9 ms·

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily

by ipaddr 5y ago

As someone who has been in the industry for 20+ years I've noticed changes that may have lead to this point. Daily standups, meetings, gluing frameworks Daily standups are is a one size solution to a communication problem. Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. Daily standups leads to cutting projects into small daily tasks. This leads to a system of micromanagement and it doesn't provide an opportunity of non-verbal self reflection and focuses you into threadmill small task thinking never connecting with the project as a whole. Developers are expected to attend meetings more than ever. The focus required to deep dive into complex issues get's broken with meetings that developers shouldn't be attending. You can attend meetings or you program rarely can you do both effectively on the same day and rarely can you get the focus you once had. No one wants to reinvent the wheel so gluing together packages is considered best practice. The work has become more about making decisions around the packages you choose rather than being given time to make the package. Top pay with top companies seem to lead to burnout, lost purpose and this unhappiness. There is something unhealthy when companies get too large, force employees into promotions or unemployment, have an avg employment of under a year or designs interview processes around finding people who optimize for a high paycheck over those with a long history of experience.

watwut 5y ago
> doesn't provide an opportunity of non-verbal self reflection and focuses you into threadmill small task thinking never connecting with the project as a whole. I agree. Core issue now seem to be that no one ever thinks much about project/module/library as a whole.
sibit 5y ago
> Developers are expected to attend meetings more than ever. The focus required to deep dive into complex issues get's broken with meetings that developers shouldn't be attending. You can attend meetings or you program rarely can you do both effectively on the same day and rarely can you get the focus you once had. I recently started a new job where we have weekly recurring "standups" with clients. Most of the gaps between meetings are an hour with a few 1 1/2 hour gaps throughout the week. After the 3rd day I asked my boss "with all these recurring meetings when an I suppose to actually get my work done"?
- Trasmatta 5y ago
  I'm curious, how did your boss respond to that?
  - rablackburn 5y ago
    My bet would be something like: "haha, yeah it's ridiculous, right?" IME it's sadly common for an organisation to have a Problem, for everyone to acknowledge there is a Problem, for someone to even come up with a roadmap to solve the Problem...and yet nothing will change because there is some ineffable disconnect between knowing and doing. Really it seems to come down something like "well, if we're going to go to all the effort to change something, we better do it right. If you can't prove the change you're going to make is going to solve this issue perfectly forever it's better to leave it as it is right now. rather than waste all that effort" or, "good idea, let's add a weekly meeting to monitor fixing this issue"
    - Trasmatta 5y ago
      > or, "good idea, let's add a weekly meeting to monitor fixing this issue" At one company, we started having daily "show and tell" meetings at the end of every day in addition to daily morning standups. I said during a retro that these were causing extra stress for the team, and felt unnecessary. The team lead responded to that by making them 15 minutes longer, because he claimed the stress was just coming from team members not having enough time for their demos.
      - rawoke083600 5y ago
        That is horrifying !
    - mpweiher 5y ago
      The weekly pre-meeting to the weekly meeting on streamlining our processes. I kid you not. p.s.: "I have an idea as to how we could streamline our processes!"
  - sibit 5y ago
spaetzleesser 5y ago
"Developers are expected to attend meetings more than ever. The focus required to deep dive into complex issues get's broken with meetings that developers shouldn't be attending. You can attend meetings or you program rarely can you do both effectively on the same day and rarely can you get the focus you once had." Agreed. when I started in the 90s I often got several months of focused work without many interruptions. Nowadays you have to attend meetings and always have somebody breathe down your neck. Hard to accomplish anything that requires experimentation over months until it works.
- Trasmatta 5y ago
  God, the thought of being treated like a skilled professional and trusted to actually do your job, rather than a code monkey who has to report their progress every single day on how many of the endless "user stories" they got done the previous day...
- ryanschneider 5y ago
  I also started I the 90s and now that you mention it I don’t think I had any meetings at my first job at a small software company. And even after we were acquired I still think we had at most semi monthly meetings. My first job with daily standups was 2008 or so, and I just realized I left less than a year after they were implemented. In short, I probably had less meetings in my first ten years in software than I did last quarter.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Agreed. when I started in the 90s I often got several months of focused work without many interruptions. I did that too. Quite often the project failed after those months because we'd built the wrong thing, or the landscape had changed, or the customer had failed to spec what they needed well enough. This was the "Waterfall" methodology, and Agile, with all its meetings, is specifically designed to fix that problem.
