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> I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills. That's not entirely it. Some people just won't say something unless put in a setting whe

> I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills. That's not entirely it. Some people just won't say something unless put in a setting where they are explicity asked for it. I've had meetings where I ask for a status, and someone says they are stuck on X, and they've been stuck on X for two days. And I'll ask why they didn't just ask for help. They weren't comfortable asking for help. They were only ok stating the problem when asked specifically for status. So it also creates that environment were some people are more likely to share.

kaashif 1y ago
It's usually possible for the person running a small project to ask everyone for status and know what everyone's going to say in the meeting before the meeting. Then the meeting is pointless. But not all projects allow for that.
- coliveira 1y ago
  Why do you think a larger meeting is a remedy for this? Quite the opposite, if you can't get a personal status from a large group, doing the meeting is completely pointless because it demonstrate lack of preparation.
  - kaashif 1y ago
    It's not. That's not what I meant or said. I said not all projects allow for getting status ahead of time. This is a nice way of saying that some people just won't tell you what they're up to async, you have to wring information out of them synchronously. They're just bad at communicating. On a well functioning team I can rely on people just reporting status themselves when something relevant happens and reaching out for help. But some people just don't do that, especially people from other teams, departments, etc.
    - coldtea 1y ago
      >This is a nice way of saying that some people just won't tell you what they're up to async, you have to wring information out of them synchronously. Like, you explicitly ask them in an IM and they don't tell you? Not telling you on their own, I can understand. If the former happens though, you have bigger problems, that asking on a real-life meeting wont solve.
      - smeej 1y ago
        Seriously. This sounds like, "I can't manage my direct report, so I need to waste the time of everybody else on the team just so the little punk realizes he can't hide forever." A team meeting should not be the go-to solution for "Bob is bad at communicating"!
        kaashif 1y ago
        It appears you didn't read my comment, here's the relevant part: > But some people just don't do that, especially people from other teams Hope this helps.
        smeej 1y ago
        Oh I read it. If you're the manager, YOUR job is to figure out how to get the information from the people who owe you a report, not weaponize my presence at a meeting to ferret out people you can't manage to reach. But honestly the condescending tone of this whole exchange tells me everything I need it to about why you struggle to get information out of people.
        kaashif 1y ago
        Okay, well, if you read my comment saying that sometimes meeting with people outside the team is useful, then you start writing about how I'm wasting the time of people _inside_ my team, then I must have miscommunicated something. You're reading things into what I'm saying that aren't there. My job is to defend my direct reports from having their time wasted and clear blockers for them. Sometimes, yeah, this means meeting with people to ferret them out. I'm not weaponizing anyone's presence at a meeting except mine.
- o1bf2k25n8g5 1y ago
  > It's usually possible for the person running a small project to ask everyone for status Perhaps, for efficiency, they could ask everyone simultaneously in parallel, or at least roughly around the same time? To maximize creativity and opportunity, perhaps we could then figure out some way to share each person's status update with every other person on the team?
  - kaashif 1y ago
    Are you intentionally describing having a Slack chat for a project and asking for status updates there? You still don't need a meeting for that if everyone actually does it.
dgb23 1y ago
But you can share your daily status asynchronously as well. This might not scale well to larger teams, but we simply write a short message in a dedicated channel each day. It contains a short status and a few bullet points to plan the next day. Slack makes this conventient because you can write a top level message and then use the reply feature to add more details.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago
  As you said, async doesn’t go well with scale, and async comms is OK if statuses are all you’re gonna write there. But in meetings you get to have back-and-forth, and while you can also have that in async, you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. Which they might not do altogether. Anyway, I’ve come to really dislike async comms. If something is being communicated to you over async, it’s something not important enough that you can ignore it, in many cases indefinitely. Meetings are still the best way to keep everyone in sync and it’s a structural strategy to keep everyone accountable for making progress at their jobs.
  - portaouflop 1y ago
