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I think the author fundamentally misunderstands (or else mischaracterizes) why people say things like "cancel this meeting so we can get some work done". It's

I think the author fundamentally misunderstands (or else mischaracterizes) why people say things like "cancel this meeting so we can get some work done". It's because many people feel like sitting in a room BS'ing about what work needs to be done, is something they can get paid for without having to do anything actually productive. Most meetings are not actually work, they are paid time masquerading as work. I don't know anyone who thinks that there should never be any meetings, ever. But, most organizations have a bias towards meetings, in that if invited to a meeting it is assumed you need an excuse not to go; the default is that if asked to go to a meeting, you should. If we treated meetings like purchases, where you have a certain budget of hours you are allowed to use, and you need approval from a higher level to schedule one, I don't think people would try to schedule as many meetings as they currently do.

32MHz 4y ago
It’s easy to confuse productivity with performance. But they are not the same thing. Have you ever had a full day of meetings and you say to yourself “wow, I was so productive today”. But really what work was performed? If you’re an IC probably very little.
wincy 4y ago
I’m right at the cusp where I was a very strong individual contributor at my previous jobs, and have now been a team lead for about six months now. At first, I felt like I was wasting time spending a good portion of my day in meetings, but I’ve realized that the meetings are super important because I know what the business actually wants and can translate that into the technical documentation necessary to get our software engineers where they’re working efficiently. This way, the engineers on my team don’t have to ask a bunch of questions to the PO/team lead for clarification like they did before. It’s a huge win and our team has been lauded as becoming substantially more productive because of this design work, refining and grooming our tickets properly before the devs ever see them. From an individual contribution perspective I’ve written a few hundred lines of code since I started, unless you count me out putting code via some CLI tricks involving some templates (I don’t really, and am trying to teach the other engineers about powershell/bash use cases) but when I do step in it’s either because of some design pattern we want to nail to avoid future tech debt, or I’m fixing a bug that a junior or mid level dev has spent a dozen hours on and couldn’t figure out what went wrong. So the 20% or so of my time I’m actually spending doing IC work is to unblock the team, so it feels really high impact relative to the time I spend on it. So in short, my role has the added benefit of far fewer meetings for the other developers on the team, while also keeping someone technical in the loop to push back on unrealistic expectations from the business, getting to ask clarifying questions, and working closely with our POs to have everything teed up so the team can just show up to work and get down to the “important stuff”. I think it’s an important role with intangible benefits people can’t really see until they get a before/after comparison where everything else was largely the same.
teeray 4y ago
Some people are also just lousy at expressing their thoughts in writing. When asked to render an opinion, those people will default to the response: “let’s have a call about this” instead. Invariably, that call ends up just being a brain dump of their disorganized thinking.
- quectophoton 4y ago
  I'm working with software developers like this. It might be coincidence, but they are the same ones that actively push for writing less documentation[1] and also the ones creating Jira tickets with only a title and absolutely no description. [1]: Documentation needed by teams in a different continent to be able to communicate and integrate with our service, I must add.
  - charlie0 4y ago
    As someone with disorganized thinking, I'll counter with this. Documentation and clearer writing is the antidote. If the people around you can't do either, it's time to switch teams.
shortstuffsushi 4y ago
It's funny to me, the length and level of detail defending meetings feels like the sort of meeting content people long to avoid. Paragraph after paragraph, major bullet after major bullet, all to say "there is value in meetings that you would otherwise miss." I can agree with some meetings being of value, but to your point, I think a lot are fluff, like the majority of this article.
- MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
  This feels like a good point, but then again I skimmed after the first few paragraphs of the article. Does that say something about me, or is it really just bullshit? (no offense to the author)
  - shortstuffsushi 4y ago
    I will admit to the same, and perhaps I've missed some buried gem as a consequence, but I think that also speaks to the value of not deeply burying the lede.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
  I imagine someone who actually doesn’t have anything productive to do. If it were me, I’d be worried about someone finding out and deciding my position doesn’t need to exist. I would find a new job. Perhaps someone else would try to make their current one matter. Further still, many (most, probably) who try the latter will do things that range from unproductive to counterproductive.
deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
Worse than that, the people tasked with execution are constantly being pulled into hangout time. To many of us, this feels incredibly insensitive, because nobody ever got burned out because their job included too much brainstorming (or bullshitting). In my experience, meetings burn people out because they can see how un-stressed and un-busy their coworkers are, while they all sit in a room and come up with more ways to pile it on. If you’ve been the one person in a room of 10 people deciding what to do with you next, you know how insane this feels.
- anon7725 4y ago
  "pigs and chickens": A pig and a chicken are about to open a restaurant called "Ham and Eggs". The chickens are involved, but the pigs are committed. When involvement in the meeting and commitment to the execution of the meeting's outcome are inversely related, stress ensues.
- bawolff 4y ago
  Idk, meetings can be stresful sometimes. 99% waste of time combined with 1% being put on the spot where if you accidentally say something stupid could have significant consequences (e.g. maybe you just agreed to a bunch of extra work. Maybe you just accidentally undermined someone, etc). Of course depends on corporate culture.
  - whiplash451 4y ago
    Totally agree. Meetings have a massive mental cost for that reason. Evidence is how draining a set of back-to-back meetings is. Much more exhausting than the same amount of time spent in « deep work ».
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
> it's s because many people feel like sitting in a room BS'ing about what work needs to be done, is something they can get paid for without having to do anything actually productive. There it is. Literally the exact thing the article is talking about: "The tech industry suffers from a deep association of work with individual productive toil, and that just isn’t what knowledge work is." ... "And finally please. Pvlease. PLEASE stop saying that meetings aren’t work. That’s toxic productivity culture speaking. That’s the dominant power structure trying to preserve a split between thinkers and doers. It’s a perspective that rejects the dignity of knowledge work and of your colleagues as knowers" It's kinda fascinating seeing the (current) top comment in this thread demonstrate perfectly the very trope this article is addressing. That's not to say all meetings are useful and productive, but that, too, is what this article is about: that meetings should be treated as dignified work in and of themselves, and treated with appropriate gravity and respect so they can be as useful as possible, because it's in those meetings where, done well, learning and group knowledge creation occurs. But if we all run around assuming meetings are inherently not "productive", then who should be surprised if they live down to our expectations?
- deathanatos 4y ago
  > meetings should be treated as dignified work in and of themselves, and treated with appropriate gravity and respect so they can be as useful as possible This is completely backwards. If meeting want to be treated as dignified work, and have "gravity and respect", then they need to act that way. You're not going to get dignity and respect from the "ICs" all the while bullshitting during the meeting. > it's in those meetings where, done well, learning and group knowledge creation occurs. It really isn't. Not in the meetings that people complain about when they complain about meetings. I've sat through any number of meetings, watching the bullshit roll by: I'm forced to pick my battles here: I'd be far too squeaky of a wheel if I attempted to correct the whole lot, and managers hate being upstaged. Even where I must (because bad understanding of the problem at hand is cascading towards a bad solution, and JIRA tasks that make 0 sense to anyone who'd have to complete them) — even where I must, often I get talked over, or flat out ignored, even in the most bizarre of ways: I'll get an acknowledgement of "oh, the detail you've pointed out is correct" but … then management will want to go right back to making the same bad decision spawned from the original — and allegedly acknowledged as — incorrect information. No knowledge creation or learning is occurring, here. None of my meetings have agendas. Slides are not shared, even getting slides shared after the fact is like pulling teeth. Heck, sometimes the invite is sent with mere minutes of notice. I have far better luck moving the needle with what I've taken to calling "working sessions": often pairing with a singular other person, and walking them directly through tasks towards a goal that we want to accomplish, often with screens shared. But these are not the sorts of things that people rail against, IMO.