  - csande17 5y ago
    My favorite Agile failure case is when you have all the meetings and still fail, because you spent all your time on Agile paperwork instead of designing and building a product.
galoisscobi 5y ago
> Developers are expected to attend meetings more than ever. How do people deal with this? I'm expected to take on more and more meetings and my time to do deep work diminishes as I go on. I'm curious to learn more from people who are handling this well.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  > I'm curious to learn more from people who are handling this well. Working as an IC I just don't accept invites and don't attend. With the following exceptions: - Weekly review/Agile flavour meetings with my team - Meeting with a team member to solve a specific issue - A manager/VP/CTO _explicitly_ makes it clear _my_ presence is required Perhaps I've been luck with my managers or perhaps it comes with seniority but I've never got any negative feedback on this. Most people invite you in for stuff just as a passive listener. When I'm doing contract work I make it clear I am available for milestone review meetings and everything else is surcharged billable hours.
- Falkon1313 5y ago
  Sleep until about 15 minutes before the first meeting. There's no sense bothering getting into work only to be interrupted by a meeting. If it's a meeting-heavy day just resign yourself to the fact that you're not going to get anything done that day. So basically, you have to plan your sprints to be two days shorter than they actually are (or whatever, depending on your company's meeting schedule). Adjust all your estimates accordingly. A 3 hour task will take all day when you factor in interruptions, meetings, and meeting fatigue, so estimate 8 hours for it. Sigh heavily, and remind yourself that you couldn't possibly get more than 3 days work done in two weeks, under the circumstances. So what little you did is actually pretty good.
- timalmond 5y ago
  Mostly, I refuse and explain why I am refusing. I write replies like:- "I have nothing to contribute to this, so I see no value in attending this meeting." "I see that point 3 on the agenda is relevant to me, can you bring me into the meeting at that point"? These are professional answers. You are telling whoever has invited you that you think your time is better spent, on behalf of the company, doing something else. If they then insist despite your protests, you have to accept it. Although you might at some point realise that the person you are working for is an idiot.
Trasmatta 5y ago
Re: meetings, I really think we need more tech companies taking the initiative to cut out meetings entirely. I think many companies would be shocked to find out that work would continue on, productivity would actually go up, and reported employer happiness would improve. I think it would be a "2020 remote work" style revelation for many teams. Many teams thought remote work would never work out for them, but when they were forced to do it, they found it actually worked great. That being said, I doubt many companies would ever find the idea tractable. So we should start with something simpler: you should never schedule more than 2 hours worth of meetings for your developers in any given week. And those 2 hours should be very carefully considered, such that they don't segment their day. The amount of wasted productivity that comes from endless meetings is staggering. Not to mention the mental health hit of trying to do challenging knowledge work while having your day constantly interrupted.
- lvturner 5y ago
  I tried this, it didn't work well for my team. For whatever reason, my team generally likes having scheduled times to discuss certain topics. I always give them optionality on the meeting however (i.e. we regularly review if a given meeting is causing more pain than it's solving)
  - Trasmatta 5y ago
    In that situation, I think just the goal of minimizing the amount of meetings to the best of your team's ability would still help. Preferably 2 hours or less total, but 3 or 4 might be okay if special care is taken to when they are scheduled. My meetings all get scattered throughout the week haphazardly such that getting even a few hours of dedicated work done is almost impossible on many days.
- jayde2767 5y ago
  I wish there was a true measure for opportunity cost.
- timalmond 5y ago
  There's a place for meetings, but if you're efficient, they should be rare, small and short. No, you don't need a weekly project update meeting. I can send you something out of Jira and if there is an issue, you can post a reply to it, or email me. And I can spend time thinking about what you've written and write a careful reply. Only when that still doesn't work, do we do a synchronous meeting, at which point we cover only the points of contention, and with as few people as necessary. The other beauty of tools like Jira is that the conversation is preserved. Why did we approach the problem that way? Well, go look at it. You'll have someone asking why we can't do a thing and a reply pointing out the problems of that and hence why we have to do it this way. You don't get all of that from the email of the meeting.
jayde2767 5y ago