    > you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. What? Instead you are punishing everyone to sit on a meeting, hearing two people discuss something that could have been a dm. I get that some people prefer meetings but to me every meeting with more than 3 people is a massive waste of time
    - scott_w 1y ago
      When you get to that point, those two people should take the discussion outside of the sync call. The purpose of a sync is to figure out whether your current work is on track and, if not, who and what is needed to fix that.
  - poincaredisk 1y ago
    >async doesn’t go well with scale, Sync is even worse at scale. I had the pleasure of attending standups in a 20-person team. It was a nightmare where I said two sentences and then wasted the next two hours of my life listening to things I either know or are unrelevant to me. >you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read Great, because skipping three pages of unimportant conversation is faster than skipping 30 minutes of banter between two extrovert UI developers as a backend specialist. >structural strategy to keep everyone accountable Sounds exactly like something mid level managers say to themselves. Structural synergy? Keeping people accountable? I just want to work, damnit.
throw__away7391 1y ago
I have employed a massive hack for the past two decades--whenever asked to do any random task or assist someone, and in particular where the asker is just lazy trying to get someone else to do their job, eagerly and pleasantly agree, but ask the requestor to write up a sentence or two describing said request and email it to you. It's such a small request that no one can't argue it, but so many people (lazy ones especially) are astonishingly bad at this and 90% of the time that request will never come. The next time you see the person, take the initiative and remind them about the email you never received and ask if they could send it. You've now turned the tables on the asker, they may even start to avoid you.
jajko 1y ago
You are talking about juniors mixed with severe introvert persona. Most juniors in dev are a variant of that. Its part of seniority to overcome these self-inflicted mental barriers (reverse doesn't obviously work - an extroverted dev can still be as green as spring lawn, even if loaded with yet-undeserved confidence). If you need to babysit bunch of juniors thats fine, but it should be clear from one's role in team/project that this needs to be a continuous effort (at least till they grok how to step up, but it takes years if at all for some).
falcor84 1y ago
I predict that in "20 minutes in the future" we'll see the industry moving to AI based scrum-assistants with a scheduled daily trigger, that will reach out to each dev to have a check-in conversation and then automatically synthesize the input from everyone and update the project manager (possibly AI-based itself) with insight about how things are progressing and recommendations.
- quxbar 1y ago
  https://www.dailybot.com/ https://www.dailybot.com/ I think we're re-inventing early 2010s development trends with extra steps.
  - dkdcio 1y ago
    this is literally something my team already does —- you don’t need AI but this does fit with my running theory that AI makes it easier for people to see stupid processes they should change
- jay_kyburz 1y ago
  The AI is watching your screen and check-ins, it doesn't need to ask you, it knows what you are working on. It will tell you how much time you spent working on tickets, and how long to spent working on the perfect reply for hacker news.
  - coldtea 1y ago
    By that point one would be wise to find another job, because an IT gig wont be any different than a glorified McJob (if it's not eliminated entirely)
    - falcor84 1y ago
      > By that point one would be wise to find another job Much easier said then done. Especially if this really goes towards technological unemployment.
- 1y ago
ljm 1y ago
I've worked with people who want you to put the effort into writing a document or proposal, or even just answering a question on Slack or on Linear, but will spend zero effort themselves actually reading what you give them. Instead they'll just wait until the next meeting and basically ask you to give a tl;dr or 'context'. I wasn't sure if it was a case of just having poor literacy or just some bullshit power play on their part. In the most egregious cases I started to get petty and just read my message aloud, verbatim, while they had it open on the screenshare. Not as if their time is automatically more valuable than mine.
fapjacks 1y ago
I think this is normal for most people, but I've found that one-on-one's are a way more effective tool for revealing these sorts of situations. A good manager, though, is very rare. Maybe there's some surface area here for AI, to identify landmines workers are stepping on. Who knows, maybe AI should just be the ones attending meetings.
const_cast 1y ago
> And I'll ask why they didn't just ask for help. They weren't comfortable asking for help. They were only ok stating the problem when asked specifically for status. This is a real thing but it should only be temporary. If your culture is good and amendable to this sort of thing, then the IC should learn fairly quickly that they need to ask for help. This behavior in ICs is, believe it or not, trained. I'm sure they've worked somewhere before or with a different manager in the past who would get annoyed at them asking for help. So they've tuned their behavior to that.

