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I kind of agree. In my last role I ended up in a fantastic place where the teams under me could operate fairly autonomously and were happy. My only recurring m

by agd 5y ago

I kind of agree. In my last role I ended up in a fantastic place where the teams under me could operate fairly autonomously and were happy. My only recurring meetings were: - 1-1s fortnightly and only with senior members - My 1-1 with my boss, again fortnightly - Senior leadership team, once a week I kept 1-1s to 30mins unless someone had an important issue, in which case I was completely flexible. Most of my time went on planning/strategy, customer research, and acting as an ad-hoc coach for the teams beneath me. The key things I found were: - many meetings can be replaced by an update email - decisions often work better through docs + feedback than big meetings - you don't need frequent contact with the team if the goals and constraints are communicated very clearly I realise none of this is groundbreaking. But it seems quite rare, and also hard to achieve in practice.

polskibus 5y ago
Are you still there or did you move? If you did move, what were the reasons? I'm honestly curious from career choices point of view.
- agd 5y ago
  Moved to start my own company. So not to do with the culture.
westurner 5y ago
> - many meetings can be replaced by an update email Highlights from the feed(s); GitLab has the better activity view IMHO but I haven't tried the new GitHub Issues beta yet. 3 questions from 5 minute Stand-Up Meetings (because everyone's actually standing there trying to leave) for Digital Stand Up Meetings: Since, Before, Obstacles: ## 2021-09-28 ### @teammembername #### Since #### Before #### Obstacles Since: What have you done since last reporting back? Before: What do you plan to do before our next meeting? Obstacles: What needs which other team resources in order to solve the obstacles? You can do cool video backgrounds for any video conferencing app with pipewire. You can ask team members to prep a .txt with their 3 questions and drop it in the chat such that the team can reply to individual #fragments of your brief status report / continued employment justification argument > - decisions often work better through docs + feedback than big meetings SO, ah, asynchronous communication doesn't require transcripting for the "Leader Assistant" that does the Mando quarterly minutes from the team chat logs, at least 6 Patterns of Collaboration: GRCOEB: Generate, Reduce, Clarify, Organize, Evaluate, Build Consensus [Six Patterns]; voting on specific Issues, and ideally Chat - [x] lineitems, and https://schema.org/SocialMediaPosting https://schema.org/SocialMediaPosting with emoji reactions [Six Patterns]: http://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/team-building#six-patterns-of-collaboration http://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/team-building#six-pat... , Text Templates, Collaboration Checklist: Weighted Criteria, Ranked-choice Voting. Docs and posts with URLs and in-text pull-quotes do better than another list of citations at the end. > - you don't need frequent contact with the team if the goals and constraints are communicated very clearly Metrics: OKRs, KPIs, #GlobalGoals Goals Targets and Indicators Tools / Methods; Data / Information / Knowledge / Experience / Wisdom: - Issues: Title, - [ ] Description, Labels, Assignee, - [ ] Comments, Emoji Reactions; - Pull Requests, - [ ] [Optional] [Formal] Reviews, Labels & "Codelabels", label:SkipPreflight, CI Build Logs, and Signed Deployed Documented Applications; code talks, the tests win again, docs sell - Find and Choose - with Consensus - a sufficiently mature Component that already testably does: unified Email notifications (with inbound replies,) and notifications on each and every Chat API and the web standard thing finally, thanks: W3C Web Notifications. - Contribute Tests for [open source] Components. - [ ] Create a workflow document with URLs and Text Templates - [ ] Create a daily running document with my 3 questions and headings and indented markdown checkbox lists; possibly also with todotxt/todo.txt / TaskWarrior & BugWarrior -style lineitem markup. What does an engineering manager do all day? A polite answer would be, continuously reevaluate the tests of the product and probably also the business model if anyone knew what they were up to in there
ryandrake 5y ago
> - many meetings can be replaced by an update email Project Manager checking in here. I'm one of the originators of all these meetings. Whenever someone complains that this meeting could be replaced by an E-mail, my response is: "But, do you actually read your E-mail?" If they are honest, the answer is often "NO". I'd love to reduce our meeting load at work, but Person A needs a decision from Person B and Person C would like updates from Team X, and none of these people use their goddamn E-mail! So, sadly, it's off to another meeting room...
- nunez 5y ago
  To be fair, a Slack or Teams thread is also a good way to obtain consensus on decisions.