I view the daily standup as a way to communicate status to a Product Owner/Project Manager/SCRUM Master who may have to communicate status to a larger "Standup of Standups", if you will. I agree that a high quality team communicates with each other often and status amongst them should not be necessary, or require a daily scheduled time.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >I view the daily standup as a way to communicate status to a Product Owner/Project Manager/SCRUM Master who may have to communicate status to a larger "Standup of Standups", if you will. What's wrong with an email?
  - verve_rat 5y ago
    Or that work tracking system they spent all that time and money configuring.
- jrs235 5y ago
  Standups aren't supposed to be status reports. They're supposed to be huddles (to determine the plan of action). Want "status"? Look at the "xyz board". Blockers? That's important. Communicating any blockers that need to be addressed. That can be an email. And shouldn't have to wait until the next huddle. You can waste hours waiting. Communicate blockers immediately synchronously (interrupting) or asynchronously (noninterrupting, like email) depending on your work environments preferred or agreed upon protocols.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    Perhaps not, but a 10-minute daily face-to-face status update isn't so bad. Some thing can't be clearly communicated via a project board. Blockers shouldn't wait until a standup, but a standup can be a useful failsafe. It means that a quick sync up happens at least once a day.
onion2k 5y ago
There's a very simple fix if you believe you have too many meetings - decline them. If you don't think you're needed in a meeting, say so. Give a reason like "I have nothing to add to that discussion." or "There's no agenda so I don't know if I'm needed." or simply "I'm busy, I think my time would be better spent on story 123." Make the people who invite you start to consider if you're really needed[1]. Also, create your own "meetings" by putting blocks of focused coding time in your calendar where you're unavailable to other people. Part of your job as a dev is to organise your time well. You can't just delegate that to other people. If you're saying yes to every invite, and then you sit and don't have anything to add, then you haven't done your job properly. [1] They might stop inviting you, and then you'll have less input on things and less visibility to management (which mean you were needed in the meetings after all). Make sure you're happy with that before you try this strategy.
- watwut 5y ago
  I cant refuse to go to planning meetings, standups and retrospective. Those are core of agile and already take massive massive amount of time. Some of their parts are useful, but they also contain hours of nothingness. The other meetings are small in number and comparatively more useful per minute.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    I cant refuse to go to planning meetings, standups and retrospective. Yes you can. Just send a note saying why you won't be there and what you'd have said if you had been. Agile ceremony meetings are practically the definition of meetings that could be emails.
    - watwut 5y ago
      Sight. I cant refuse agile ceremony while working employment in that company. I can leave the job for non-agile one or make myself fired. However, the combination of "being in one of those majorities of companies that believes in agile" and "not being in these meetings" is not available. If your point is "then put up your resignation", then yes it is available. I am not a serf. That is not however what the "I cant do it" sentence in English refers to.
twblalock 5y ago
Being in meetings means you get to be in the room when decisions are made. Even if you aren't an active participant, you get to at least listen in. Almost all problems are really people problems, and people problems can only be solved by communicating with other people. Some engineers seem to want to work for long stretches uninterrupted, like monks copying sacred texts. That is not the way to succeed. To succeed you need to make sure what you are building is actually what you should be building. I've never seen a way to figure that out without having meetings with other people. Think of it this way -- a software engineer is not just a programmer, just as a fireman is not just a "hose operator." You are ultimately someone who gets things done and solves problems for other people, and that requires regular communication with those other people.
- freedom2099 5y ago
  True… but I can’t have 5h of meetings a day and be expected to produce much…
  - ptr 5y ago
    Yes you can, if you take into account the impact of what it is you produce.
- bennysomething 5y ago
  I think the idea of deep work has a place too. I haven't read the book but I think it touch's Linus locking himself away at a critical point in Linux's development. Bill gates did something similar (not sure what he was working on at that time).
  - mongol 5y ago
    I think he did that when he created git?
    - bennysomething 5y ago
      Yeah maybe it was that not sure!
tome 5y ago
