If I'm in a meeting that seemed reasonable for me to attend, but I'm not adding/receiving value, or the meeting is straying from the agenda topics, I'll ask what input is needed from me or leave a message in the chat that I'm dropping and to ping me when needed.
I also decline meeting requests outside of my working hours (unless it's with someone too many time zones away for our workdays to overlap). My favorite was when someone set up a meeting with me on Friday after I went home for the weekend and when I didn't attend, they added me to a meeting on Monday morning before my work day started. They were angry at me for not attending either meeting. Of course, I never even saw the invites.
I think most people get is, but the point it, we have to set these boundaries for ourselves, and I'm sure it's not just engineers who want to avoid meeting hell.
You're one of the good ones.
The retort to "This meeting could have been an E-mail" is "But, do you respond to your E-mail?" Sometimes we really do need an answer/decision/action, and not everyone has good E-mail hygiene. I have worked with a non-trivial number of people who don't read their E-mail and/or don't respond to it. And when you don't respond, I have no idea whether you even read it, so I have to assume you didn't. When I need someone to do/say something, I will reach for E-mail as a first try, but if you don't respond, I have to put on my Disappointed Face and schedule a meeting :(
This is so true at my workplace, thinking back. The folks with unreplied emails cluttering their inboxes are exactly who get pulled into meetings. It's basically an emergency handholding step to get them to actually do some work. The folks who clearly reach inbox zero once or twice a day, I honestly barely remember their faces because folks don't dare waste their time with meetings.
Also if there are the occasional emails that actually do need an answer/decision/action Right This Second or whatever and people aren't, then the expectation that people reply isn't being sufficiently set and carried out. Add that to the cornucopia of BS that is management mismanagement.
That said the high bandwidth meeting often accomplishes in 30 minutes what would take 10 email turns to clarify.
I honestly hate meetings with a vague agenda and then when you get there, you have ~5 minutes to make up a plan to conquer Europe during German occupation, or else (in a threatening tone). I am starting to just abort and leave that kind of meetings.
Please tell me what you need, and then I can see if this is a simple e-mail / knowledge base issue I can link you to. Or I see this is a bigger thing, but then I can prepare options, ideas and workarounds how to approach your problem. And then we can send it around to all required people and then we can have an interesting discussion about our points in a meeting after everyone has had a bit of time to think and brainstorm.
My preferred approach is not to modify the meetings to make them more efficient, but to go on an extremist crusade against all meetings. Insist on asynchronous communication. Create dashboards with whatever metrics are discussed at status update meetings. Have people write memos explaining new proposals. Some meetings will survive the crusade, and that’s ok. All meetings aren’t actually bad, but that should be the default.
No there aren't. If you are consistently getting push backs on meetings within your org it's not that the teams or IC's believe that meetings are useless (what a silly thing to say) it's a sign that they don't have faith in the organization structure to concretely do anything with the information or provide valuable input.
If you try to setup a meeting and get push back you should _immediately_ ask yourself why the other person feels that way about the people involved or even yourself.
No more than those that believe every last one is 100% useful.
Not disagreeing, but you've also got to be mindful of scenarios where there is something which needs to be hashed out and neither party fully owns the thing.
If you don't nip it in the bud by getting those people together on a call or in the room together, you can end up with a lot of unnecessary back and forth.
Getting people in the room together is particularly effective for such cases.
I’ve seen some people who will fill the week up with Groundhog’s Day-style repeat meetings, and even the basic expectation that they have an agenda, goals, and need to summarize what was decided afterwards increases the cost to them personally enough to make better use of everyone’s time.
I see it like this: people are going back and forth over email and waffling then it's probably not that important, why should it be any different in person aside from the fact they're performing for management.
I suspect the population for whom this holds isn’t much smaller than the famously-a-majority “bad at math” set, and the difference in visibility of the issue is because the “bad at literacy” folks don’t volunteer their status as readily as the bad-at-math folks.
A good leader then talks to the team as the professional adults they are to understand why there isn't communication at the cadence that was agreed upon and discusses why such communication is important.
If they (managers) want to lord over the process and do work for work's sake, then they should write out requirements that say "thou shalt commit one line of code by X date". It just comes down to the individuals doing the 'management' being lazy if they're in this position expecting their 'reports' to drop everything and context switch to a meeting when they can't be arsed to do the managing.
Meetings are work. Not practical work, but management work, which is very valuable to coordinate and unify efforts.
I agree, though, that there are people who like meetings for meetings's sake, and those waste eveyone's time. In my experience, they're usually executives with little practical background. They use meetings primarily for politics/socialization, and have the power to summon as many meetings as they wish.