kaashif 1y ago

It's usually possible for the person running a small project to ask everyone for status and know what everyone's going to say in the meeting before the meeting. Then the meeting is pointless. But not all projects allow for that.

coliveira 1y ago
Why do you think a larger meeting is a remedy for this? Quite the opposite, if you can't get a personal status from a large group, doing the meeting is completely pointless because it demonstrate lack of preparation.
- kaashif 1y ago
  It's not. That's not what I meant or said. I said not all projects allow for getting status ahead of time. This is a nice way of saying that some people just won't tell you what they're up to async, you have to wring information out of them synchronously. They're just bad at communicating. On a well functioning team I can rely on people just reporting status themselves when something relevant happens and reaching out for help. But some people just don't do that, especially people from other teams, departments, etc.
  - coldtea 1y ago
    >This is a nice way of saying that some people just won't tell you what they're up to async, you have to wring information out of them synchronously. Like, you explicitly ask them in an IM and they don't tell you? Not telling you on their own, I can understand. If the former happens though, you have bigger problems, that asking on a real-life meeting wont solve.
    - smeej 1y ago
      Seriously. This sounds like, "I can't manage my direct report, so I need to waste the time of everybody else on the team just so the little punk realizes he can't hide forever." A team meeting should not be the go-to solution for "Bob is bad at communicating"!
      - kaashif 1y ago
        It appears you didn't read my comment, here's the relevant part: > But some people just don't do that, especially people from other teams Hope this helps.
        smeej 1y ago
        Oh I read it. If you're the manager, YOUR job is to figure out how to get the information from the people who owe you a report, not weaponize my presence at a meeting to ferret out people you can't manage to reach. But honestly the condescending tone of this whole exchange tells me everything I need it to about why you struggle to get information out of people.
        kaashif 1y ago
        Okay, well, if you read my comment saying that sometimes meeting with people outside the team is useful, then you start writing about how I'm wasting the time of people _inside_ my team, then I must have miscommunicated something. You're reading things into what I'm saying that aren't there. My job is to defend my direct reports from having their time wasted and clear blockers for them. Sometimes, yeah, this means meeting with people to ferret them out. I'm not weaponizing anyone's presence at a meeting except mine.
o1bf2k25n8g5 1y ago
> It's usually possible for the person running a small project to ask everyone for status Perhaps, for efficiency, they could ask everyone simultaneously in parallel, or at least roughly around the same time? To maximize creativity and opportunity, perhaps we could then figure out some way to share each person's status update with every other person on the team?
- kaashif 1y ago
  Are you intentionally describing having a Slack chat for a project and asking for status updates there? You still don't need a meeting for that if everyone actually does it.

dgb23 1y ago

But you can share your daily status asynchronously as well. This might not scale well to larger teams, but we simply write a short message in a dedicated channel each day. It contains a short status and a few bullet points to plan the next day. Slack makes this conventient because you can write a top level message and then use the reply feature to add more details.

rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y ago
As you said, async doesn’t go well with scale, and async comms is OK if statuses are all you’re gonna write there. But in meetings you get to have back-and-forth, and while you can also have that in async, you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. Which they might not do altogether. Anyway, I’ve come to really dislike async comms. If something is being communicated to you over async, it’s something not important enough that you can ignore it, in many cases indefinitely. Meetings are still the best way to keep everyone in sync and it’s a structural strategy to keep everyone accountable for making progress at their jobs.
- portaouflop 1y ago
  > you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. What? Instead you are punishing everyone to sit on a meeting, hearing two people discuss something that could have been a dm. I get that some people prefer meetings but to me every meeting with more than 3 people is a massive waste of time
  - scott_w 1y ago
    When you get to that point, those two people should take the discussion outside of the sync call. The purpose of a sync is to figure out whether your current work is on track and, if not, who and what is needed to fix that.
- poincaredisk 1y ago
  >async doesn’t go well with scale, Sync is even worse at scale. I had the pleasure of attending standups in a 20-person team. It was a nightmare where I said two sentences and then wasted the next two hours of my life listening to things I either know or are unrelevant to me. >you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read Great, because skipping three pages of unimportant conversation is faster than skipping 30 minutes of banter between two extrovert UI developers as a backend specialist. >structural strategy to keep everyone accountable Sounds exactly like something mid level managers say to themselves. Structural synergy? Keeping people accountable? I just want to work, damnit.