by agd 5y ago

polskibus 5y ago

Are you still there or did you move? If you did move, what were the reasons? I'm honestly curious from career choices point of view.

agd 5y ago
Moved to start my own company. So not to do with the culture.

westurner 5y ago

> - many meetings can be replaced by an update email Highlights from the feed(s); GitLab has the better activity view IMHO but I haven't tried the new GitHub Issues beta yet. 3 questions from 5 minute Stand-Up Meetings (because everyone's actually standing there trying to leave) for Digital Stand Up Meetings: Since, Before, Obstacles: ## 2021-09-28 ### @teammembername #### Since #### Before #### Obstacles Since: What have you done since last reporting back? Before: What do you plan to do before our next meeting? Obstacles: What needs which other team resources in order to solve the obstacles? You can do cool video backgrounds for any video conferencing app with pipewire. You can ask team members to prep a .txt with their 3 questions and drop it in the chat such that the team can reply to individual #fragments of your brief status report / continued employment justification argument > - decisions often work better through docs + feedback than big meetings SO, ah, asynchronous communication doesn't require transcripting for the "Leader Assistant" that does the Mando quarterly minutes from the team chat logs, at least 6 Patterns of Collaboration: GRCOEB: Generate, Reduce, Clarify, Organize, Evaluate, Build Consensus [Six Patterns]; voting on specific Issues, and ideally Chat - [x] lineitems, and https://schema.org/SocialMediaPosting https://schema.org/SocialMediaPosting with emoji reactions [Six Patterns]: http://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/team-building#six-patterns-of-collaboration http://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/team-building#six-pat... , Text Templates, Collaboration Checklist: Weighted Criteria, Ranked-choice Voting. Docs and posts with URLs and in-text pull-quotes do better than another list of citations at the end. > - you don't need frequent contact with the team if the goals and constraints are communicated very clearly Metrics: OKRs, KPIs, #GlobalGoals Goals Targets and Indicators Tools / Methods; Data / Information / Knowledge / Experience / Wisdom: - Issues: Title, - [ ] Description, Labels, Assignee, - [ ] Comments, Emoji Reactions; - Pull Requests, - [ ] [Optional] [Formal] Reviews, Labels & "Codelabels", label:SkipPreflight, CI Build Logs, and Signed Deployed Documented Applications; code talks, the tests win again, docs sell - Find and Choose - with Consensus - a sufficiently mature Component that already testably does: unified Email notifications (with inbound replies,) and notifications on each and every Chat API and the web standard thing finally, thanks: W3C Web Notifications. - Contribute Tests for [open source] Components. - [ ] Create a workflow document with URLs and Text Templates - [ ] Create a daily running document with my 3 questions and headings and indented markdown checkbox lists; possibly also with todotxt/todo.txt / TaskWarrior & BugWarrior -style lineitem markup. What does an engineering manager do all day? A polite answer would be, continuously reevaluate the tests of the product and probably also the business model if anyone knew what they were up to in there

ryandrake 5y ago

> - many meetings can be replaced by an update email Project Manager checking in here. I'm one of the originators of all these meetings. Whenever someone complains that this meeting could be replaced by an E-mail, my response is: "But, do you actually read your E-mail?" If they are honest, the answer is often "NO". I'd love to reduce our meeting load at work, but Person A needs a decision from Person B and Person C would like updates from Team X, and none of these people use their goddamn E-mail! So, sadly, it's off to another meeting room...

nunez 5y ago
To be fair, a Slack or Teams thread is also a good way to obtain consensus on decisions.