In my last role I ended up in a fantastic place where the teams under me could operate fairly autonomously and were happy. My only recurring meetings were:
- 1-1s fortnightly and only with senior members
- My 1-1 with my boss, again fortnightly
- Senior leadership team, once a week
I kept 1-1s to 30mins unless someone had an important issue, in which case I was completely flexible.
Most of my time went on planning/strategy, customer research, and acting as an ad-hoc coach for the teams beneath me.
The key things I found were:
- many meetings can be replaced by an update email
- decisions often work better through docs + feedback than big meetings
- you don't need frequent contact with the team if the goals and constraints are communicated very clearly
I realise none of this is groundbreaking. But it seems quite rare, and also hard to achieve in practice.
Project Manager checking in here. I'm one of the originators of all these meetings. Whenever someone complains that this meeting could be replaced by an E-mail, my response is: "But, do you actually read your E-mail?" If they are honest, the answer is often "NO". I'd love to reduce our meeting load at work, but Person A needs a decision from Person B and Person C would like updates from Team X, and none of these people use their goddamn E-mail! So, sadly, it's off to another meeting room...
Highlights from the feed(s); GitLab has the better activity view IMHO but I haven't tried the new GitHub Issues beta yet.
3 questions from 5 minute Stand-Up Meetings (because everyone's actually standing there trying to leave) for Digital Stand Up Meetings: Since, Before, Obstacles:
## 2021-09-28
### @teammembername
#### Since
#### Before
#### Obstacles
You can do cool video backgrounds for any video conferencing app with pipewire.
You can ask team members to prep a .txt with their 3 questions and drop it in the chat such that the team can reply to individual #fragments of your brief status report / continued employment justification argument
> - decisions often work better through docs + feedback than big meetings
SO, ah, asynchronous communication doesn't require transcripting for the "Leader Assistant" that does the Mando quarterly minutes from the team chat logs, at least
6 Patterns of Collaboration: GRCOEB: Generate, Reduce, Clarify, Organize, Evaluate, Build Consensus [Six Patterns]; voting on specific Issues, and ideally Chat - [x] lineitems, and https://schema.org/SocialMediaPosting with emoji reactions
[Six Patterns]: http://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/team-building#six-pat... , Text Templates, Collaboration Checklist: Weighted Criteria, Ranked-choice Voting.
Docs and posts with URLs and in-text pull-quotes do better than another list of citations at the end.
> - you don't need frequent contact with the team if the goals and constraints are communicated very clearly
Metrics: OKRs, KPIs, #GlobalGoals Goals Targets and Indicators
Tools / Methods; Data / Information / Knowledge / Experience / Wisdom:
- Issues: Title, - [ ] Description, Labels, Assignee, - [ ] Comments, Emoji Reactions;
- Pull Requests, - [ ] [Optional] [Formal] Reviews, Labels & "Codelabels", label:SkipPreflight, CI Build Logs, and Signed Deployed Documented Applications; code talks, the tests win again, docs sell
- Find and Choose - with Consensus - a sufficiently mature Component that already testably does: unified Email notifications (with inbound replies,) and notifications on each and every Chat API and the web standard thing finally, thanks: W3C Web Notifications.
- Contribute Tests for [open source] Components.
- [ ] Create a workflow document with URLs and Text Templates
- [ ] Create a daily running document with my 3 questions and headings and indented markdown checkbox lists; possibly also with todotxt/todo.txt / TaskWarrior & BugWarrior -style lineitem markup.
What does an engineering manager do all day?
A polite answer would be, continuously reevaluate the tests of the product and probably also the business model if anyone knew what they were up to in there
I get that it’s fun to bash excessive meetings, but trying to hash out a complex topic by lobbing Slack message grenades back and forth over the wall is often the worst idea.
But, typing can be a bottleneck for people I suppose, both in speed and pain as you say. I wonder if there’s a WPM inflection point for chat vs call preference.
This way there are no ambiguities and no one can evade responsibility. This avoids a he-said vs she-said situation as well.
A meeting has value beyond just the words themselves, which is where writing meets its limit.
This itself is a victory. This means the subject needs more discussion or is too complex for a 5 minute meeting.
I prefer to spend 2 hours to make a subject clear to all parties rather than developing under a false interpretation and having to fix the issue through a grueling 5 day back and forth.
I think writing before and after the meeting is both desirable. Before to specify the object of the meeting and to limit its scope, afterwards to conclude and archive the decisions made.
For general coordination, a written medium is better, especially since one can take the time to be precise, and the content is searchable later as you say.
I find that invasive too. For me, this often turns a 5 minute interaction that fits in the middle of a task into a 30 minute interaction with the same outcome, but with a huge interruption of my workflow, which may mean that I lost an hour or more.
However, pre-slack there used to be a certain type that would never read e-mail, but instead would call 5 seconds after the e-mail and want to be walked through the e-mail rather than read it themselves. Also had one time about 15 years ago where someone literally tried to break through a secure door to ask about an e-mail I had sent 3 minutes ago. I was on VPN @ home, and they got pissed off thinking I was just ignoring the call to my desk.
It's not a personal failing, though. The modern world necessitates bullshit and inevitably people will fall into those roles out of either advancement or utility.
In noticing that percentage of meetings is a measure of bullshit, we have to be honest and question how roles that require fewer meetings, such as engineering roles, can be bullshit. I don't think such people think about this enough because the bullshit is masked by more measurable levels of "productivity".
To be honest, at least 80% of the work that I've done as a software engineer did nothing to improve the product or improve the world. Most of it is caused by a lack of inertia-control which creates "technical debt" (aka shitty code) that makes even the simplest of changes into huge undertakings. But there's not enough time to make anything right because we need to get this other thing done by this deadline. In other cases where that isn't a problem, what I'm being asked to do may not be particularly valuable to the user/customer.
As a web developer, the problem is further exacerbated by the perceived need for tools that weren't needed for nearly the same job not so long ago. We've turned JavaScript into Java because the field believes that every webpage should be capable of everything Google accomplishes with their products. We can't see the forest for the trees; the vast majority of internet users don't care about page reloads. In fact, I would be much happier if my bank website, for example, ditched all of the JavaScript and assets that slow down the page and went with simple HTML forms. All of these doo-dads, if you will, are just extra bullshit that costs the world millions, perhaps billions, and for what?
Management, in my eyes, isn't in so much of a different position than anyone else. Meetings are their form of spending time fiddling with build toolchains and debuggers.
meetings are so much fun that of course people go to them all day long in an effort to slack off.
But what happens once developers gets the power? Just look at architects, scheduling meetings where he talks about the latest tech blogs he read. Or managers, scheduling meetings where they talk about the latest linkedin blog he read. Or even CEO who schedules a company all-hands where he talks about the latest team-building blog he read on HBR. In those cases meetings aren't work, it is you forcing people you have power over to listen to your hobbies and thoughts. Of course the participants wont like it.
Why not? There may be a toxic management culture in some places, but in a well functioning organisation the manager wants people to challenge things.
I hate those meetings.
I used to sip coffee and daydream during most meetings when I was a junior dev.
I mean (meeting duration + interruption duration) * hourly wage of everyone involved.
Even a so-called five minutes stand-up easily cost more than a coffee machine.
Do CEOs have a bullshit job?
If you have meetings with seniors to make strategic decisions this is real work.
If you are recruiting people, again this is real work.
I do think that CEOs have very few incentives to waste time, contrary to middle-management.
So if your work is 90% meetings I am sorry but you have a bullshit job, nothing more, nothing less.