5 ms·

Some context: I'm a lead engineer on a team with six products. I keep my camera off in meetings. I'm in far more meetings than I can possibly be productive in.

by kodah 5y ago

Some context: I'm a lead engineer on a team with six products. I keep my camera off in meetings. I'm in far more meetings than I can possibly be productive in. I'm also usually not the active speaker in meetings. Why stare into a camera when what my yearly bonuses are calculated on is work/team output? I've found most meetings I get into are either: - Developers who can't figure something out from documentation and are too impatient (or sometimes critical) to be helped over Slack. - Executives who would rather speak than send an email or create a Slack thread. It's not useful for me to pay attention the whole time when I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings. The exceptions I have for this are: - 1:1's - Interviews

sz4kerto 5y ago
> I'm in far more meetings than I can possibly be productive in. > I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings. There's an organisational issue here.
- klodolph 5y ago
  Yes, that sounds like an organizational issue. It's a common organizational issue without easy solutions.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Not necessarily. "delivering code" is not the same as "writing code" after all. It's very likely that half the meetings are with product, and higher ups, to discuss what the dev team can deliver, and the other half are with the dev team to discuss what they're going to deliver. The way to avoid those meetings is to write documents instead, but you'd still not be writing code.
- ratww 5y ago
  For the first quote maybe. But for the second ("I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings"), not really. Technical Managers and Tech Leads need to participate in meetings but some also need/want to keep their coding skills and codebase knowledge sharp. A compromise is spending only 25%-50% of the time coding. Some people are good with both and prefer to keep doing it. There's no one-size-fits-all solution.
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    I think your description is sound, but only for people managers of some kind. I burnt out pretty hard trying to meet similar expectations as an IC twice though. The first I was just trying to get code written when I was constantly being dragged into bureaucratic agile planning meetings, or talking to the PM about why my thing isn't done yet, or joining an "all hands". The 2nd had very little of the former, but I was responsible for fixing customer reported bugs, communicating with them in a timely and asynchronous manner about those bugs, and then also delivering features. It didn't help that they put me on some incredibly mundane React project near the end, but I reached a point where I'd sit at my computer and just feel bad about the day. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be in meetings all day, but I don't know that coding is what I'd want to be doing with the time in between, at least not to try and meet deadlines. To me, that'd be a recipe for deep depression.
    - ratww 5y ago
      Yeah, it really depends on the kind of management, kind of programming and the person. It's definitely not for everyone or for every situation. But when it works it's much better than the alternative.
- thrower123 5y ago
  It's an incredibly common one. Somehow, despite Peopleware being almost 35 years old, and pg's Maker Schedule, Manager's Schedule essay being twelve years old, we haven't learned anything and still have this incongruity that will not be reconciled in a direction which leads towards more productivity. At times it feels like managers like to schedule meetings in such a way as to make it impossible to get any engineering work done on the clock. I particularly hate the the 10:00 AM, 2:30 PM meeting stack for it's ability to slice the day into chunks that are difficult to use productively for deeper work.
  - skydhash 5y ago
    Another thing I don’t like is managers sending you a notification for a meeting in 30 minutes, which throws your concentration out of the windows. Then finding out the reason of the meeting was because they have not read your status report. Or something that could have been answered in a couple of slack messages. And then it’s already 4pm and your work day ends at 5pm.
ed_balls 5y ago
> Developers who can't figure something out from documentation and are too impatient (or sometimes critical) to be helped over Slack. Maybe it's a symptom they miss human contact.
pyrale 5y ago
> and are too impatient to be helped over Slack. Slack is not a panacea. Sometimes, you need to share a screen and have a fluid discussion, which Slack does not provide. All-slack communication is definitely not great. It is ok for some communications that can be asynchronous and don't need a support, but that's definitely a small subset of the work communications needed for an engineering context.
- xyzzy123 5y ago
  Check out slack huddles, they actually work fairly well now. Was not a fan initially but have grown to like the fairly fluid transition to fully sync comms (for the kind of interaction where I used to go to a co-worker's desk before we were full remote).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Fiahil 5y ago
Same context, but I keep my camera on to help others do the same. I spent the last six months with an org that had a strong remote culture but held meeting on phone conference call. So I've worked with some of my teammates long enough to hear their children but I never saw their face. It really helps to connect with the person you are talking to when you see them when speaking. My only exception is when I do large conferences where only the PM is speaking or when I'm doing something else and not listening. In that case cutting my camera is more polite.
- kodah 5y ago
  > It really helps to connect with the person you are talking to when you see them when speaking. I don't feel the same way. I connect with my colleagues fairly easily, video or not. I was also raised in a world with gaming and IRC, so having to pay better attention to tone and phrasing inferences is second nature to me.
  - Fiahil 5y ago
    One difference between meeting people in MMORPGs and IRC vs meeting people while working remotely is that you rarely had to pressure someone to do something in the first context. At work, you need to do a lot of -sometimes unpleasant- things to make people go in the same direction. You can think of it like preventing all deaths in your team of a 40vs40 battleground.
Lutger 5y ago
The perceived the need to keep the camera off during a meeting is a good indication there is something wrong with the meeting, not that it's a good thing to keep the camera off. We had some recurring meetings where people consistently didn't show up. The managers first impulse was to make the meeting mandatory. But the first thought should be: why are people not showing up? Engineers hate being unproductive, it should be a signal that there's something wrong with the meeting if nobody show's up. Turning the camera off is just a socially acceptable way of not showing up. There are exceptions of course, some being just don't like being seen or have an issue being filmed out of privacy considerations.
- theelous3 5y ago
  > Turning the camera off is just a socially acceptable way of not showing up. Why do you think that someone with a camera off is not present? How can you honestly equate camera-off with absence? > There are exceptions of course imo it's the opposite. Rarely to never does it matter if you see my face in a meeting. It's an exceedingly rare exception that you should need to as a business requirement. Have you considered that... _you_ just like having your camera on, and like seeing other people? And other people just don't care? Furthermore - even if you were right, I would say it's a good thing that busy people have a socially graceful way to opt out of the organisational mistakes of others.
  - akavel 5y ago
    There's a one-way implication here, not two way, i.e.: I_want_socially_acceptable_absence => I_join_with_camera_off but there's no 100% certainty the other way round.
  - healsjnr1 5y ago
    > Have you considered that... _you_ just like having your camera on, and like seeing other people? Yes, I think this is the whole point here. This is a bidirectional relationship. We all have biases, and for a lot of people wanting some physical concept of the person they are working with is one of them, so yeah, they might just like seeing your face. It's your prerogative to turn it off, but there is a very real chance this will impact your relationship with other people. The biggest change for me is that I now hide my self video 100% of the time. I can't see myself in an irl meeting, so I don't need to see myself online either. Don't this kind of makes the whole problem go away.

