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I work in hardware so my feelings about meetings may be different. In my experience, meetings are important because they keeps all the stakeholders in sync. The

I work in hardware so my feelings about meetings may be different. In my experience, meetings are important because they keeps all the stakeholders in sync. The problem is that engineers like to work in silos and they do not communicate well with other engineers. Meetings allows stakeholders to communicate. It's not efficient but it's better than not communicating at all. Written reports would help, but writing a report does not guarantee that anybody will read it. I also think it's very telling that whenever a project is at risk for missing deadlines, upper management tries to correct the course by holding more meetings. The extra meetings take a toll on productivity, but they also keep everybody focused, on task, and most importantly, they allow management to quickly allocate resources and people to critical path items.

PenguinCoder 4y ago
The thing about this is its repetitive and useless, constantly draining of brain power. In my job, I respond to emailed/ticket incidents. I do the work to fix the problem. I note the work and fix in the ticket.y manager wants a weekly report on "what you accomplished this week". Then we have a weekly stand-up meeting with the whole team. And THEN I have 1on1 meetings to discuss what I'm working on. At this point, I've done the work, documented a fix, written about the problem and the fix in three different places, and then talked in two meetings about the problems and the fix. Why the shit do I have to relive this problem 5 times just to make a manager happy with "staying in sync". I spend more time TALKING about the problem than it took to fix usually. The only thing I should need to tell my manager is when I can't meet the deadline and WHY. Not explaining and repeating my work 5 times. It's beyond inefficient, it's not a matter of allocating resources, it's an asinine waste of time.
k0stas 4y ago
> The problem is that engineers like to work in silos and they do not communicate well with other engineers. This is organizational problem that should be solved so that meetings are avoided as much as possible. The main way I have seen this solved is by engineering teams having clear APIs between. I use the term API loosely. This may be a software API between software teams but it may be a document, hardware interface or other sort of interface. Without this sort of structure, communication requirements grow quadratically with each additional person, i.e., n*(n-1)/2 where n is the # of people.
jk20 4y ago
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PenguinCoder 4y ago

The thing about this is its repetitive and useless, constantly draining of brain power. In my job, I respond to emailed/ticket incidents. I do the work to fix the problem. I note the work and fix in the ticket.y manager wants a weekly report on "what you accomplished this week". Then we have a weekly stand-up meeting with the whole team. And THEN I have 1on1 meetings to discuss what I'm working on. At this point, I've done the work, documented a fix, written about the problem and the fix in three different places, and then talked in two meetings about the problems and the fix. Why the shit do I have to relive this problem 5 times just to make a manager happy with "staying in sync". I spend more time TALKING about the problem than it took to fix usually. The only thing I should need to tell my manager is when I can't meet the deadline and WHY. Not explaining and repeating my work 5 times. It's beyond inefficient, it's not a matter of allocating resources, it's an asinine waste of time.

k0stas 4y ago

> The problem is that engineers like to work in silos and they do not communicate well with other engineers. This is organizational problem that should be solved so that meetings are avoided as much as possible. The main way I have seen this solved is by engineering teams having clear APIs between. I use the term API loosely. This may be a software API between software teams but it may be a document, hardware interface or other sort of interface. Without this sort of structure, communication requirements grow quadratically with each additional person, i.e., n*(n-1)/2 where n is the # of people.

jk20 4y ago

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