5 ms·

I've got no problem with having standup and other such things, but wish that all meetings (standup, backlog refinement, brainstorming sessions, etc) were schedu

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.
        ithkuil 5y ago
        The threat of a meeting seemed to have worked as intended
- pc86 5y ago
  > 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). How doesn't that make sense? If you want to compress all your meetings into one day for every two-week sprint (ten working days), you only need to average 48 minutes a day of meetings to fill that day. That's not an obscene amount.
  - sombremesa 5y ago
    The scenario is thus: you have, say, 6 hours of meetings relevant to team X per week. However, you tell team X that you have too many meetings on your calendar (from teams A,B,C) and thus do not have room to move X meetings to one day (but you can have these meetings otherwise). It just sounds like a combination of lazy scheduling and no desire to improve dev experience.
    - jrockway 5y ago
      Yeah, lazy scheduling is an easy trap to fall into. People have the wrong cost optimization function in mind while scheduling meetings -- moving an existing meeting is too expensive to consider, while breaking up an engineer's 4 hour block of productivity into 2 1:30 minute blocks is considered totally okay. In reality, the actual cost is the opposite -- moving a meeting costs nothing, but breaking up that block of free time costs an entire day of an engineer's time (something like $1000). I have a plan for this. I'm writing a small program to move certain meetings to an auto-scheduled state. You pick some blocks on your calendar where you'll accept auto-scheduled meetings. You then say "I want to have a meeting with X, Y, and Z", and the system will use a constraint solver to find a time. The cost function favors bin-packed meetings, keeping entire days free, etc. If existing meetings have to move to optimize the cost function, so be it. I don't actually know if people will tolerate this. People are creatures of habit, so if you're used to a biweekly team meeting on Monday, it will be weird when it gets replaced with a postmortem review that starts 30 minutes earlier and the team meeting moves to Thursday or whatever. I also think it will be hard to get people to commit to giving the bot a slot to work with. We shall see. If anything interesting comes of this I'll write up something about how it went.
- jedimastert 5y ago
  > 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). My manager absolutely has more than 8 hours of meetings ina given week, and not jut useless ones. I've seen calendars of people a level or two above me where several days a week are wall-to-wall meetings. I don't think it's all that uncommon either. At some point, your job is coordinating and strategizing and communicating what needs to be done, and after a while, beyond meetings being an unfortunate nesesity, the meetings are the work
  - sombremesa 5y ago
    That's all well and good, as long as people aren't expected to produce a month's worth of software from 40 hours of nothing but meetings. Unfortunately, they are. Largely due to inexperience and incompetence at the managerial level (zero technical chops once you go any level above IC). I'm well aware most software companies aren't like this, though. They'd go out of business, like this one will. Almost every key engineer (including CTO) has left this company already - six of them in the three months since I joined. One of them wrote a 10 page open letter to the CEO on the way out. Things are a real mess... Among other gems in that open letter was a link to this article [0]. [0] https://neilonsoftware.com/2020/09/08/non-technical-development-managers-are-like-head-chefs-who-cant-see-taste-or-smell/ https://neilonsoftware.com/2020/09/08/non-technical-developm...
  - zo1 5y ago
    I think people forget that it's incredibly difficult to coordinate a group of people beyond a certain number. We're all walking, talking grey gooey blobs of personality, feelings, ambitions and stubbornness (even managers/leaders). To even attempt at mitigating and guiding such things to team or company-useful outcomes we have to have meetings. Sometimes lots of them. It's the unfortunate nature of such a dynamic and chaotic system.
    - atatatat 5y ago
      Anything over 100 seems to get tough. Federate your business today.
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.

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.
      - ithkuil 5y ago
        The threat of a meeting seemed to have worked as intended
pc86 5y ago
> 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). How doesn't that make sense? If you want to compress all your meetings into one day for every two-week sprint (ten working days), you only need to average 48 minutes a day of meetings to fill that day. That's not an obscene amount.
- sombremesa 5y ago
  The scenario is thus: you have, say, 6 hours of meetings relevant to team X per week. However, you tell team X that you have too many meetings on your calendar (from teams A,B,C) and thus do not have room to move X meetings to one day (but you can have these meetings otherwise). It just sounds like a combination of lazy scheduling and no desire to improve dev experience.
  - jrockway 5y ago
    Yeah, lazy scheduling is an easy trap to fall into. People have the wrong cost optimization function in mind while scheduling meetings -- moving an existing meeting is too expensive to consider, while breaking up an engineer's 4 hour block of productivity into 2 1:30 minute blocks is considered totally okay. In reality, the actual cost is the opposite -- moving a meeting costs nothing, but breaking up that block of free time costs an entire day of an engineer's time (something like $1000). I have a plan for this. I'm writing a small program to move certain meetings to an auto-scheduled state. You pick some blocks on your calendar where you'll accept auto-scheduled meetings. You then say "I want to have a meeting with X, Y, and Z", and the system will use a constraint solver to find a time. The cost function favors bin-packed meetings, keeping entire days free, etc. If existing meetings have to move to optimize the cost function, so be it. I don't actually know if people will tolerate this. People are creatures of habit, so if you're used to a biweekly team meeting on Monday, it will be weird when it gets replaced with a postmortem review that starts 30 minutes earlier and the team meeting moves to Thursday or whatever. I also think it will be hard to get people to commit to giving the bot a slot to work with. We shall see. If anything interesting comes of this I'll write up something about how it went.
jedimastert 5y ago
> 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). My manager absolutely has more than 8 hours of meetings ina given week, and not jut useless ones. I've seen calendars of people a level or two above me where several days a week are wall-to-wall meetings. I don't think it's all that uncommon either. At some point, your job is coordinating and strategizing and communicating what needs to be done, and after a while, beyond meetings being an unfortunate nesesity, the meetings are the work
- sombremesa 5y ago
  That's all well and good, as long as people aren't expected to produce a month's worth of software from 40 hours of nothing but meetings. Unfortunately, they are. Largely due to inexperience and incompetence at the managerial level (zero technical chops once you go any level above IC). I'm well aware most software companies aren't like this, though. They'd go out of business, like this one will. Almost every key engineer (including CTO) has left this company already - six of them in the three months since I joined. One of them wrote a 10 page open letter to the CEO on the way out. Things are a real mess... Among other gems in that open letter was a link to this article [0]. [0] https://neilonsoftware.com/2020/09/08/non-technical-development-managers-are-like-head-chefs-who-cant-see-taste-or-smell/ https://neilonsoftware.com/2020/09/08/non-technical-developm...
- zo1 5y ago
  I think people forget that it's incredibly difficult to coordinate a group of people beyond a certain number. We're all walking, talking grey gooey blobs of personality, feelings, ambitions and stubbornness (even managers/leaders). To even attempt at mitigating and guiding such things to team or company-useful outcomes we have to have meetings. Sometimes lots of them. It's the unfortunate nature of such a dynamic and chaotic system.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    Anything over 100 seems to get tough. Federate your business today.

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.