I'm generally puzzled by the HN conventional wisdom against meetings, and I'm puzzled by this thread specifically because there doesn't seem to be a single commenter who is as much as just fine with meetings. Am I really in such a small minority, or has HN turned into an echo chamber on this issue, where no one with a countervailing opinion dares to get a word in? Having a meeting interrupt my work ranges from slightly irritating (if it comes during flow, but I can always easily get back into the groove later) to a welcome break from the intellectual stress of solo development work. I get to interact with my colleagues, learn about what they've been doing, and understand more about what the team needs and what our customers need. Have I forgotten that I sold my soul to the devil to obtain a unique ability to focus, and regain focus after interruption? Or are there a double digit percentage of HN inhabitants who are just like me but not speaking up in this thread? I don't know how I would understand my team mates as people, understand what they need from me and understand what other parts of the business need from me without meetings. Am I missing something here?
- Nursie 5y ago
  I don't mind the morning meeting, they can be useful to catch up with where the team is and who needs help, and who's working on a problem someone else solved last week/month/year. The problem I have with them in practice is that they are usually (in my experience) turned into a management progress meeting where developers are made to answer for their progress on specific items, rather a round-robin "Here's what I'm doing". At that point collaboration and team communication is out of the window.
- mightyRodri 5y ago
  I feel the same, the dayli meetings are super important for fast iteration. Sayinf you dont need those is implying there is no outside input that yould improve your work. Wich is only true when your task is so sepperated from everyone that you could effectively get your own one man team.
- BlargMcLarg 5y ago
  >I don't know how I would understand my team mates as people This sounds overly dramatic considering most people are very different in a meeting setup. We didn't need meetings to do this for the majority of our species' existence. Just talk with them, basic empathy. The way it sounds, you like some meetings because they fulfill X, but X can also be fulfilled in different ways without the downsides of meetings, be it specific meetings or in general. It's those downsides and knowing X can still be satisfied that drives many of us against meetings. Many times, meetings are also subpar or flat-out fail to achieve X because of other circumstances.
bigpeopleareold 5y ago
> No one wants to reinvent the wheel so gluing together packages is considered best practice. The work has become more about making decisions around the packages you choose rather than being given time to make the package. While I have not been developing anything much lately, I realized that most of my career making things ended up being. In part because of this, I found the passion to start digging through again stuff I wanted to learn but never had a project for, basically now a deep dive into system programming. At the moment, I'll probably only gain insight, but it feels more gratifying than learning how to glue packages together.
johannes1234321 5y ago
> Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. I don't agree there. Constant communication is important for a good team, however in constant flow it often is being lost, what is important. Important things easily get lost between other noise. Whether a daily is the right approach can be argued. Maybe a weekly is enough. However having a time where everybody listens and things can be brought to attention is useful in my experience.
- Juliate 5y ago
  He's not denying that (constant) communication isn't important. But that, planned, too frequent, mandatory, with a prescriptive format, meetings (which dailies/weeklies are) is harmful. I've been 21 years in this industry, the past 7 in Scrum/Agile infested companies/teams and I've never seen such a sterile and unproductive way of work.
  - pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
    > He's not denying that (constant) communication isn't important. I also agree that it isn't as important as they make it out to be.
sascha_sl 5y ago
I've spent 2 years in a team that was allowed to build platform tooling from scratch and it's been the most productive and high impact work i've done to date. The only reason I'm not there anymore is that the team disintegrated after a change in leadership. Despite that being years ago, our tooling survived, judging from some headers. If you glue things together, you inevitably have unknowns about the specifics of how your software actually works, and that very often comes back to bite you. But it's even worse if you do platform engineering, because developers downstream from you will find features (or anti-features) you didn't notice and completely derail and guardrails you had envisioned. Having full control over everything we wrote kept us nimble and able to react fast. If you own all your code, making small adjustments is easy. If you glue together packages or off the shelf code you may end up having to choose between a trade off and maintaining a fork of a piece of code far beyond the scope of the thing you need. The only pain we had left was keeping in step with kubernetes API packages.
yason 5y ago
Meetings on Monday only. A lot of wasted time on Mondays anyway (how can be it be that your mind adapts to the weekend's free time in a minute but takes hours to drudge itself back to "work mode" after the weekend?) and that leaves the rest of the week for programming. Programmers do talk about stuff informally anyway if and when the need arises, often via asynchronous messaging or even face-to-face but those aren't meetings in the sense that they adapt to the programmer flow and not the other way around.