by kodah 5y ago

sz4kerto 5y ago

> I'm in far more meetings than I can possibly be productive in. > I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings. There's an organisational issue here.

klodolph 5y ago
Yes, that sounds like an organizational issue. It's a common organizational issue without easy solutions.
onion2k 5y ago
Not necessarily. "delivering code" is not the same as "writing code" after all. It's very likely that half the meetings are with product, and higher ups, to discuss what the dev team can deliver, and the other half are with the dev team to discuss what they're going to deliver. The way to avoid those meetings is to write documents instead, but you'd still not be writing code.
ratww 5y ago
For the first quote maybe. But for the second ("I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings"), not really. Technical Managers and Tech Leads need to participate in meetings but some also need/want to keep their coding skills and codebase knowledge sharp. A compromise is spending only 25%-50% of the time coding. Some people are good with both and prefer to keep doing it. There's no one-size-fits-all solution.
- brailsafe 5y ago
  I think your description is sound, but only for people managers of some kind. I burnt out pretty hard trying to meet similar expectations as an IC twice though. The first I was just trying to get code written when I was constantly being dragged into bureaucratic agile planning meetings, or talking to the PM about why my thing isn't done yet, or joining an "all hands". The 2nd had very little of the former, but I was responsible for fixing customer reported bugs, communicating with them in a timely and asynchronous manner about those bugs, and then also delivering features. It didn't help that they put me on some incredibly mundane React project near the end, but I reached a point where I'd sit at my computer and just feel bad about the day. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be in meetings all day, but I don't know that coding is what I'd want to be doing with the time in between, at least not to try and meet deadlines. To me, that'd be a recipe for deep depression.
  - ratww 5y ago
    Yeah, it really depends on the kind of management, kind of programming and the person. It's definitely not for everyone or for every situation. But when it works it's much better than the alternative.
thrower123 5y ago
It's an incredibly common one. Somehow, despite Peopleware being almost 35 years old, and pg's Maker Schedule, Manager's Schedule essay being twelve years old, we haven't learned anything and still have this incongruity that will not be reconciled in a direction which leads towards more productivity. At times it feels like managers like to schedule meetings in such a way as to make it impossible to get any engineering work done on the clock. I particularly hate the the 10:00 AM, 2:30 PM meeting stack for it's ability to slice the day into chunks that are difficult to use productively for deeper work.
- skydhash 5y ago
  Another thing I don’t like is managers sending you a notification for a meeting in 30 minutes, which throws your concentration out of the windows. Then finding out the reason of the meeting was because they have not read your status report. Or something that could have been answered in a couple of slack messages. And then it’s already 4pm and your work day ends at 5pm.

