Oh does this ever strike a nerve, especially as I’ve been working hard on a new project these past few months with tight deadlines and lots of visibility. Does

Oh does this ever strike a nerve, especially as I’ve been working hard on a new project these past few months with tight deadlines and lots of visibility. Does this mean that us engineers are spending time with our heads down actually writing code and getting us to the finish line? Of course not! It means we’re spending day after day sitting in meetings talking about the stuff we want to get done as the precious time that could be spent actually doing things just slips away. It’s especially acute for me as a principal engineer since I am involved in the breadth of the project so I need to be in these discussions. I like to joke with my boss and program managers that when they are in meetings, they are getting work done but when I’m in meetings, I’m not getting work done. Jokes aside I do agree with the general premise that meetings can be valuable and that sometimes getting everybody together in a room (or on a call) helps a lot more than everybody in a silo for a week and not getting the right things finished. The problem is that by and large people just don’t know how to run meetings effectively. Case in point is that where I work we have a rule about starting meetings 5 minutes after the hour to give people time between meetings to use the restroom, get coffee, or whatever. It’s a nice thought in theory but in practice it just means meetings now all run 5 or 10 minutes late because everybody is determined to fill that buffer. I often asked why instead of starting meetings 5 or 10 minutes later we couldn’t just end them 5 or 10 minutes earlier and never got a good answer. But that’s just a symptom of a deeply rooted problem with meeting culture. All too often I’m booked into meetings with no agenda or no real explanation about why it’s worth my time. Meetings that could be scheduled for 30 or 15 minutes get an hour slot. Meetings with an agenda go off the rails and nobody speaks up to put a stop to it. Stand-up meetings turn into design meetings. Too many people, or the wrong people get invited to meetings which causes derails or wastes others time. My “favorite” are “pre-meetings” to talk about upcoming meetings. It becomes self-parody sometimes. People’s calendars get so packed with meetings that the only way to get time with certain people is to attend unstructured “office hours” style meetings. You have people who absolutely refuse to engage in discussions over email or IM so it ends up requiring a 30 or 60 meeting for something that could be solved in 5 minutes over a chat. It’s just ridiculous. So I’d argue it’s not that meetings don’t have value and aren’t “work”, it’s that people don’t know how to run them effectively and they just waste a bunch of people’s time. Whenever I schedule a meeting I always try to schedule for the least amount of time necessary, describe what it is and why I need people there in the invite, and have an agenda that I mercilessly try to stick to. I really try to be respectful of others time. It’s not really hard but it seems like these simple things are so hard to do.