by ipaddr 5y ago

watwut 5y ago

> doesn't provide an opportunity of non-verbal self reflection and focuses you into threadmill small task thinking never connecting with the project as a whole. I agree. Core issue now seem to be that no one ever thinks much about project/module/library as a whole.

sibit 5y ago

> Developers are expected to attend meetings more than ever. The focus required to deep dive into complex issues get's broken with meetings that developers shouldn't be attending. You can attend meetings or you program rarely can you do both effectively on the same day and rarely can you get the focus you once had. I recently started a new job where we have weekly recurring "standups" with clients. Most of the gaps between meetings are an hour with a few 1 1/2 hour gaps throughout the week. After the 3rd day I asked my boss "with all these recurring meetings when an I suppose to actually get my work done"?

Trasmatta 5y ago
I'm curious, how did your boss respond to that?
- rablackburn 5y ago
  My bet would be something like: "haha, yeah it's ridiculous, right?" IME it's sadly common for an organisation to have a Problem, for everyone to acknowledge there is a Problem, for someone to even come up with a roadmap to solve the Problem...and yet nothing will change because there is some ineffable disconnect between knowing and doing. Really it seems to come down something like "well, if we're going to go to all the effort to change something, we better do it right. If you can't prove the change you're going to make is going to solve this issue perfectly forever it's better to leave it as it is right now. rather than waste all that effort" or, "good idea, let's add a weekly meeting to monitor fixing this issue"
  - Trasmatta 5y ago
    > or, "good idea, let's add a weekly meeting to monitor fixing this issue" At one company, we started having daily "show and tell" meetings at the end of every day in addition to daily morning standups. I said during a retro that these were causing extra stress for the team, and felt unnecessary. The team lead responded to that by making them 15 minutes longer, because he claimed the stress was just coming from team members not having enough time for their demos.
    - rawoke083600 5y ago
      That is horrifying !
  - mpweiher 5y ago
    The weekly pre-meeting to the weekly meeting on streamlining our processes. I kid you not. p.s.: "I have an idea as to how we could streamline our processes!"
- sibit 5y ago

spaetzleesser 5y ago

"Developers are expected to attend meetings more than ever. The focus required to deep dive into complex issues get's broken with meetings that developers shouldn't be attending. You can attend meetings or you program rarely can you do both effectively on the same day and rarely can you get the focus you once had." Agreed. when I started in the 90s I often got several months of focused work without many interruptions. Nowadays you have to attend meetings and always have somebody breathe down your neck. Hard to accomplish anything that requires experimentation over months until it works.

Trasmatta 5y ago
God, the thought of being treated like a skilled professional and trusted to actually do your job, rather than a code monkey who has to report their progress every single day on how many of the endless "user stories" they got done the previous day...
ryanschneider 5y ago
I also started I the 90s and now that you mention it I don’t think I had any meetings at my first job at a small software company. And even after we were acquired I still think we had at most semi monthly meetings. My first job with daily standups was 2008 or so, and I just realized I left less than a year after they were implemented. In short, I probably had less meetings in my first ten years in software than I did last quarter.
onion2k 5y ago
Agreed. when I started in the 90s I often got several months of focused work without many interruptions. I did that too. Quite often the project failed after those months because we'd built the wrong thing, or the landscape had changed, or the customer had failed to spec what they needed well enough. This was the "Waterfall" methodology, and Agile, with all its meetings, is specifically designed to fix that problem.
- csande17 5y ago
  My favorite Agile failure case is when you have all the meetings and still fail, because you spent all your time on Agile paperwork instead of designing and building a product.

galoisscobi 5y ago

> Developers are expected to attend meetings more than ever. How do people deal with this? I'm expected to take on more and more meetings and my time to do deep work diminishes as I go on. I'm curious to learn more from people who are handling this well.

