3 ms·

Programmers: Skip the damned meetings! Also programmers: Who and why decided that we should be doing this thing this way?! Or: Why is the other team doing thi

• nine_k 3y ago
  The point is not in not having meetings, but in having useless and inconsequential meetings. It's much like requiring that any computation should either return a value or produce an effect. Without that, it's just waste.
  • klabb3 3y ago
    The problem is that some people, engineers included, think that way more people should be involved in decisions than necessary. One structural cause of that is the “nobody owns anything, everything is shared and employees are replaceable cogs” paradigm. Because then it’s suddenly a real problem that people do things a bit differently. You have to not only agree on what to do (the interface) but also the how (implementation). It would be the same problem in a band if you decided to rotate the instruments every time you jam.
  • chii 3y ago
    > but in having useless and inconsequential meetings. only know to be useless after having had the meeting, and the decisions or discussion were either moot, already known, or completely expected. So how do you know whether a meeting is required, before organizing and/or attending one?
    • mrweasel 3y ago
      A few tricks that can catch meeting that a more or less guaranteed to be useless (in IT): * Does it have less than 10 people attending? * It there an here an agenda? * Is there more technical people than managers? * Do you know why you've been asked to attend? If you can answer "No" to any of those questions, you're going to have a bad time. Now you can have meetings where you answer yes to all of the above, and it's still useless, but the chances are lower.
      • dalore 3y ago
        Don't you mean more than 10? A meeting with more than 10 people tends to waste more people's time than a meeting with less than 10.
      • mcv 3y ago
        I think only the first and last are really important. I've had very effective meetings where I was the only technical person and we didn't have a formal agenda. Often meetings with stakeholders where I wanted to know what I could do for them; what they needed. So I guess that's still an agenda, but more important is that I was in control and the meeting was small. Being a bystander in a big meeting, that is the worst. If it doesn't affect me and my input is not needed, why am I there?
      • ryanbrunner 3y ago
        One rubric I use is "is there one or more questions to be decided on in this meeting?" If no, it's a pointless meeting.
• j4yav 3y ago
  I enjoy working at companies where things get written down so you don't have to be at the meeting, unless you specifically want to participate in the real-time discussion.
• commandlinefan 3y ago
  managers: why is this taking so long? I'm scheduling a daily two hour meeting and inviting everybody so I can yell at you for taking so long!
  • swader999 3y ago
    And said managers refuse to attend the daily standup.