 20 people), that starts late with phone and projector problems. That is essentially telling your employees that you don't care about their time.

thwarted 16y ago

I had a meeting this week, scheduled a day in advance and reserved a conference room, that lasted 5 minutes and resulted in me informing the other participant the issue at hand needed to be handled by a completely different department. This could have been done over IM a day earlier. My mistake was assuming that since it was scheduled, it was something that definitely required face to face interaction. Thankfully, I took the brunt of this nonsense and my team didn't get interrupted.