DoingIsLearning 5y ago
> I'm curious to learn more from people who are handling this well. Working as an IC I just don't accept invites and don't attend. With the following exceptions: - Weekly review/Agile flavour meetings with my team - Meeting with a team member to solve a specific issue - A manager/VP/CTO _explicitly_ makes it clear _my_ presence is required Perhaps I've been luck with my managers or perhaps it comes with seniority but I've never got any negative feedback on this. Most people invite you in for stuff just as a passive listener. When I'm doing contract work I make it clear I am available for milestone review meetings and everything else is surcharged billable hours.
Falkon1313 5y ago
Sleep until about 15 minutes before the first meeting. There's no sense bothering getting into work only to be interrupted by a meeting. If it's a meeting-heavy day just resign yourself to the fact that you're not going to get anything done that day. So basically, you have to plan your sprints to be two days shorter than they actually are (or whatever, depending on your company's meeting schedule). Adjust all your estimates accordingly. A 3 hour task will take all day when you factor in interruptions, meetings, and meeting fatigue, so estimate 8 hours for it. Sigh heavily, and remind yourself that you couldn't possibly get more than 3 days work done in two weeks, under the circumstances. So what little you did is actually pretty good.
timalmond 5y ago
Mostly, I refuse and explain why I am refusing. I write replies like:- "I have nothing to contribute to this, so I see no value in attending this meeting." "I see that point 3 on the agenda is relevant to me, can you bring me into the meeting at that point"? These are professional answers. You are telling whoever has invited you that you think your time is better spent, on behalf of the company, doing something else. If they then insist despite your protests, you have to accept it. Although you might at some point realise that the person you are working for is an idiot.

Trasmatta 5y ago

Re: meetings, I really think we need more tech companies taking the initiative to cut out meetings entirely. I think many companies would be shocked to find out that work would continue on, productivity would actually go up, and reported employer happiness would improve. I think it would be a "2020 remote work" style revelation for many teams. Many teams thought remote work would never work out for them, but when they were forced to do it, they found it actually worked great. That being said, I doubt many companies would ever find the idea tractable. So we should start with something simpler: you should never schedule more than 2 hours worth of meetings for your developers in any given week. And those 2 hours should be very carefully considered, such that they don't segment their day. The amount of wasted productivity that comes from endless meetings is staggering. Not to mention the mental health hit of trying to do challenging knowledge work while having your day constantly interrupted.

lvturner 5y ago
I tried this, it didn't work well for my team. For whatever reason, my team generally likes having scheduled times to discuss certain topics. I always give them optionality on the meeting however (i.e. we regularly review if a given meeting is causing more pain than it's solving)
- Trasmatta 5y ago
  In that situation, I think just the goal of minimizing the amount of meetings to the best of your team's ability would still help. Preferably 2 hours or less total, but 3 or 4 might be okay if special care is taken to when they are scheduled. My meetings all get scattered throughout the week haphazardly such that getting even a few hours of dedicated work done is almost impossible on many days.
jayde2767 5y ago
I wish there was a true measure for opportunity cost.
timalmond 5y ago
There's a place for meetings, but if you're efficient, they should be rare, small and short. No, you don't need a weekly project update meeting. I can send you something out of Jira and if there is an issue, you can post a reply to it, or email me. And I can spend time thinking about what you've written and write a careful reply. Only when that still doesn't work, do we do a synchronous meeting, at which point we cover only the points of contention, and with as few people as necessary. The other beauty of tools like Jira is that the conversation is preserved. Why did we approach the problem that way? Well, go look at it. You'll have someone asking why we can't do a thing and a reply pointing out the problems of that and hence why we have to do it this way. You don't get all of that from the email of the meeting.

