I'm a software developer, and I hate meetings. All software developers hate meetings. Stop scheduling them, and stop inviting us to them.
Dons giant headphones and swivels back around to the soft glow of multiple monitors.
But that's not quite true, is it? Humans build things by collaborating and working together. Breakthroughs and progress are a group effort, and it takes all kinds of meetings for that to work.
My favorite theatrical example of this is from the movie Apollo 13, where the engineers on the ground in Houston have to figure out a way to make a square cartridge compatible with a round one in order for the astronauts in space to survive.
Now that’s a meeting.
Realistically of course, more mundane meetings are needed. Work needs to be estimated and prioritized, designs need to be hammered out, and retrospectives are necessary for finding avenues for team improvement. (You are doing retros, right?)
Since teams need to work together and therefore have meetings, the things to solve for are necessity and scheduling.
Because it’s not really meetings that everyone hates; it’s having their time wasted. And wasting someone’s time on this earth is a disrespectful and selfish thing to do.
Necessity
I have a not-so-fond memory of working at a bigger company where the meeting rooms were at a premium. Because of this, the PM felt we needed to stay in the room for the entire time we booked it whenever we had a team meeting, even if we flew through the agenda.
“Well we have the room, so what else do we need to go over?” Um, nothing. Meeting over. Let’s go work on building stuff.
There are loads of strategies for determining whether a meeting is necessary or not, and every team is different. (Let me Google the flowcharts for you.) The important thing is to set some threshold for meeting necessity, share it with your team, and refine it as needed. That way, when the meeting invite pops up in the developer’s inbox, they can assume that their time is not going to be wasted. It turns out that people are a LOT more helpful and engaged when they know that you respect their time.
Most of all, if you hit the goals for the meeting, end it.
Scheduling
If you have software developers on your team, the worst thing you can do is plop a meeting into the middle of the morning or the afternoon. “Getting into the zone” is indeed a thing for me and most developers I’ve come across, and a meeting at 10 or 11am interrupts that flow in a big way. Same with a 3pm meeting.
I recommend setting necessary meetings up at the beginning of the day or the end of the day, depending on the make-up of your team. Got a bunch of “morning people”? Then hold the conceptual or creative meetings at the beginning of the day, and do the logistical stuff at the end.
Either way, find ways to leave your developers alone for long, uninterrupted stretches in between collaborative meetings. That is when real work gets done.
TL;DR
Human progress comes from collaboration. People don’t hate meetings necessarily, they just hate having their time wasted. Set team standards for meeting necessity and scheduling to mitigate the anti-meeting sentiment.
Top comments (5)
also, if your team is big enough, not everyone is really required for the meeting. if you don't need someone's opinion to make a decision, they probably don't have to be there. if someone's not affected by the results of the meeting at all they definitely don't have to be there. and don't get me started on scrum meetings in big teams, you'll never be the same after a few months of daily standups with 20+ people
Couldn't agree more. I brought up distractions multiple times in our retrospectives. Though improving, there are still team members who can't keep their hands from tapping developers' shoulders every now and then. It's forgivable if it's about serious issues, but not if it's an inquiry about data that is already available on email or slack. All the more if it's non work related chit chats.
I'm starting to think that the size of the team is a factor here. Since we are a small team, information is expected to circulate faster. Process flows are by-passed. Sitting side-by-side in a room tempts people to jump through the process and ask anyone within reach. I don't know. Human nature, maybe? I'm wondering if a team can really pull off such streamline communication.
I had a weird love/hate thing with meetings. I enjoyed meetings a lot because I could learn about other departments and work through things but I loathed meetings where I wasn't needed or was needed for 5 minutes. I was the guy who got up and walked out.
8 out of 10 meetings are an absolute waste of time.
Easier said than done, I would just reject any meeting that doesn't have a clear agenda with the items to be discussed and what we need to prepare beforehand.
Unfortunately I keep having last minute meetings that just pop out of nowhere. You can easily measure the health of a project by counting the number of unexpected meetings you have.
There are many ways to communicate and having a meeting is only one way. I would say that meeting is needed when you need to make a decision. Otherwise meetings can be used for a scrum like events where you share information very shortly. Seeing f2f is more efficient than writing in chat still. Longer discussions are usually waste of time.