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Meetings force us to context switch, kill our flow, and sap our job satisfaction long term. That's what developers say, but I suspect that it's not actually tr

Meetings force us to context switch, kill our flow, and sap our job satisfaction long term. That's what developers say, but I suspect that it's not actually true. Something that leads to a far worse reduction in job satisfaction is not knowing what's going on, being surprised with complex features that the product people have assumed will be simple, and not having opportunities to be seen as an expert. Those things generally require developers to be in meetings. If devs don't have those things they get grumpy and quit. The problem with most meetings is organisational. If your day is fragmented by lots of one hour meetings with one hour gaps between them then you can't get much else done. That's the frustrating part - you have lots of meetings and lots of 'dead space' between them. If you change things so meetings are 50 minutes long, and only have ten minutes between them, and that 'defrags' all the 'dead space' to a single block where you can focus, then meetings suddenly stop being so much of a problem. If you hate meetings because they require too much context switching away from code, and they stop you focusing, reorganise them so they don't do that. If your first reaction to this suggestion is "But I can't because I don't control when meetings are", then the problem isn't meetings, it's your colleagues not giving a shit about your working environment. That's a very bad sign.

pif 5y ago
> Meetings force us to context switch, kill our flow, and sap our job satisfaction long term. That's what programmers say. Developing software is much more than programming, at least when you are developing something else than an information system.
MarkMarine 5y ago
How do you manage to move 8 other people's schedules around such that you get these blocks of time? Usually the hardest people to schedule are the manager who wants to sit in on every meeting, and the PM who also wants to be in every meeting. They look at my time and see something easy to schedule, there is a big empty block right there and it fits the tiny sliver of time they have free in the day. There is an impedance mismatch between professional meeting attenders, and the people the build, and the meeting attenders are in charge.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  If your manager does that, they are not very good at their job.
- stemlord 5y ago
  I like to fill in those spots with "FOCUSED WORK TIME" blocks instead of leaving it empty, it lets my PMs know I desire that time to work.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    Exactly. Google Calendar even has a specific category for it.
- onion2k 5y ago
  How do you manage to move 8 other people's schedules around such that you get these blocks of time? The way I do it is to block out 4 hours in the afternoon in my calendar as "Focus Time" that people aren't allowed to touch, and let people schedule me into meetings any time other than that. If all the devs on a team do it then the meetings they're required in just naturally gravitate to being shorter ones in the morning with fewer gaps. I'm quite fortunate in the sense that the company I work in operates as a 'sociocracy' (https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/ https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/) so teams do actually get to define that this sort of thing is acceptable. In other companies it might be a harder sell, but most managers I've worked with do understand that there's other work to do besides meetings so they're usually open to talking about how to do better as a team. Especially if their bonus is related to performance. Even if they're not open to talking about it, you can always raise it in every single retro for months until someone starts getting annoyed enough to fix it.
- burnished 5y ago
  Put meetings on your own calendar to block out chunks of time. People will see the conflict and look for a better time.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
ReactiveJelly 5y ago
I end up answering lots of random questions for my coworkers (knowledge transfer-type stuff that hasn't been documented because the company was small before 2020) and having a block of meetings sucks because then I may not get to reply to a question for a while. And I can say from the other side, I hate waiting 1 or 2 hours for my managers or non-manager Schelling point people to get out of meetings so I can ask them a 5-minute question.
adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
step one is don't have 50 minute meetings. if your meeting was 20 minutes, you'd probably finish it in 30 and have had a much more productive meeting.
- onion2k 5y ago
  I absolutely agree that meetings should not be any longer than necessary. Declining any meeting that doesn't have a defined agenda and goal should be acceptable too.
NicoJuicy 5y ago
That's why you have weekly or monthly updates, depending on the org. One of the biggest issues is devs not giving feedback enough, a lot of it is based on personality. There's no point in having a meeting and forcing people to give feedback though.
ownagefool 5y ago
I'm not sure the article argued all meetings are bad. I've worked in a lot of places where non-technical managers stick random crap in my calendar all day long. You know, the kind of place that if two devs actually try to discuss an issue it ends up with 1 hour locked in a room with the expectation some winner will emerge. But that doesn't mean that a meeting about the context of some customer problem is a dud. It's a large part of the reason that product team exists. I rarely got those meetings. More of them, less of the pointless ones please. :)
danjac 5y ago
I used to hate meetings full stop, now I have a more nuanced take: my purpose at work is to create solutions, not code, and all other things being equal, the less code that needs to be written towards that solution, the better. A good meeting with a clear agenda and outcomes can save hours, or even days or weeks of writing code. A bad meeting - poorly organized and led, clashing egos instead of reasonable arguments, and so on - is something nobody needs.
- adrian_b 5y ago
  Meetings can be very useful, especially when, as you say, they are well prepared, but only when they are not too frequent. In my experience at many companies, from small startups to large multinational companies, weekly meetings are fine, but daily meetings always waste much more time than they can save.
- bob1029 5y ago
  Meetings are very important. You just need to make sure you are having the right ones if they start to seem pointless. Ad-hoc, developer initiated meetings are the happy path. I think it is also acceptable and healthy for developers to be required to check in on some weekly call too. Daily standups are where things start to derail for me. At some level, we need more async written communication. Forcing everyone on the call every single day can feel dystopian depending on your current tasks.
  - danjac 5y ago
    Sometimes a daily standup can be a good tool to get a dysfunctional (poorly communicating) team or project into a place where they at least have to get into the habit of communicating with each other enough to convey basic information and tasks on a daily basis. If the team is already working fine with async communication then it's just another empty ritual that can be safely dropped.
    - fendy3002 5y ago
      For a remote team IMO it's good if your timezone is almost the same. It's the most suitable place to ask others about yesterday's blockers, or when you found something that you want to ask after 4pm. It's also the best place to heads up "I need your help x, lets call after (some time).
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I think this is a misconception that software developers tend to have; their comfort zone, their work passion and their perceived goal is to sit behind a screen and type the code. But that's just the programming part of the job, as a software engineer your responsibilities are much wider. Meetings can (I'm not saying they will) tweak what code needs to be written and how. Left on their own, developers may end up writing code that isn't needed or doesn't do what it's supposed to, which is wasted time, dead code or branches, or worse, sunk cost fallacy kicks in where it's kept anyway because someone wrote it. I wouldn't have minded more meetings in my current job. I'm leaving in two weeks. Not because of a lack of meetings mind you, it's a combination of factors.
- fijiaarone 5y ago
  You’d be surprised how little work can be done by builders, mechanics, farmers, accountants, or doctors in meetings. Experts and creators actually need time to actually work and time to focus on their work.
captainbland 5y ago
Yeah I'd agree with this. Some meetings are for sure necessary. I think the problems start arising when a team gets too big or has too many responsibilities, then suddenly the discussions have to be much bigger and as such must become kind of long and tedious.
NullPrefix 5y ago
>not having opportunities to be seen as an expert
ehnto 5y ago
> If you hate meetings because they require too much context switching away from code, and they stop you focusing, reorganise them so they don't do that. If you have such agency, but in a significantly large organization, or even one that's just not empathetic to the issue, getting everyone's schedules to line up is why you end up with such fragmented meeting plans. Of course the meetings are not going to be organized around you specifically, when everyone is also in a half dozen sparodic meetings that they're trying to work around too. So the solution is to stop requiring so many people in the first place, so that everyone is "across it". It's not just devs either. 95% of the time, I contribute nothing, gain nothing, and could have gotten the same value out of an email summary. I find meetings are often covering a deficit in the planning and documentation of the project. A well planned project, and a well documented technology environment/application, will not need constant meetings in order to transfer tidbits of information over the lossy conduit of verbal meetings.
Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
> reorganise them so they don't do that This is good advice if you have the power to do that. But often people just don't have that control. Meeting times are set by managers/team leads/etc and you are required to be at them. If you decline because it will 'hurt your flow', this will not be well received by most managers.