throw__away7391 1y ago

I have employed a massive hack for the past two decades--whenever asked to do any random task or assist someone, and in particular where the asker is just lazy trying to get someone else to do their job, eagerly and pleasantly agree, but ask the requestor to write up a sentence or two describing said request and email it to you. It's such a small request that no one can't argue it, but so many people (lazy ones especially) are astonishingly bad at this and 90% of the time that request will never come. The next time you see the person, take the initiative and remind them about the email you never received and ask if they could send it. You've now turned the tables on the asker, they may even start to avoid you.

jajko 1y ago

You are talking about juniors mixed with severe introvert persona. Most juniors in dev are a variant of that. Its part of seniority to overcome these self-inflicted mental barriers (reverse doesn't obviously work - an extroverted dev can still be as green as spring lawn, even if loaded with yet-undeserved confidence). If you need to babysit bunch of juniors thats fine, but it should be clear from one's role in team/project that this needs to be a continuous effort (at least till they grok how to step up, but it takes years if at all for some).

falcor84 1y ago

I predict that in "20 minutes in the future" we'll see the industry moving to AI based scrum-assistants with a scheduled daily trigger, that will reach out to each dev to have a check-in conversation and then automatically synthesize the input from everyone and update the project manager (possibly AI-based itself) with insight about how things are progressing and recommendations.

quxbar 1y ago
https://www.dailybot.com/ https://www.dailybot.com/ I think we're re-inventing early 2010s development trends with extra steps.
- dkdcio 1y ago
  this is literally something my team already does —- you don’t need AI but this does fit with my running theory that AI makes it easier for people to see stupid processes they should change
jay_kyburz 1y ago
The AI is watching your screen and check-ins, it doesn't need to ask you, it knows what you are working on. It will tell you how much time you spent working on tickets, and how long to spent working on the perfect reply for hacker news.
- coldtea 1y ago
  By that point one would be wise to find another job, because an IT gig wont be any different than a glorified McJob (if it's not eliminated entirely)
  - falcor84 1y ago
    > By that point one would be wise to find another job Much easier said then done. Especially if this really goes towards technological unemployment.
1y ago

ljm 1y ago

I've worked with people who want you to put the effort into writing a document or proposal, or even just answering a question on Slack or on Linear, but will spend zero effort themselves actually reading what you give them. Instead they'll just wait until the next meeting and basically ask you to give a tl;dr or 'context'. I wasn't sure if it was a case of just having poor literacy or just some bullshit power play on their part. In the most egregious cases I started to get petty and just read my message aloud, verbatim, while they had it open on the screenshare. Not as if their time is automatically more valuable than mine.

fapjacks 1y ago

I think this is normal for most people, but I've found that one-on-one's are a way more effective tool for revealing these sorts of situations. A good manager, though, is very rare. Maybe there's some surface area here for AI, to identify landmines workers are stepping on. Who knows, maybe AI should just be the ones attending meetings.

const_cast 1y ago

> And I'll ask why they didn't just ask for help. They weren't comfortable asking for help. They were only ok stating the problem when asked specifically for status. This is a real thing but it should only be temporary. If your culture is good and amendable to this sort of thing, then the IC should learn fairly quickly that they need to ask for help. This behavior in ICs is, believe it or not, trained. I'm sure they've worked somewhere before or with a different manager in the past who would get annoyed at them asking for help. So they've tuned their behavior to that.