6 ms·

Sorry but that's nuts. Teams that work together on the same project should regularly get together in a synchronous conversation. Doesn't have to be everyday or

Sorry but that's nuts. Teams that work together on the same project should regularly get together in a synchronous conversation. Doesn't have to be everyday or anything but this is ridiculous and extreme. It would seem reasonable to me if it were "no meetings with more than 5 people" or something, depending on how their product and development teams are structured. But... three is verboten?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jasonlotito 4y ago
One-on-ones are the reason for that. Two people mean both are actively involved. Either listening to someone speak to them directly, or talking to someone directly. > Teams that work together on the same project should regularly get together in a synchronous conversation. This doesn't prevent that. It seems that it only prevents you from automating the decision on when to do that. If you need to synchronize, you can. However, if you don't, there is no need to hold a meeting. But people tend to make meetings opt-out rather than opt-in. This seems to enforce an opt-in approach first.
- chadlavi 4y ago
  Teams work in cycles. This would mean, for example, that a monthly/quarterly retro with the whole team is now not allowed. That's bad.
  - tlholaday 4y ago
    It's worth experimenting with ... - any team member can propose an ad-hoc whole-team meeting at any time. - any two team members can propose an ad-hoc whole-team meeting at any time. - any team manager can mandate an ad-hoc whole-team meeting up to four times yearly The Shopify rule is "no team member and no manager can mandate a recurring meeting with more than one other person."
    - watwut 4y ago
      Any team member thing suits few dominant or extroverted personalities. But people who are not comfortable socially won't propose whole team meeting. Also, I would expect the management to be the ones to care the most about hoe team functions overall. They should be the ones to notice communication is dying or that we are splitting into subgroups or that someone is isolated work wise (unable to get answers to questions or whatever). Team dynamic is literally work of leadership, so they should be able to decide on meetings.
naravara 4y ago
Presumably they can still schedule the synchronous conversations one at a time. They just can't set them to "recurring." I have no idea how they make policies like these work with business partnerships though. I could live with a rule like this internally, but it's hard to get time on a client or partner's calendar and, when you do, recurring meetings let you reserve it.
- kube-system 4y ago
  That's part of how recurring meetings get out of hand. They'll get scheduled as an 'easy' way to maintain a cadence when people have a busy schedule, regardless of any particular instance's necessity. If someone works with a dozen different groups, this sometimes results in evenly spaced 5 minute status updates interrupting someone's workday every half hour.
  - naravara 4y ago
    The alternative is spending all day coordinating with 10 different people's secretaries to schedule time on their calendars with them. It's much easier to cancel instances of a recurring meeting than to have to schedule each one each time. Of course, if it's just a 5 minute status update you should just send a memo.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      That's right. But I find that meeting organizers are reluctant to cancel instances of a meeting even when they don't have much to share, because they are unsure in advance if others on the meeting may have something to bring up.
      - naravara 4y ago
        I always send a "I am good to cancel today's meeting unless someone has something they would like to discuss." Takes no more effort than just cancelling.
emodendroket 4y ago
There’s nothing preventing them from meeting multiple times in a day if they want; they just need to have a purpose for meeting rather than having a standing meeting whether or not they have things to discuss.
Maximus9000 4y ago
I agree. I've been a manager for almost a decade now and I've swung to both extremes on meetings. Some recurring team meetings are a good thing. Personally, one of my favorite recurring meetings is the retrospective meeting after a sprint. Yes, we could just toss all of that feedback onto an online retro board, but the interaction in the retro meeting is where the real gold is.
- oldstrangers 4y ago
  Specific to retrospective meetings, they're also kind of therapeutic. There's a lot to unpack after a really stressful project, and its nice to have an outlet to direct some of that energy (ranting, celebrating, venting, whatever). Getting to bond with a coworker over a shared struggle is an important but often overlooked part of a healthy work life.
- ResearchCode 4y ago
  Just get rid of the "sprints".
  - carlivar 4y ago
    That's an easy thing to say. The harder thing is what system should replace sprints, and why is it better?
    - ptr 4y ago
      The argument is usually that sprints just add overhead on top of picking the highest prio work from the backlog. Ie, sprints don’t have to be replaced with anything since there are no benefits.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        The benefit is a social one of being able to tell "stakeholders" that their shit's getting bumped to the next sprint if they keep trying to toss extra junk on the pile this sprint. The time cut-off is helpful for keeping jackasses up the org chart at bay, when it's done correctly and you're actually allowed to say things like that, and follow through. The chunked time makes it easier to justify a larger time-cost to monkeying with the short-term schedule, which makes stakeholders be more considerate. That's in the unicorn-rare case that you're in an org that can do "agile" right, but still has the problem of clueless stakeholders shitting everywhere and no discipline or expectation that PMs are empowered to tell them (politely) to fuck off without the support of this kind of framework. Otherwise, yeah, they're not that useful. You can track velocity and such without them, so that's not a good reason to have them.
throwaway892238 4y ago
> Teams that work together on the same project should regularly get together in a synchronous conversation. This generalization is clearly not strictly true, but people stick to it anyway without thinking. Who should get together, exactly? When should they? Why? What is the goal, and are they meeting that goal? Almost every single recurring meeting I've been in has not considered these things seriously. It's just generic people making a generic meeting to talk about generic things to make it feel like work is getting done, when usually, at the end of the meeting, you realize the entire meeting could have been an e-mail. The only useful purpose of a generic, purposeless, recurring intra-team meeting is to reinforce social working relationships. They aren't going to solve a bug or ship a new feature or solve a design decision in one of these meetings. They exist solely to talk about work without doing work, because the interaction between humans smoothes the social dynamics of doing work. But nothing actually gets done.
- maxbond 4y ago
  Ask yourself; could this meeting be a Zoom? Could that Zoom be an email? https://youtu.be/hePJ1YPMxEw https://youtu.be/hePJ1YPMxEw
- bfgoodrich 4y ago
  [dead]
- alkonaut 4y ago
  Anyone who does Scrum remotely will probably have a standup as a daily recurring multi-part meeting. No one loves those but I think they can be useful.
  - Lyngbakr 4y ago
    In my experience, a standup bot in a Teams/Slack channel can often replace those. If there's a blocker or nuanced issue that would benefit from in-person discussion, then hopping on a call makes total sense. In contrast, having a meeting by default makes no sense to me.
nottorp 4y ago
> Teams that work together on the same project should regularly get together in a synchronous conversation. I'm beginning to think most HN posters do not talk to their co workers outside scheduled meetings.
- brailsafe 4y ago
  I'd prefer to talk to my co-workers when necessary, and not any more than that. That could mean slack messages to discuss a certain issue, or even the occasional status update team-wide. Anything beyond that is a farce imo, and just shouldn't be shoe-horned into remote working or software dev culture if it's not there organically. I get no value out of it, and wish others would rely less on that for socializing.
  - nottorp 4y ago
    So you don't want to know about the bigger picture. That's fine. I still think that helps.
    - brailsafe 4y ago
      I'd like to know about the bigger picture in a way that helps me appreciate it, and only if there's a way I specifically can be involved in getting there or the possible positive or negative outcome of me knowing or not knowing about it. Most of the time though, "knowing about the bigger picture" is actually just some arbitrary executive who wants to hear themselves talk to everyone simultaneously, inevitably saying nothing of substance, and about things I don't and will never likely have involvement with. It's a ludicrous burden to subject myself to, viewing my day to day work through the lense of some specious company-wide objective, especially if the only people who gain are the people at the top. Like seriously, I don't even have stock or stock options, if the company makes more money, it's someone elses choice whether I get anything more out of it, or whether I get fired because my role doesn't fit within their new structure.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jasonlotito 4y ago

