Comment by BLKNSLVR

Comment by BLKNSLVR 3 days ago

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I just exited the toilet following 2.5 hours of back-to-back meetings, and was looking forward to actually getting some work done when the product owner grabbed me for a conversation about priorities for the sprint planning session that's scheduled in a couple of hours.

In this week so far (first week back from Christmas / New Year leave) I've spent maybe half a day total on work that could be classified as "progress". The rest of the time has been meetings and the required meeting follow-up work.

There's no point in Sprint Planning or considering adding priorities to the current plate. It's full. But nobody has time to eat things off the plate because we're always in meetings to work out how we can eat off the plate more efficiently.

/rant

I've come back from holidays angry. Things gotta change.

bruce511 3 days ago

The secret is to add every meeting into your Jira as a task, and then close it once the meeting is done.

Equally, instead of talking about meetings as detracting from your work, start talking about them as the work.

When your manager asks about your milestones, or accomplishments, or success stories, make meeting attendance front and center.

When discussing software development, bug fixing, etc in the meetings, point out that you won't actually do any of it. Point out that 20+ hours of your week is in meetings, 10 hours of admin (reading, writing, updating tickets), 5 hours of testing etc.

"This task will take 40 hours. At 1 hour per week I expect to be done in October sometime. If all goes to plan'

Yes, it seems cynical, but actually it has real outcomes. Firstly your "productivity" goes up. (As evidenced by your ticket increase.)

Secondly your mental state improves. By acknowledging (to yourself) that you are fundamentally paid to attend meetings, you can relax in your own productivity.

Thirdly by making your time allocations obvious to your manager, you place the burden for action on him.

If you convince your colleagues to do the same, you highlight the root problem, while moving the responsibility to fix it off your plate.

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  • andrei_says_ 3 days ago

    Thank you for this!

    I was just thinking about how for the people requesting all of these meetings, the meetings are the work. If they don’t meet / waste everyone’s time, they are… unproductive.

    For engineers, meetings are the non-productive part and are not counted anywhere.

    Adding them to Jira and accounting for their cost is the way. Businesses understand money. Meetings are expensive.

    Does your company log meetings as tickets?

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    • bruce511 3 days ago

      Cunningly my company doesn't do meetings, at least not on the developer side. Obviously there are interactions but they are one-on-one and are not reoccurring.

      My experience though is consulting to large organizations. They have lots more people, more layers, and hence need more accountability. I get the need for that, but also see that balance is required. I help both sides understand the requirements of the other party, and help them find balance so that both sides win.

      Part of that is helping programmers understand what managers need, and part of that is helping managers understand what programmers need.

      Managers, for example, are happy to add everyone to every meeting. Workers usually prefer one on one time.

      Equally co-workers often benefit from set-aside time for team meetings. This helps with in-team communication.

      Information flow is necessary. Doing it well is better for everyone.

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    • matwood 2 days ago

      > I was just thinking about how for the people requesting all of these meetings, the meetings are the work.

      This is a huge problem in all orgs of any size and one I battle with - misaligned incentives.

      > For engineers, meetings are the non-productive part and are not counted anywhere.

      Part of addressing the issue is to not be binary in your thinking. You'll lose the people you need to persuade. Some meetings are very productive and necessary for engineers. The goal isn't to get rid of all meetings as much as it's to only have productive meetings. When forced to only have productive meetings, fewer meetings naturally result.

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      • nuancebydefault 21 hours ago

        Indeed, a lot of needless stuff is getting done and a lot of stuff is done in wrong ways because of... no or bad communication! So simply saying 'too many meetings' does not cut it.

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nine_zeros 3 days ago

Have you considered setting more meetings with various stakeholders to discuss how to prioritize time for the next 2 weeks? And then follow up check in meetings every 2 days to change direction in an agile way?

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  • Clubber 3 days ago

    You really have to schedule a meeting to discuss an upcoming meeting, so the upcoming meeting can be more efficient.

    (yes this happened to me before)

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    • BeefWellington 2 days ago

      My favourite is the ole "Oh we need Dwayne for this one, let's schedule a follow-up tomorrow with him, and until then we can rough out a bunch of requirements only Dwayne possibly knows by... umm... Guessing?"

      I do not miss development.

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    • be_erik 3 days ago

      I too ran a pre-IPM for years. I still would. Why would I waste an entire team’s time when I can just collaborate with 2 people first?

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      • BLKNSLVR 3 days ago

        Something I heard that stuck with me was that, for important business decisions, the "meeting" is almost ceremonial-only: to make the decision offical. Such meetings should essentially be fast, no digressions, just 'the biz'.

        All the work to actually reach requisite agreement for the decision is done in the days / weeks leading up to the meeting via ad-hoc-ish one-on-one or one-on-very-few meetings (possibly including graft and corruption).

        The "decision" meeting isn't organised until the result is known and guaranteed.

        This maybe doesn't apply to Agile / Development-related meetings, but I'll keep trying to determine how to make it apply, such is my disdain for this (seemingly) waste of the team's time (he said, whilst posting on HN).

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intelVISA 2 days ago

How big's the org? This setup feels unavoidable past a certain company size as growth attracts grifters who then call meetings atop meetings to appear useful.

Unless you own the shop I don't see the issue - good money for a day's work a week?

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  • BLKNSLVR 2 days ago

    It's more a case of team-member churn, requiring a near-constant re-establishment of work practises, alongside a number of over-officiated processes that are in a constant state of being re-engineered for efficiency because they're a constant source of "time drain away from actual progress". There's also a lot of tech debt that has only recently (in the past three years) been really focused on to grow out of. There's also a lot of complexity to the system(s) we work with and the combination of complexity and tech debt is neither pretty nor easy.

    Unless you own the shop I don't see the issue - good money for a day's work a week?

    Yeah, except I have a visceral feeling of pressure to make progress and I don't want to be "one of those people" who don't work towards some kind of improvement. I had a bit of a rant today, and one of the leaders agreed with basically all of my points, although they said that there's a limited amount that can change in the immediate due to existing priorities. However, I'm still going to dedicate some time every day to map out how to improve on the status quo - this will further inhibit my actual task progress, but in the pursuit of a loftier goal (so, yes, potentially making it worse, but it'll feel like I might make things better...).

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