If I need a series of five if-then questions to put together a proposal, and each round trip takes half a day, then we have both already wasted a half hour over what would have taken ten minutes to resolve.
As an engineer it's important to feel comfortable occasionally declining BS meetings: it reflects more poorly on the person who can't get people to come to their meetings than on you. (Even though people might appear mad at you.)
It's also critical to decline project kick-off meetings unless you've been explicitly informed about the project by your manager. Sometimes people play power games or bypass roadmaps. Other times your manager forgets to tell you you're on a project. Either way, it again makes the meeting organizer look bad if you aren't there.
My solution was to not accept meetings and have a PM go grab me if they really needed me, that was enough friction to allow me time to get work done. As in your case, this created a bunch of mystique as I was now that guy that showed up in the middle of a meeting, said a bunch of smart things (hopefully!) and then left.
One of the difference about the new Zoom-centric world is that it's zero effort to add an somebody to a meeting "just in case". I push my leads to decline meetings where there is no clear agenda and/or clear idea of the value they can provide. It's ok that your default isn't to hit "accept", it's the meeting organizer's job to convince you that it's worth attending over other priorities.
The people that do this are the same people that send the same request to several different people in hopes that one of them will do it, resulting in duplicate effort.
I'm double- or triple-booked for most hours of the day. I casually decline meetings all the time and don't sweat it even in the slightest. I don't recall the last time someone asked me, "Hey, you were supposed to show your face at Meeting X, why weren't you there???" This happens in crappy companies.
I didn't cancel, I declined meetings. There is a very important difference.
> i'll add that there you can avoid making people mad at you by communicating why
I usually gave a reason, but when there was a large invite list, or no notice, I did not.
The one time I "got into trouble" was when I gave a reason: "I am declining this meeting because there is no agenda." My manager told me to just have him intervene instead of declining the meeting.
The common disdain to meetings is that in many meetings no one has a tangible impact while an engineer can create tangible value in their “regular” stated mission. If reading this makes you feel offended then don’t worry, it’s surely not your meetings… only those organized by functionaries whose sole contribution is organizing open ended meetings with no impact.
Start by sharing an agenda. List the very few things you need to discuss and decide up front. Provide review materials for those who actually prep. During the meeting, record notes on the conversation, record decisions made, and record action items, and publish these records.
If you're not prepared to do this, you aren't prepared to meet. You're just having a chat. That can be done ad-hoc. Call it a chat. Have it over Slack or one-on-one. More than one person requires an agenda, and should result, at a minimum, in a document that adds to the organization's knowledge (even if only of decisions or disagreements).
Powerful people are on a manager’s schedule.
Meetings are a unit of work for a manager, and they freely schedule meetings because there’s very little cost to them. The advantage of this schedule is you can have speculative meetings that potentially open up new opportunities.
This is very costly on a Maker’s schedule.
PG suggests partitioning the day to AM being maker’s schedule and PM being manager’s schedule. (A form of office hours).
This works if you have power and can swing this. But I’d be curious to hear what ICs do.
I personally just block off my calendar and decline meetings (with reasons given, always politely). I also entertain speculative meetings — I never want to shut myself off to new ideas. Most of my career has been built on serendipitous meetings by people who want to share a crazy idea.
Problem is its hard to convince managers that there was minimal work done this week because I did 3 hours of meetings each day but it was all spread out. its worse with non-technically sound managers because they need constant Q&A.
There was a time when I was working super late because of all the meetings and slack discussions in day time then to do actual coding work I had to find time later in night and my sleep schedule was getting messed up. this persisted until I introduced some hard boundaries. all in all I recommend blocking off time in schedule but thats not a scalable solution unless whole team agrees to it. plus dont get me started on different timezones working together.
Wants daily 20-30 minute stand-up/tag-up
Constantly bombards DMs since understanding is weak/research skills are poor
Pull engineers into fringe meetings "Just in case" (can't multi-task since full attention is needed to prevent any harm being done)
Good: Put a meeting on a calendar in the future in order to force all discussion and investigation to happen before that meeting and keep things moving.
Bad: Adding a "decision meeting" doesn't make a decision any easier or harder than before, and doesn't make the research and investigation take any less time than before, and often we don't know what we don't know, so beginning research leads to more research...
I think it is really useful for making decisions that people just don't care that much about and aren't that invested in, since it motivates a timeline for those decisions. Otherwise, it just creates an arbitrary deadline. Why are you working late on a Friday night? Oh, well, my manager created this deadline on Monday morning to make this decision.
