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I predict this post (like every other post about not interrupting programmers) is going to trigger an avalanche of "shut up and do your jobs and stop complainin

I predict this post (like every other post about not interrupting programmers) is going to trigger an avalanche of "shut up and do your jobs and stop complaining, you spoiled lazy coddled whiny programmers". It seems to be lost on negative commenters that giving programmers (or anybody else for that matter) the freedom to do their jobs well benefits everybody. I sometimes suspect that the interruptions, like the horrible open offices and pointless standup meetings, are put in place not because anybody even perceives them to be a benefit, but as a "muscle flex" to remind the workers who's boss, regardless of how detrimental is it to everybody, including the boss.

andi999 5y ago
It depends, doesnt it. Two billable hours might be considered better than one billable hour.
dkdbejwi383 5y ago
I've got no problem with having standup and other such things, but wish that all meetings (standup, backlog refinement, brainstorming sessions, etc) were scheduled all in one morning or one whole day out of the week, so that I could then have good 4-5 hour uninterrupted blocks for the rest of the days, instead of having an hour to work, a 20 minute meeting, 40 minutes of work, a 45 minute meeting, 15 minutes of "work", lunch, 30 minutes of work, another meeting, etc.
- sombremesa 5y ago
  I tried to advocate for this at my current workplace but got a lot of pushback from people who said they didn't want to spend their whole day in meetings (even if it's just one working day out of 10). Others said they had so many meetings they couldn't possibly find enough time to have that many meetings in a day (doesn't make sense to me but that's a direct quote). Clarified here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27316534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27316534 Now I'm realizing my job is actually to attend meetings. I should ask for a raise! Though in reality I'm just going to quit soon. The sweet irony is that this meeting heavy company of 50ish people uses Zoom without pro accounts...it's enough to make a grown man cry.
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    > my job is actually to attend meetings. It's probably not, though - or, at least one of those meetings is the one where you have to showcase/demonstrate what you "accomplished" in spite of all the interruptions. You do have to produce something in spite of all the time wasted in meetings. I've unironically been told that that's what the weekends are for.
    - sombremesa 5y ago
      The 'my job is actually to attend meetings' was tongue-in-cheek - perhaps that wasn't as obvious as I thought. These days I code during the meetings, since it doesn't seem to make a difference whether I pay attention. > I've unironically been told that that's what the weekends are for. This kind of rings true, I've only been here around 3 months. I did spend a couple of weekends on code in the first month, but overall this company (and my comp) really isn't worth that kind of effort, so I've stopped. I really only joined this company because I wanted a better work life balance (joke's on me) and my business isn't yet profitable, but I'm actually financially independent so it's tough to muster up motivation to work overtime for free.
      - ipaddr 5y ago
        Have you ever tried just not showing up. Or pitting two managers against each other? I would love to attend your meeting but this other team needs this. Let them schedule it out for you?
        gregmac 5y ago
        I went on a kick of replying (and sometimes declining) meetings without agendas, asking "what is the agenda for this?" And sometimes with an agenda, I will try to reply and resolve whatever it was about asynchronously. There have been several meetings avoided when I replied with something like "this sounds like known bug #1234" or "here's the wiki page documenting this: is there something else not covered?". My # meetings went down after I started doing this. Maybe it changed the culture in a good way, or maybe people got tired of me and stopped inviting me to meetings.. but either way seems like success.
- thrower123 5y ago
  My least favorite, and all too common, kind of day is one that gets bracketed with meetings. The most usual form of this is the 10:30 AM standup/status meeting, paired with the 3 pm also standup/status/testing session. Assuming that you eat lunch, this is almost perfectly designed to make sure that you can't actually accomplish anything in the course of a 9-5 work day.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  Completely agree with this in principle. I've passive-aggressively kept a spreadsheet that tracks how much time I spend in meetings, and it's averaged between 25% and 30% over the course of a couple years. That's frustrating in its own right, but what's worse is that nobody ever factors it into scheduling estimates. If your team is getting 6 hours of work done in an 8 hour day, that's the equivalent of the whole team taking a day off every week and expecting everything to still get done on schedule. Except it's worse, because it makes you less efficient all the time rather than just one day a week. On the other hand, I don't think that trying to fit all weekly meetings into a single day would solve the problem either. It's often the case that decision makers — the people you need to have at a lot of meetings — are involved in different areas of a business or product, so they'd have overlapping demands on their time. Where I work, there are a few people who are like this, and their schedule shapes how meetings are planned for everyone else. When any of these people have conflicting meetings scheduled, one or more of those meetings have to be rescheduled for another day. So now everyone else has 2 half days of meetings a week, rather than one full day. And then, what happens if you learn new information and have to make a decision? Do you wait a week to talk about it? Probably not. So, you'd probably have a couple heavy meeting days, and then a number of ad hoc meetings scattered over the week. This is not the improvement we were looking for, and I think at a certain point the team would just drift away from the initial vision, and settle into the former pattern. Not saying it's a good thing!