pif 5y ago

> Meetings force us to context switch, kill our flow, and sap our job satisfaction long term. That's what programmers say. Developing software is much more than programming, at least when you are developing something else than an information system.

MarkMarine 5y ago

How do you manage to move 8 other people's schedules around such that you get these blocks of time? Usually the hardest people to schedule are the manager who wants to sit in on every meeting, and the PM who also wants to be in every meeting. They look at my time and see something easy to schedule, there is a big empty block right there and it fits the tiny sliver of time they have free in the day. There is an impedance mismatch between professional meeting attenders, and the people the build, and the meeting attenders are in charge.

2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
If your manager does that, they are not very good at their job.
stemlord 5y ago
I like to fill in those spots with "FOCUSED WORK TIME" blocks instead of leaving it empty, it lets my PMs know I desire that time to work.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Exactly. Google Calendar even has a specific category for it.
onion2k 5y ago
How do you manage to move 8 other people's schedules around such that you get these blocks of time? The way I do it is to block out 4 hours in the afternoon in my calendar as "Focus Time" that people aren't allowed to touch, and let people schedule me into meetings any time other than that. If all the devs on a team do it then the meetings they're required in just naturally gravitate to being shorter ones in the morning with fewer gaps. I'm quite fortunate in the sense that the company I work in operates as a 'sociocracy' (https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/ https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/) so teams do actually get to define that this sort of thing is acceptable. In other companies it might be a harder sell, but most managers I've worked with do understand that there's other work to do besides meetings so they're usually open to talking about how to do better as a team. Especially if their bonus is related to performance. Even if they're not open to talking about it, you can always raise it in every single retro for months until someone starts getting annoyed enough to fix it.
burnished 5y ago
Put meetings on your own calendar to block out chunks of time. People will see the conflict and look for a better time.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

ReactiveJelly 5y ago

I end up answering lots of random questions for my coworkers (knowledge transfer-type stuff that hasn't been documented because the company was small before 2020) and having a block of meetings sucks because then I may not get to reply to a question for a while. And I can say from the other side, I hate waiting 1 or 2 hours for my managers or non-manager Schelling point people to get out of meetings so I can ask them a 5-minute question.

adgjlsfhk1 5y ago

step one is don't have 50 minute meetings. if your meeting was 20 minutes, you'd probably finish it in 30 and have had a much more productive meeting.

onion2k 5y ago
I absolutely agree that meetings should not be any longer than necessary. Declining any meeting that doesn't have a defined agenda and goal should be acceptable too.

