5 ms·

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 le

by danjac 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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).
e_i_pi_2 4y ago
This is a great point - there's been a lot of times that I feel like I was able to save the dev team work by being in a meeting and advocating for a solution that would also work well with our existing architecture, rather than something that may sound better but be much more complicated to implement.

by danjac 4y ago

adrian_b 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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).

e_i_pi_2 4y ago

This is a great point - there's been a lot of times that I feel like I was able to save the dev team work by being in a meeting and advocating for a solution that would also work well with our existing architecture, rather than something that may sound better but be much more complicated to implement.