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    I do, I'll add in meetings in the estimate you should too. I love contracting where you charge the client for each meeting, itemize the list by date/duration and suddenly meetings become shorter.
  - tharkun__ 5y ago
    Story points to the rescue. It sounds to me like you guys are estimating in hours, thus you give an 8 hour estimate, they expect something to be done 8 work hours after you started work. Everyone knows you have 80 hours in a two week period so they expect you do finish 10 of these 8 hour tickets. Compare that to Story Points. Your velocity over a two week sprint is auto adjusting for the typical/average meeting load and other interruptions. If you estimate a ticket at 8 story points and your velocity is 24 story points then everyone should expect you to finish 3 of these tasks per sprint. This is obviously all 'on average' and there might be a production incident that means this time you didn't get it all done or maybe the other way around, someone got sick and 3 large meetings didn't happen and you got a 4th ticket through. Also note that I chose 8 story points at random. 8 story points is specifically NOT to be equated with 8 hours. Story points are just uses as a relative complexity measure, meaning something with 3 story points is roughly a third as complex as that 8 pointer. Many managers and even people that claim to be Scrum Product Owner or even Scrum Masters don't really understand that.
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mjburgess 5y ago
The culture here is fascinating. I comment (sincerely, and thoughtfully) in one topic criticising naive interpretations of AI -- heavily downvoted. OK, we're AI fanatics here: programmers are gods. Intelligence is just a program we're yet to write. So in this thread I comment to defend how demanding programming is on the intellect. Again, many downvotes. I have no idea what this community is.
- slingnow 5y ago
  It's a community of people with thoughts that sometimes differ from yours. It doesn't seem that confusing.
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    Indeed: isn't that precisely a good reason to reply rather than downvote? I have maybe downvoted a handful of times in a decade of being on this site: only for spam or grossly misleading comments. Increasingly I see seas of downvoted comments as-if this were reddit. I think that might just be it: the community has grown so large, it has attracted enough of those types who vote-their-emotions.
    - slingnow 5y ago
      I think I agree with you in general, and to be fair I didn't downvote your original comment. My takeaway was that you were taking the unpopular opinion (programming is uniquely hard/creative/etc) and attempting to reinforce it by unfairly reducing the creative act of painting to no more than paint on a canvas. That's my best guess.
- loopz 5y ago
  You'll fare much better trying for constructive and introspective perspectives. Often you'll receive downvotes immediately anyway, but the tide might turn as other people might recognize something in what you write over time. This is a startup/founder-centric forum, and creative people usually have less time for criticism and negative viewpoints, that then need to be translated into something worthwhile.
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amozoss 5y ago
Author here: My intention wasn't to whine or anything. In fact, 2 of the 4 tips I gave was how I protect against interruptions from myself. The comments have inspired me to write a follow up, titled something like "My number one source of interruptions is myself", and maybe it'll avoid the mess of flame.
908B64B197 5y ago
> I sometimes suspect that the interruptions, like the horrible open offices and pointless standup meetings, are put in place not because anybody even perceives them to be a benefit, but as a "muscle flex" to remind the workers who's boss, regardless of how detrimental is it to everybody, including the boss. Microsoft had a culture of offices with a door, to allow more focus. But it's not the only thing they did differently (and the companies valuation speaks for itself).
- Arainach 5y ago
  That's not quite the data point you think it is. Their valuation stayed roughly constant from 2001-2016, and the huge spike since then corresponds to a huge shift away from offices with doors - all new buildings after 2010 or so were that way, and most of main campus has been torn down to be rebuilt as open office floorplans.
akomtu 5y ago
I did some cat herding in past and the sole reason I run morning stand-ups is to know what everyone is doing. In other words, I was afraid to appear clueless when higher ups ask me about progress. It wasn't a muscle flex, but it wasn't for the team's benefit either. And yes, open spaces are wonderful for such low-effort managing activity.
nly 5y ago
Try it when your company spans America, Europe and Asia and you have meetings between teams in all of them

andi999 5y ago

It depends, doesnt it. Two billable hours might be considered better than one billable hour.