ed_balls 5y ago

> Developers who can't figure something out from documentation and are too impatient (or sometimes critical) to be helped over Slack. Maybe it's a symptom they miss human contact.

pyrale 5y ago

> and are too impatient to be helped over Slack. Slack is not a panacea. Sometimes, you need to share a screen and have a fluid discussion, which Slack does not provide. All-slack communication is definitely not great. It is ok for some communications that can be asynchronous and don't need a support, but that's definitely a small subset of the work communications needed for an engineering context.

xyzzy123 5y ago
Check out slack huddles, they actually work fairly well now. Was not a fan initially but have grown to like the fairly fluid transition to fully sync comms (for the kind of interaction where I used to go to a co-worker's desk before we were full remote).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Fiahil 5y ago

Same context, but I keep my camera on to help others do the same. I spent the last six months with an org that had a strong remote culture but held meeting on phone conference call. So I've worked with some of my teammates long enough to hear their children but I never saw their face. It really helps to connect with the person you are talking to when you see them when speaking. My only exception is when I do large conferences where only the PM is speaking or when I'm doing something else and not listening. In that case cutting my camera is more polite.

kodah 5y ago
> It really helps to connect with the person you are talking to when you see them when speaking. I don't feel the same way. I connect with my colleagues fairly easily, video or not. I was also raised in a world with gaming and IRC, so having to pay better attention to tone and phrasing inferences is second nature to me.
- Fiahil 5y ago
  One difference between meeting people in MMORPGs and IRC vs meeting people while working remotely is that you rarely had to pressure someone to do something in the first context. At work, you need to do a lot of -sometimes unpleasant- things to make people go in the same direction. You can think of it like preventing all deaths in your team of a 40vs40 battleground.

Lutger 5y ago

The perceived the need to keep the camera off during a meeting is a good indication there is something wrong with the meeting, not that it's a good thing to keep the camera off. We had some recurring meetings where people consistently didn't show up. The managers first impulse was to make the meeting mandatory. But the first thought should be: why are people not showing up? Engineers hate being unproductive, it should be a signal that there's something wrong with the meeting if nobody show's up. Turning the camera off is just a socially acceptable way of not showing up. There are exceptions of course, some being just don't like being seen or have an issue being filmed out of privacy considerations.

theelous3 5y ago
> Turning the camera off is just a socially acceptable way of not showing up. Why do you think that someone with a camera off is not present? How can you honestly equate camera-off with absence? > There are exceptions of course imo it's the opposite. Rarely to never does it matter if you see my face in a meeting. It's an exceedingly rare exception that you should need to as a business requirement. Have you considered that... _you_ just like having your camera on, and like seeing other people? And other people just don't care? Furthermore - even if you were right, I would say it's a good thing that busy people have a socially graceful way to opt out of the organisational mistakes of others.
- akavel 5y ago
  There's a one-way implication here, not two way, i.e.: I_want_socially_acceptable_absence => I_join_with_camera_off but there's no 100% certainty the other way round.
- healsjnr1 5y ago
  > Have you considered that... _you_ just like having your camera on, and like seeing other people? Yes, I think this is the whole point here. This is a bidirectional relationship. We all have biases, and for a lot of people wanting some physical concept of the person they are working with is one of them, so yeah, they might just like seeing your face. It's your prerogative to turn it off, but there is a very real chance this will impact your relationship with other people. The biggest change for me is that I now hide my self video 100% of the time. I can't see myself in an irl meeting, so I don't need to see myself online either. Don't this kind of makes the whole problem go away.