Comment by bruce511

Comment by 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.

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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