One-on-ones are the reason for that. Two people mean both are actively involved. Either listening to someone speak to them directly, or talking to someone directly. > Teams that work together on the same project should regularly get together in a synchronous conversation. This doesn't prevent that. It seems that it only prevents you from automating the decision on when to do that. If you need to synchronize, you can. However, if you don't, there is no need to hold a meeting. But people tend to make meetings opt-out rather than opt-in. This seems to enforce an opt-in approach first.

chadlavi 4y ago
Teams work in cycles. This would mean, for example, that a monthly/quarterly retro with the whole team is now not allowed. That's bad.
- tlholaday 4y ago
  It's worth experimenting with ... - any team member can propose an ad-hoc whole-team meeting at any time. - any two team members can propose an ad-hoc whole-team meeting at any time. - any team manager can mandate an ad-hoc whole-team meeting up to four times yearly The Shopify rule is "no team member and no manager can mandate a recurring meeting with more than one other person."
  - watwut 4y ago
    Any team member thing suits few dominant or extroverted personalities. But people who are not comfortable socially won't propose whole team meeting. Also, I would expect the management to be the ones to care the most about hoe team functions overall. They should be the ones to notice communication is dying or that we are splitting into subgroups or that someone is isolated work wise (unable to get answers to questions or whatever). Team dynamic is literally work of leadership, so they should be able to decide on meetings.

naravara 4y ago

Presumably they can still schedule the synchronous conversations one at a time. They just can't set them to "recurring." I have no idea how they make policies like these work with business partnerships though. I could live with a rule like this internally, but it's hard to get time on a client or partner's calendar and, when you do, recurring meetings let you reserve it.

kube-system 4y ago
That's part of how recurring meetings get out of hand. They'll get scheduled as an 'easy' way to maintain a cadence when people have a busy schedule, regardless of any particular instance's necessity. If someone works with a dozen different groups, this sometimes results in evenly spaced 5 minute status updates interrupting someone's workday every half hour.
- naravara 4y ago
  The alternative is spending all day coordinating with 10 different people's secretaries to schedule time on their calendars with them. It's much easier to cancel instances of a recurring meeting than to have to schedule each one each time. Of course, if it's just a 5 minute status update you should just send a memo.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    That's right. But I find that meeting organizers are reluctant to cancel instances of a meeting even when they don't have much to share, because they are unsure in advance if others on the meeting may have something to bring up.
    - naravara 4y ago
      I always send a "I am good to cancel today's meeting unless someone has something they would like to discuss." Takes no more effort than just cancelling.

emodendroket 4y ago

There’s nothing preventing them from meeting multiple times in a day if they want; they just need to have a purpose for meeting rather than having a standing meeting whether or not they have things to discuss.