32MHz 4y ago

It’s easy to confuse productivity with performance. But they are not the same thing. Have you ever had a full day of meetings and you say to yourself “wow, I was so productive today”. But really what work was performed? If you’re an IC probably very little.

wincy 4y ago

I’m right at the cusp where I was a very strong individual contributor at my previous jobs, and have now been a team lead for about six months now. At first, I felt like I was wasting time spending a good portion of my day in meetings, but I’ve realized that the meetings are super important because I know what the business actually wants and can translate that into the technical documentation necessary to get our software engineers where they’re working efficiently. This way, the engineers on my team don’t have to ask a bunch of questions to the PO/team lead for clarification like they did before. It’s a huge win and our team has been lauded as becoming substantially more productive because of this design work, refining and grooming our tickets properly before the devs ever see them. From an individual contribution perspective I’ve written a few hundred lines of code since I started, unless you count me out putting code via some CLI tricks involving some templates (I don’t really, and am trying to teach the other engineers about powershell/bash use cases) but when I do step in it’s either because of some design pattern we want to nail to avoid future tech debt, or I’m fixing a bug that a junior or mid level dev has spent a dozen hours on and couldn’t figure out what went wrong. So the 20% or so of my time I’m actually spending doing IC work is to unblock the team, so it feels really high impact relative to the time I spend on it. So in short, my role has the added benefit of far fewer meetings for the other developers on the team, while also keeping someone technical in the loop to push back on unrealistic expectations from the business, getting to ask clarifying questions, and working closely with our POs to have everything teed up so the team can just show up to work and get down to the “important stuff”. I think it’s an important role with intangible benefits people can’t really see until they get a before/after comparison where everything else was largely the same.

teeray 4y ago

Some people are also just lousy at expressing their thoughts in writing. When asked to render an opinion, those people will default to the response: “let’s have a call about this” instead. Invariably, that call ends up just being a brain dump of their disorganized thinking.

quectophoton 4y ago
I'm working with software developers like this. It might be coincidence, but they are the same ones that actively push for writing less documentation[1] and also the ones creating Jira tickets with only a title and absolutely no description. [1]: Documentation needed by teams in a different continent to be able to communicate and integrate with our service, I must add.
- charlie0 4y ago
  As someone with disorganized thinking, I'll counter with this. Documentation and clearer writing is the antidote. If the people around you can't do either, it's time to switch teams.

shortstuffsushi 4y ago

It's funny to me, the length and level of detail defending meetings feels like the sort of meeting content people long to avoid. Paragraph after paragraph, major bullet after major bullet, all to say "there is value in meetings that you would otherwise miss." I can agree with some meetings being of value, but to your point, I think a lot are fluff, like the majority of this article.

