Was this post written during a long, pointless meeting?
Of course not!
…Or was it? 👀
Let’s start with this: I’ve been in the industry for over ten years. I’ve met all kinds of developers - including the stereotypical introverts who would rather refactor legacy code than talk to another human being.
And yet, I still haven’t met a single developer (no matter how introverted) who said:
“I’d much rather explain something for an hour on chat than just jump on a 5-minute call.”
(For office folks: replace “call” with “walk up to someone’s desk.”)
So no - we don’t hate people or conversations. Quite the opposite!
A short, focused call is gold for any developer. 💎
What we hate is something entirely different.
Endless, soul-crushing meetings 😵💫
You know the kind:
*️⃣ It could’ve been an email.
*️⃣ The same topic gets re-hashed for the tenth time.
*️⃣ Half the attendees have no idea why they’re even there.
*️⃣ Someone inevitably shares their screen and talks for 30 minutes straight.
As a senior dev / tech lead, you can get completely trapped in meetings.
In my previous company, I caught myself avoiding complex tasks — not because they were hard, but because meetings would make them take twice as long as they would for a junior dev with no calls that day.
Meanwhile, some “meeting person” feels accomplished because they scheduled a call “with many important people.” 🎉
And I’m not innocent either. Once I scheduled a 12-person call… only for the other team’s tech lead to say:
“Well, we’ll see. We need to check.”
That was it. That was the whole value of the meeting.
At least I felt ashamed for wasting everyone’s time. 🙃
The Myth of Multitasking 🧠❌
Some people - usually non-technical - believe that lots of meetings are fine because:
“You can just do something else in the background.”
Yeah, no. That myth was scientifically debunked last century.
There is no “multitasking.” There is only context switching - and it drains brainpower like crazy.
So you either:
- Tune out completely and do your own work (in which case… why were you invited?)
- Try to listen, knowing at any moment someone may say: “Let’s hear what you think.”
Result: you can only do simple, low-effort tasks - or, if you have none, you may as well write a blog post. 😉✍️
Software Development ≠ “Just Typing Code” ⌨️🧩
People often don’t understand the nature of software development.
Real development requires deep focus. And when that focus lasts long enough, you enter the famous flow state - where:
✅ things finally make sense
✅ the problem is “loaded into RAM”
✅ progress becomes fast and satisfying
…until a calendar notification pops up:
“Let’s have a 45-minute call to discuss something we already discussed three times, just to document it properly in a spreadsheet.”
or:
“Let’s invite 20 people to brainstorm a feature we might implement in 2028.”
A dev with three 1-hour meetings does not have 5 fully productive hours left.
After a meeting, you’re mentally drained and you need time to reload the entire context of your work.
That’s not laziness. That’s simply how the brain works. 🧠⚙️
Super — oto lista badań i statystyk w formacie Markdown, które możesz łatwo wkleić jako „bonus research”.
🎯 Bonus Research
- Research shows that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds for a person to get back to their original task after a context switch. (Monitask)
- According to one source, context-switching can reduce productivity by 20% to 80%, depending on how many switches and their type. (trunk.io)
- It is estimated that context switching costs the global economy approximately US$450 billion annually. (atlassian.com)
- One report found that the time staff spend managing and attending meetings costs employers an annual average of US$29,000 per employee. (WorkLife)
- A study by London School of Economics and Political Science found that ≈ 35% of business meetings are unproductive, with the overall annual cost to firms of unproductive meetings estimated at US$259 billion in the US. (lse.ac.uk)
- Only ≈ 30% of meetings are considered productive, and only ≈ 37% actively use an agenda. (Notta)
So what is a good meeting? ✅
Short. Clear purpose. Right people. Output > conversation.
Below are some practical tips you can steal 👇
🛠️ Action Points: How to Run Developer-Friendly Meetings
✅ Ask yourself first: “Do we really need a meeting? Can this be a comment, ticket update, or 3-message chat thread?”
✅ Invite only the people who actually need to be there. Optional attendees = async notes.
✅ Define the goal in one sentence. If you can’t — you’re not ready to schedule a meeting.
✅ Set a default length of 15 min. Extend only if needed.
✅ Start with facts, not storytelling. “Here’s the problem. Here are the options.”
✅ End with a decision and owner. If no decision was made — the meeting failed.
✅ Send a 3-bullet summary after. So no one has to join “just in case.”
Bonus tip:
If you must brainstorm, use async pre-work so the call starts at solution level, not catch-up level.
💬 How much flow time did you lose this week because of meetings? Drop a comment — let’s calculate the real cost of calls.
Top comments (3)
Great read, you nailed what happens when process turns into performance.
Meetings often start with good intent (sharing context) but they end up replacing the context itself. Real collaboration begins when we stop proving we’re working and start thinking again.
As for your question: I don’t waste time in meetings anymore. I just don’t have time to play. 😉
Haha, that tracks perfectly with your “one-person company / zero-agile” philosophy 😄
When you are the whole team, the sprint review, and the retro - meetings really are just… cosplay.
And honestly, there’s something refreshing about that clarity:
no rituals, no dashboards, no “alignment sessions” - just do the work, ship the work, move on.
Meanwhile the rest of us are still trying to figure out how to politely say
“This meeting could’ve been a repository README.”
Could not agree more. As much as I like to work from home, the fact that more and more people started working remote in the last years have only attributed to the 'Death by meetings' issue.
And lets not forget the root of all evil: Teams chat.