Maximus9000 4y ago

I agree. I've been a manager for almost a decade now and I've swung to both extremes on meetings. Some recurring team meetings are a good thing. Personally, one of my favorite recurring meetings is the retrospective meeting after a sprint. Yes, we could just toss all of that feedback onto an online retro board, but the interaction in the retro meeting is where the real gold is.

oldstrangers 4y ago
Specific to retrospective meetings, they're also kind of therapeutic. There's a lot to unpack after a really stressful project, and its nice to have an outlet to direct some of that energy (ranting, celebrating, venting, whatever). Getting to bond with a coworker over a shared struggle is an important but often overlooked part of a healthy work life.
ResearchCode 4y ago
Just get rid of the "sprints".
- carlivar 4y ago
  That's an easy thing to say. The harder thing is what system should replace sprints, and why is it better?
  - ptr 4y ago
    The argument is usually that sprints just add overhead on top of picking the highest prio work from the backlog. Ie, sprints don’t have to be replaced with anything since there are no benefits.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      The benefit is a social one of being able to tell "stakeholders" that their shit's getting bumped to the next sprint if they keep trying to toss extra junk on the pile this sprint. The time cut-off is helpful for keeping jackasses up the org chart at bay, when it's done correctly and you're actually allowed to say things like that, and follow through. The chunked time makes it easier to justify a larger time-cost to monkeying with the short-term schedule, which makes stakeholders be more considerate. That's in the unicorn-rare case that you're in an org that can do "agile" right, but still has the problem of clueless stakeholders shitting everywhere and no discipline or expectation that PMs are empowered to tell them (politely) to fuck off without the support of this kind of framework. Otherwise, yeah, they're not that useful. You can track velocity and such without them, so that's not a good reason to have them.

throwaway892238 4y ago

> Teams that work together on the same project should regularly get together in a synchronous conversation. This generalization is clearly not strictly true, but people stick to it anyway without thinking. Who should get together, exactly? When should they? Why? What is the goal, and are they meeting that goal? Almost every single recurring meeting I've been in has not considered these things seriously. It's just generic people making a generic meeting to talk about generic things to make it feel like work is getting done, when usually, at the end of the meeting, you realize the entire meeting could have been an e-mail. The only useful purpose of a generic, purposeless, recurring intra-team meeting is to reinforce social working relationships. They aren't going to solve a bug or ship a new feature or solve a design decision in one of these meetings. They exist solely to talk about work without doing work, because the interaction between humans smoothes the social dynamics of doing work. But nothing actually gets done.

maxbond 4y ago
Ask yourself; could this meeting be a Zoom? Could that Zoom be an email? https://youtu.be/hePJ1YPMxEw https://youtu.be/hePJ1YPMxEw
bfgoodrich 4y ago
[dead]
alkonaut 4y ago
Anyone who does Scrum remotely will probably have a standup as a daily recurring multi-part meeting. No one loves those but I think they can be useful.
- Lyngbakr 4y ago
  In my experience, a standup bot in a Teams/Slack channel can often replace those. If there's a blocker or nuanced issue that would benefit from in-person discussion, then hopping on a call makes total sense. In contrast, having a meeting by default makes no sense to me.

nottorp 4y ago

> Teams that work together on the same project should regularly get together in a synchronous conversation. I'm beginning to think most HN posters do not talk to their co workers outside scheduled meetings.

brailsafe 4y ago
I'd prefer to talk to my co-workers when necessary, and not any more than that. That could mean slack messages to discuss a certain issue, or even the occasional status update team-wide. Anything beyond that is a farce imo, and just shouldn't be shoe-horned into remote working or software dev culture if it's not there organically. I get no value out of it, and wish others would rely less on that for socializing.
- nottorp 4y ago
  So you don't want to know about the bigger picture. That's fine. I still think that helps.
  - brailsafe 4y ago
    I'd like to know about the bigger picture in a way that helps me appreciate it, and only if there's a way I specifically can be involved in getting there or the possible positive or negative outcome of me knowing or not knowing about it. Most of the time though, "knowing about the bigger picture" is actually just some arbitrary executive who wants to hear themselves talk to everyone simultaneously, inevitably saying nothing of substance, and about things I don't and will never likely have involvement with. It's a ludicrous burden to subject myself to, viewing my day to day work through the lense of some specious company-wide objective, especially if the only people who gain are the people at the top. Like seriously, I don't even have stock or stock options, if the company makes more money, it's someone elses choice whether I get anything more out of it, or whether I get fired because my role doesn't fit within their new structure.