NicoJuicy 5y ago

That's why you have weekly or monthly updates, depending on the org. One of the biggest issues is devs not giving feedback enough, a lot of it is based on personality. There's no point in having a meeting and forcing people to give feedback though.

ownagefool 5y ago

I'm not sure the article argued all meetings are bad. I've worked in a lot of places where non-technical managers stick random crap in my calendar all day long. You know, the kind of place that if two devs actually try to discuss an issue it ends up with 1 hour locked in a room with the expectation some winner will emerge. But that doesn't mean that a meeting about the context of some customer problem is a dud. It's a large part of the reason that product team exists. I rarely got those meetings. More of them, less of the pointless ones please. :)

danjac 5y ago

I used to hate meetings full stop, now I have a more nuanced take: my purpose at work is to create solutions, not code, and all other things being equal, the less code that needs to be written towards that solution, the better. A good meeting with a clear agenda and outcomes can save hours, or even days or weeks of writing code. A bad meeting - poorly organized and led, clashing egos instead of reasonable arguments, and so on - is something nobody needs.

adrian_b 5y ago
Meetings can be very useful, especially when, as you say, they are well prepared, but only when they are not too frequent. In my experience at many companies, from small startups to large multinational companies, weekly meetings are fine, but daily meetings always waste much more time than they can save.
bob1029 5y ago
Meetings are very important. You just need to make sure you are having the right ones if they start to seem pointless. Ad-hoc, developer initiated meetings are the happy path. I think it is also acceptable and healthy for developers to be required to check in on some weekly call too. Daily standups are where things start to derail for me. At some level, we need more async written communication. Forcing everyone on the call every single day can feel dystopian depending on your current tasks.
- danjac 5y ago
  Sometimes a daily standup can be a good tool to get a dysfunctional (poorly communicating) team or project into a place where they at least have to get into the habit of communicating with each other enough to convey basic information and tasks on a daily basis. If the team is already working fine with async communication then it's just another empty ritual that can be safely dropped.
  - fendy3002 5y ago
    For a remote team IMO it's good if your timezone is almost the same. It's the most suitable place to ask others about yesterday's blockers, or when you found something that you want to ask after 4pm. It's also the best place to heads up "I need your help x, lets call after (some time).

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

I think this is a misconception that software developers tend to have; their comfort zone, their work passion and their perceived goal is to sit behind a screen and type the code. But that's just the programming part of the job, as a software engineer your responsibilities are much wider. Meetings can (I'm not saying they will) tweak what code needs to be written and how. Left on their own, developers may end up writing code that isn't needed or doesn't do what it's supposed to, which is wasted time, dead code or branches, or worse, sunk cost fallacy kicks in where it's kept anyway because someone wrote it. I wouldn't have minded more meetings in my current job. I'm leaving in two weeks. Not because of a lack of meetings mind you, it's a combination of factors.

fijiaarone 5y ago
You’d be surprised how little work can be done by builders, mechanics, farmers, accountants, or doctors in meetings. Experts and creators actually need time to actually work and time to focus on their work.

captainbland 5y ago

Yeah I'd agree with this. Some meetings are for sure necessary. I think the problems start arising when a team gets too big or has too many responsibilities, then suddenly the discussions have to be much bigger and as such must become kind of long and tedious.

NullPrefix 5y ago

>not having opportunities to be seen as an expert

ehnto 5y ago

> If you hate meetings because they require too much context switching away from code, and they stop you focusing, reorganise them so they don't do that. If you have such agency, but in a significantly large organization, or even one that's just not empathetic to the issue, getting everyone's schedules to line up is why you end up with such fragmented meeting plans. Of course the meetings are not going to be organized around you specifically, when everyone is also in a half dozen sparodic meetings that they're trying to work around too. So the solution is to stop requiring so many people in the first place, so that everyone is "across it". It's not just devs either. 95% of the time, I contribute nothing, gain nothing, and could have gotten the same value out of an email summary. I find meetings are often covering a deficit in the planning and documentation of the project. A well planned project, and a well documented technology environment/application, will not need constant meetings in order to transfer tidbits of information over the lossy conduit of verbal meetings.

Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago

> reorganise them so they don't do that This is good advice if you have the power to do that. But often people just don't have that control. Meeting times are set by managers/team leads/etc and you are required to be at them. If you decline because it will 'hurt your flow', this will not be well received by most managers.