jayde2767 5y ago

I view the daily standup as a way to communicate status to a Product Owner/Project Manager/SCRUM Master who may have to communicate status to a larger "Standup of Standups", if you will. I agree that a high quality team communicates with each other often and status amongst them should not be necessary, or require a daily scheduled time.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>I view the daily standup as a way to communicate status to a Product Owner/Project Manager/SCRUM Master who may have to communicate status to a larger "Standup of Standups", if you will. What's wrong with an email?
- verve_rat 5y ago
  Or that work tracking system they spent all that time and money configuring.
jrs235 5y ago
Standups aren't supposed to be status reports. They're supposed to be huddles (to determine the plan of action). Want "status"? Look at the "xyz board". Blockers? That's important. Communicating any blockers that need to be addressed. That can be an email. And shouldn't have to wait until the next huddle. You can waste hours waiting. Communicate blockers immediately synchronously (interrupting) or asynchronously (noninterrupting, like email) depending on your work environments preferred or agreed upon protocols.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Perhaps not, but a 10-minute daily face-to-face status update isn't so bad. Some thing can't be clearly communicated via a project board. Blockers shouldn't wait until a standup, but a standup can be a useful failsafe. It means that a quick sync up happens at least once a day.

onion2k 5y ago

There's a very simple fix if you believe you have too many meetings - decline them. If you don't think you're needed in a meeting, say so. Give a reason like "I have nothing to add to that discussion." or "There's no agenda so I don't know if I'm needed." or simply "I'm busy, I think my time would be better spent on story 123." Make the people who invite you start to consider if you're really needed[1]. Also, create your own "meetings" by putting blocks of focused coding time in your calendar where you're unavailable to other people. Part of your job as a dev is to organise your time well. You can't just delegate that to other people. If you're saying yes to every invite, and then you sit and don't have anything to add, then you haven't done your job properly. [1] They might stop inviting you, and then you'll have less input on things and less visibility to management (which mean you were needed in the meetings after all). Make sure you're happy with that before you try this strategy.

watwut 5y ago
I cant refuse to go to planning meetings, standups and retrospective. Those are core of agile and already take massive massive amount of time. Some of their parts are useful, but they also contain hours of nothingness. The other meetings are small in number and comparatively more useful per minute.
- onion2k 5y ago
  I cant refuse to go to planning meetings, standups and retrospective. Yes you can. Just send a note saying why you won't be there and what you'd have said if you had been. Agile ceremony meetings are practically the definition of meetings that could be emails.
  - watwut 5y ago
    Sight. I cant refuse agile ceremony while working employment in that company. I can leave the job for non-agile one or make myself fired. However, the combination of "being in one of those majorities of companies that believes in agile" and "not being in these meetings" is not available. If your point is "then put up your resignation", then yes it is available. I am not a serf. That is not however what the "I cant do it" sentence in English refers to.

twblalock 5y ago

Being in meetings means you get to be in the room when decisions are made. Even if you aren't an active participant, you get to at least listen in. Almost all problems are really people problems, and people problems can only be solved by communicating with other people. Some engineers seem to want to work for long stretches uninterrupted, like monks copying sacred texts. That is not the way to succeed. To succeed you need to make sure what you are building is actually what you should be building. I've never seen a way to figure that out without having meetings with other people. Think of it this way -- a software engineer is not just a programmer, just as a fireman is not just a "hose operator." You are ultimately someone who gets things done and solves problems for other people, and that requires regular communication with those other people.

freedom2099 5y ago
True… but I can’t have 5h of meetings a day and be expected to produce much…
- ptr 5y ago
  Yes you can, if you take into account the impact of what it is you produce.
bennysomething 5y ago
I think the idea of deep work has a place too. I haven't read the book but I think it touch's Linus locking himself away at a critical point in Linux's development. Bill gates did something similar (not sure what he was working on at that time).
- mongol 5y ago
  I think he did that when he created git?
  - bennysomething 5y ago
    Yeah maybe it was that not sure!

tome 5y ago

I'm generally puzzled by the HN conventional wisdom against meetings, and I'm puzzled by this thread specifically because there doesn't seem to be a single commenter who is as much as just fine with meetings. Am I really in such a small minority, or has HN turned into an echo chamber on this issue, where no one with a countervailing opinion dares to get a word in? Having a meeting interrupt my work ranges from slightly irritating (if it comes during flow, but I can always easily get back into the groove later) to a welcome break from the intellectual stress of solo development work. I get to interact with my colleagues, learn about what they've been doing, and understand more about what the team needs and what our customers need. Have I forgotten that I sold my soul to the devil to obtain a unique ability to focus, and regain focus after interruption? Or are there a double digit percentage of HN inhabitants who are just like me but not speaking up in this thread? I don't know how I would understand my team mates as people, understand what they need from me and understand what other parts of the business need from me without meetings. Am I missing something here?