dkdbejwi383 5y ago

I've got no problem with having standup and other such things, but wish that all meetings (standup, backlog refinement, brainstorming sessions, etc) were scheduled all in one morning or one whole day out of the week, so that I could then have good 4-5 hour uninterrupted blocks for the rest of the days, instead of having an hour to work, a 20 minute meeting, 40 minutes of work, a 45 minute meeting, 15 minutes of "work", lunch, 30 minutes of work, another meeting, etc.

sombremesa 5y ago
I tried to advocate for this at my current workplace but got a lot of pushback from people who said they didn't want to spend their whole day in meetings (even if it's just one working day out of 10). Others said they had so many meetings they couldn't possibly find enough time to have that many meetings in a day (doesn't make sense to me but that's a direct quote). Clarified here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27316534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27316534 Now I'm realizing my job is actually to attend meetings. I should ask for a raise! Though in reality I'm just going to quit soon. The sweet irony is that this meeting heavy company of 50ish people uses Zoom without pro accounts...it's enough to make a grown man cry.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > my job is actually to attend meetings. It's probably not, though - or, at least one of those meetings is the one where you have to showcase/demonstrate what you "accomplished" in spite of all the interruptions. You do have to produce something in spite of all the time wasted in meetings. I've unironically been told that that's what the weekends are for.
  - sombremesa 5y ago
    The 'my job is actually to attend meetings' was tongue-in-cheek - perhaps that wasn't as obvious as I thought. These days I code during the meetings, since it doesn't seem to make a difference whether I pay attention. > I've unironically been told that that's what the weekends are for. This kind of rings true, I've only been here around 3 months. I did spend a couple of weekends on code in the first month, but overall this company (and my comp) really isn't worth that kind of effort, so I've stopped. I really only joined this company because I wanted a better work life balance (joke's on me) and my business isn't yet profitable, but I'm actually financially independent so it's tough to muster up motivation to work overtime for free.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Have you ever tried just not showing up. Or pitting two managers against each other? I would love to attend your meeting but this other team needs this. Let them schedule it out for you?
      - gregmac 5y ago
        I went on a kick of replying (and sometimes declining) meetings without agendas, asking "what is the agenda for this?" And sometimes with an agenda, I will try to reply and resolve whatever it was about asynchronously. There have been several meetings avoided when I replied with something like "this sounds like known bug #1234" or "here's the wiki page documenting this: is there something else not covered?". My # meetings went down after I started doing this. Maybe it changed the culture in a good way, or maybe people got tired of me and stopped inviting me to meetings.. but either way seems like success.
thrower123 5y ago
My least favorite, and all too common, kind of day is one that gets bracketed with meetings. The most usual form of this is the 10:30 AM standup/status meeting, paired with the 3 pm also standup/status/testing session. Assuming that you eat lunch, this is almost perfectly designed to make sure that you can't actually accomplish anything in the course of a 9-5 work day.
karaterobot 5y ago
Completely agree with this in principle. I've passive-aggressively kept a spreadsheet that tracks how much time I spend in meetings, and it's averaged between 25% and 30% over the course of a couple years. That's frustrating in its own right, but what's worse is that nobody ever factors it into scheduling estimates. If your team is getting 6 hours of work done in an 8 hour day, that's the equivalent of the whole team taking a day off every week and expecting everything to still get done on schedule. Except it's worse, because it makes you less efficient all the time rather than just one day a week. On the other hand, I don't think that trying to fit all weekly meetings into a single day would solve the problem either. It's often the case that decision makers — the people you need to have at a lot of meetings — are involved in different areas of a business or product, so they'd have overlapping demands on their time. Where I work, there are a few people who are like this, and their schedule shapes how meetings are planned for everyone else. When any of these people have conflicting meetings scheduled, one or more of those meetings have to be rescheduled for another day. So now everyone else has 2 half days of meetings a week, rather than one full day. And then, what happens if you learn new information and have to make a decision? Do you wait a week to talk about it? Probably not. So, you'd probably have a couple heavy meeting days, and then a number of ad hoc meetings scattered over the week. This is not the improvement we were looking for, and I think at a certain point the team would just drift away from the initial vision, and settle into the former pattern. Not saying it's a good thing!
- ipaddr 5y ago
  I do, I'll add in meetings in the estimate you should too. I love contracting where you charge the client for each meeting, itemize the list by date/duration and suddenly meetings become shorter.
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  Story points to the rescue. It sounds to me like you guys are estimating in hours, thus you give an 8 hour estimate, they expect something to be done 8 work hours after you started work. Everyone knows you have 80 hours in a two week period so they expect you do finish 10 of these 8 hour tickets. Compare that to Story Points. Your velocity over a two week sprint is auto adjusting for the typical/average meeting load and other interruptions. If you estimate a ticket at 8 story points and your velocity is 24 story points then everyone should expect you to finish 3 of these tasks per sprint. This is obviously all 'on average' and there might be a production incident that means this time you didn't get it all done or maybe the other way around, someone got sick and 3 large meetings didn't happen and you got a 4th ticket through. Also note that I chose 8 story points at random. 8 story points is specifically NOT to be equated with 8 hours. Story points are just uses as a relative complexity measure, meaning something with 3 story points is roughly a third as complex as that 8 pointer. Many managers and even people that claim to be Scrum Product Owner or even Scrum Masters don't really understand that.