MathMonkeyMan 4y ago
This feels like a good point, but then again I skimmed after the first few paragraphs of the article. Does that say something about me, or is it really just bullshit? (no offense to the author)
- shortstuffsushi 4y ago
  I will admit to the same, and perhaps I've missed some buried gem as a consequence, but I think that also speaks to the value of not deeply burying the lede.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
I imagine someone who actually doesn’t have anything productive to do. If it were me, I’d be worried about someone finding out and deciding my position doesn’t need to exist. I would find a new job. Perhaps someone else would try to make their current one matter. Further still, many (most, probably) who try the latter will do things that range from unproductive to counterproductive.

deepsquirrelnet 4y ago

Worse than that, the people tasked with execution are constantly being pulled into hangout time. To many of us, this feels incredibly insensitive, because nobody ever got burned out because their job included too much brainstorming (or bullshitting). In my experience, meetings burn people out because they can see how un-stressed and un-busy their coworkers are, while they all sit in a room and come up with more ways to pile it on. If you’ve been the one person in a room of 10 people deciding what to do with you next, you know how insane this feels.

anon7725 4y ago
"pigs and chickens": A pig and a chicken are about to open a restaurant called "Ham and Eggs". The chickens are involved, but the pigs are committed. When involvement in the meeting and commitment to the execution of the meeting's outcome are inversely related, stress ensues.
bawolff 4y ago
Idk, meetings can be stresful sometimes. 99% waste of time combined with 1% being put on the spot where if you accidentally say something stupid could have significant consequences (e.g. maybe you just agreed to a bunch of extra work. Maybe you just accidentally undermined someone, etc). Of course depends on corporate culture.
- whiplash451 4y ago
  Totally agree. Meetings have a massive mental cost for that reason. Evidence is how draining a set of back-to-back meetings is. Much more exhausting than the same amount of time spent in « deep work ».

BaseballPhysics 4y ago

> it's s because many people feel like sitting in a room BS'ing about what work needs to be done, is something they can get paid for without having to do anything actually productive. There it is. Literally the exact thing the article is talking about: "The tech industry suffers from a deep association of work with individual productive toil, and that just isn’t what knowledge work is." ... "And finally please. Pvlease. PLEASE stop saying that meetings aren’t work. That’s toxic productivity culture speaking. That’s the dominant power structure trying to preserve a split between thinkers and doers. It’s a perspective that rejects the dignity of knowledge work and of your colleagues as knowers" It's kinda fascinating seeing the (current) top comment in this thread demonstrate perfectly the very trope this article is addressing. That's not to say all meetings are useful and productive, but that, too, is what this article is about: that meetings should be treated as dignified work in and of themselves, and treated with appropriate gravity and respect so they can be as useful as possible, because it's in those meetings where, done well, learning and group knowledge creation occurs. But if we all run around assuming meetings are inherently not "productive", then who should be surprised if they live down to our expectations?

deathanatos 4y ago
> meetings should be treated as dignified work in and of themselves, and treated with appropriate gravity and respect so they can be as useful as possible This is completely backwards. If meeting want to be treated as dignified work, and have "gravity and respect", then they need to act that way. You're not going to get dignity and respect from the "ICs" all the while bullshitting during the meeting. > it's in those meetings where, done well, learning and group knowledge creation occurs. It really isn't. Not in the meetings that people complain about when they complain about meetings. I've sat through any number of meetings, watching the bullshit roll by: I'm forced to pick my battles here: I'd be far too squeaky of a wheel if I attempted to correct the whole lot, and managers hate being upstaged. Even where I must (because bad understanding of the problem at hand is cascading towards a bad solution, and JIRA tasks that make 0 sense to anyone who'd have to complete them) — even where I must, often I get talked over, or flat out ignored, even in the most bizarre of ways: I'll get an acknowledgement of "oh, the detail you've pointed out is correct" but … then management will want to go right back to making the same bad decision spawned from the original — and allegedly acknowledged as — incorrect information. No knowledge creation or learning is occurring, here. None of my meetings have agendas. Slides are not shared, even getting slides shared after the fact is like pulling teeth. Heck, sometimes the invite is sent with mere minutes of notice. I have far better luck moving the needle with what I've taken to calling "working sessions": often pairing with a singular other person, and walking them directly through tasks towards a goal that we want to accomplish, often with screens shared. But these are not the sorts of things that people rail against, IMO.