Nursie 5y ago
I don't mind the morning meeting, they can be useful to catch up with where the team is and who needs help, and who's working on a problem someone else solved last week/month/year. The problem I have with them in practice is that they are usually (in my experience) turned into a management progress meeting where developers are made to answer for their progress on specific items, rather a round-robin "Here's what I'm doing". At that point collaboration and team communication is out of the window.
mightyRodri 5y ago
I feel the same, the dayli meetings are super important for fast iteration. Sayinf you dont need those is implying there is no outside input that yould improve your work. Wich is only true when your task is so sepperated from everyone that you could effectively get your own one man team.
BlargMcLarg 5y ago
>I don't know how I would understand my team mates as people This sounds overly dramatic considering most people are very different in a meeting setup. We didn't need meetings to do this for the majority of our species' existence. Just talk with them, basic empathy. The way it sounds, you like some meetings because they fulfill X, but X can also be fulfilled in different ways without the downsides of meetings, be it specific meetings or in general. It's those downsides and knowing X can still be satisfied that drives many of us against meetings. Many times, meetings are also subpar or flat-out fail to achieve X because of other circumstances.

bigpeopleareold 5y ago

> No one wants to reinvent the wheel so gluing together packages is considered best practice. The work has become more about making decisions around the packages you choose rather than being given time to make the package. While I have not been developing anything much lately, I realized that most of my career making things ended up being. In part because of this, I found the passion to start digging through again stuff I wanted to learn but never had a project for, basically now a deep dive into system programming. At the moment, I'll probably only gain insight, but it feels more gratifying than learning how to glue packages together.

johannes1234321 5y ago

> Daily standups shouldn't be necessary with a team constantly communicating. I don't agree there. Constant communication is important for a good team, however in constant flow it often is being lost, what is important. Important things easily get lost between other noise. Whether a daily is the right approach can be argued. Maybe a weekly is enough. However having a time where everybody listens and things can be brought to attention is useful in my experience.

Juliate 5y ago
He's not denying that (constant) communication isn't important. But that, planned, too frequent, mandatory, with a prescriptive format, meetings (which dailies/weeklies are) is harmful. I've been 21 years in this industry, the past 7 in Scrum/Agile infested companies/teams and I've never seen such a sterile and unproductive way of work.
- pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
  > He's not denying that (constant) communication isn't important. I also agree that it isn't as important as they make it out to be.

sascha_sl 5y ago

I've spent 2 years in a team that was allowed to build platform tooling from scratch and it's been the most productive and high impact work i've done to date. The only reason I'm not there anymore is that the team disintegrated after a change in leadership. Despite that being years ago, our tooling survived, judging from some headers. If you glue things together, you inevitably have unknowns about the specifics of how your software actually works, and that very often comes back to bite you. But it's even worse if you do platform engineering, because developers downstream from you will find features (or anti-features) you didn't notice and completely derail and guardrails you had envisioned. Having full control over everything we wrote kept us nimble and able to react fast. If you own all your code, making small adjustments is easy. If you glue together packages or off the shelf code you may end up having to choose between a trade off and maintaining a fork of a piece of code far beyond the scope of the thing you need. The only pain we had left was keeping in step with kubernetes API packages.

yason 5y ago

Meetings on Monday only. A lot of wasted time on Mondays anyway (how can be it be that your mind adapts to the weekend's free time in a minute but takes hours to drudge itself back to "work mode" after the weekend?) and that leaves the rest of the week for programming. Programmers do talk about stuff informally anyway if and when the need arises, often via asynchronous messaging or even face-to-face but those aren't meetings in the sense that they adapt to the programmer flow and not the other way around.