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mjburgess 5y ago

The culture here is fascinating. I comment (sincerely, and thoughtfully) in one topic criticising naive interpretations of AI -- heavily downvoted. OK, we're AI fanatics here: programmers are gods. Intelligence is just a program we're yet to write. So in this thread I comment to defend how demanding programming is on the intellect. Again, many downvotes. I have no idea what this community is.

slingnow 5y ago
It's a community of people with thoughts that sometimes differ from yours. It doesn't seem that confusing.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  Indeed: isn't that precisely a good reason to reply rather than downvote? I have maybe downvoted a handful of times in a decade of being on this site: only for spam or grossly misleading comments. Increasingly I see seas of downvoted comments as-if this were reddit. I think that might just be it: the community has grown so large, it has attracted enough of those types who vote-their-emotions.
  - slingnow 5y ago
    I think I agree with you in general, and to be fair I didn't downvote your original comment. My takeaway was that you were taking the unpopular opinion (programming is uniquely hard/creative/etc) and attempting to reinforce it by unfairly reducing the creative act of painting to no more than paint on a canvas. That's my best guess.
loopz 5y ago
You'll fare much better trying for constructive and introspective perspectives. Often you'll receive downvotes immediately anyway, but the tide might turn as other people might recognize something in what you write over time. This is a startup/founder-centric forum, and creative people usually have less time for criticism and negative viewpoints, that then need to be translated into something worthwhile.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

amozoss 5y ago

Author here: My intention wasn't to whine or anything. In fact, 2 of the 4 tips I gave was how I protect against interruptions from myself. The comments have inspired me to write a follow up, titled something like "My number one source of interruptions is myself", and maybe it'll avoid the mess of flame.

908B64B197 5y ago

> I sometimes suspect that the interruptions, like the horrible open offices and pointless standup meetings, are put in place not because anybody even perceives them to be a benefit, but as a "muscle flex" to remind the workers who's boss, regardless of how detrimental is it to everybody, including the boss. Microsoft had a culture of offices with a door, to allow more focus. But it's not the only thing they did differently (and the companies valuation speaks for itself).

Arainach 5y ago
That's not quite the data point you think it is. Their valuation stayed roughly constant from 2001-2016, and the huge spike since then corresponds to a huge shift away from offices with doors - all new buildings after 2010 or so were that way, and most of main campus has been torn down to be rebuilt as open office floorplans.

akomtu 5y ago

I did some cat herding in past and the sole reason I run morning stand-ups is to know what everyone is doing. In other words, I was afraid to appear clueless when higher ups ask me about progress. It wasn't a muscle flex, but it wasn't for the team's benefit either. And yes, open spaces are wonderful for such low-effort managing activity.

nly 5y ago

Try it when your company spans America, Europe and Asia and you have meetings between teams in all of them