The purpose of gathering people together is for handling the situations where you don't know a priori what is needed. For example someone suggests a course of action and someone who knows better can chime in and say "no, we're not doing that for reasons X, Y and Z" which both the person making the suggestion and the person organizing the meeting may have been completely unaware of. Or similarly someone might describe a problem they're having which others might have experience with handling. In the extreme you obviously have situations like brainstorming. Yes, these are interruptions that cut into peoples' productivity, but they're the price you pay for having a team that is more than the sum of its parts. If you're not willing to spend burn a lot of time with a meeting, it's probably not something you should be having a meeting on at all.
The problem is middle managers trying to use meetings to do all of their work for them. Stand up meetings stop being about making sure everyone has situational awareness and instead become a substitute for progress reports. Decision meetings stop being about making sure leaders have all the information they need and become a means for managers to offload responsibility for a decision (and often the blame for any negative consequences)_to the group. Instead of reviewing people's performance and giving useful feedback, managers rely on employees to self regulate based on perceived peer performance norms. Who needs a schedule with strategic goals when you have the action items from last week's minutes? Management is not supposed to be a cushy reward for employees who put in a lot of time and effort, it's a vital part of an efficient team which should have a lot of work to do, and that work should not be done in meetings.
* an agenda, so people know what is going to be discussed and the right people can be in the meeting, and how long it might take
* expected outcomes - e.g. Are we just discussing something, are we deciding something
If those two things aren't done, it's likely not to be an effective meeting.
* a moderator, a role that can be held by literally anyone. The goal of the moderator is to keep everyone to the agenda, manage time and handle Q&A.
Why is this industry filled with children? If you are sure you don't need to be in a meeting, decline. Why do these children need blog posts to be a bare minimum adult?
Disclaimer: I am relaying what i learned working years in Apple engineering (as above) and Motorola Labs (above) versus ridiculous Amazon etc.
This. I find it very difficult to get into a "flow state". Simple meetings such a a standup are highly interruptive for me, especially when time zones push "morning" meetings mid day.
The result, sadly, was: More meetings and more process!
The people responsible for all of the meetings kind of understood the problem, but they only had one tool in their toolbox: Meetings! So they started putting together meetings to discuss the issue Meetings to come up with solutions. Meetings to present new frameworks for meetings. Meetings to look at metrics for meeting time. Meetings to discuss the new system we were using to poll engineers about their feelings about meetings so we could quantify the progress we were making on meetings.
The underlying problem was one of incentives. These people were engaged in a battle of visibility, and their way to staying visible was to call more meetings and generate more activity. The more activity they generated, the more visible they were, and the more important executives thought they looked.
I think the suggestions in the article are great for companies with a mild case of meeting excess, but if a company is so deep in meeting hell that managers don't know how to accomplish anything without calling a lot of big meetings then there's a deeper incentives problem that needs to be addressed.
We just got through a ridiculous slog of PI planning meetings, for which the plans have already been wrecked. This was the one vital question that didn't appear in the retro, instead it was all sickly positive questions like "what went well? what can we do better? what was missing?" and at no point was the floor open to say "this was a big fucking waste of time".
A weekly status meeting (1 hr)
Three weekly status meeting update planning meetings (1 hr each)
Sprint planning every other week (2 hr)
Demo and retros every other week (2 hr)
Eight 1:1 weekly meetings (4 hrs)
That’s 12.5 hours per week so far without even counting any real project meeting where we solve anything. I’m generally around 16 hours a week in meetings and I’m not even a lead or anything. Just a standard coder at a small company.
And our velocity shows it. We’re slow at getting stuff done cause we just don’t have windows of time to focus. When meetings are only an hour apart, I rarely get to do anything productive between them. So two hour meetings can eat three hours+ of productivity.
This does not compute to me, do you have 8 managers? What's the content of these meetings?
Some weeks there might be more, some weeks I just have the team meeting. When there are more I try to get them to fall on the same days, so I still have some empty days left.
We tried using a daily standup but didn't find it productive, so we stopped.
That seems insane to me.
You know what's a bad meeting? Any Scrum meeting or status 'sync'. Meetings are invaluable. Get together frequently to talk about what you're actually trying to build with the stakeholders and you don't need process, you barely even need tickets.
But you have to be present, involved and responsive to jump on a quick call.
Instead engineers whine about context switching and how the business context of their work is irrelevant "just put it in a ticket". So now we have micromanagement up the wazoo with execrable Scrum type meetings.
I love meetings and feel a lot of anger to the type of engineer who thinks it's beneath them. Equally I detest all 'ceremonies', absolute time wasting dregs.
Then came the consultants selling books and then training. And then the Scrum Masters with their certificates. And somehow the whole thing morphed from self-managing teams into externally micromanaged teams.
Hint: the engineers were not consultants nor were they Scrum Masters because they already had plenty of work to do.
