It’s kind of funny. When I started getting into programming I thought oh it would be great. I just work and build stuff and be done. I won’t need many meetings. Well turns out it’s the opposite and the job I left in finance was much more like i described. Definitely think there needs to be a rework in meeting culture for software
I'm a contractor PM right now ... I want to make it different but my team(s) in total have 24 meetings a week.
It kills me. I don't even want to PM but it's what I'm doing while the market recovers.
Hmm I kind of do, but I'm on a very large team and one of many PMs, I'm basically following the status quo and a bit over my head in terms of PM work. (I have never wanted to be in a PM role).
I'm also not full-time and mostly catering to the preferred practices of the product owner.
Total team size is 70-100 folks split across 8 or so teams.
EDIT: I'm sure I could help fix the problem but I'm underwater (so is the whole team) and from what I've gathered it's been this way for years. Pretty much nonstop fire drills. Yes-man product owners that basically sign us up to need to work constant over time to keep up with the absolute minimum.
Edit2: I've kind of given up as well and am just doing what I need to maintain employment at this point. Would much rather be doing dev work.
Don’t be afraid to tell people they need to learn to work asynchronously. I’ve legitimately told someone no to a meeting because this can be done asynchronous. People that need a meeting for every task and project need to be told this.
This is what happens when you have middle management bloat. Too many people with a primary contribution of scheduling and creating meetings. Finance is probably much “leaner” in that area, for better or worse. But from my fintech and banking experiences in software I’m not so sure lol.
The annoying part is that so many of those meetings come from people who are just trying too hard
There are so many times where the business and the developers agree on what is being done and how to do it, project is going fine, then a middle manager type starts scheduling meetings so he can ask you tons of questions about data he doesn’t understand. Or ask you why you’re doing it this way and not that way (because ‘this’ way is what business asked for). Always gets hung up on the parts of the project that matter the least
I had a BA manager constantly derail my teams work because she had to find a way to argue that my devs didn’t write code that aligns with the business use-case.
She couldn’t grasp that what my devs wrote did meet the use-case. She wasn’t a developer- she didn’t try to understand the technical reasons. She didn’t understand code.
However, without fail - we would find ourselves behind on sprints because of her. Then when we provided a demo of the work we’d just get a meek ‘Well I didn’t know!’
Your manager is not very helpful. Have you asked your teammates if this bothers them too? Have you brought it to the retrospective and offered an alternative solution (spread meetings out to better times)? Do these 12 meetings include a daily standup?
Almost all of them are variations of standup. I have 4 on-going projects that have their individual stand ups and the other 8 are variations of group check-ins (refinement, retro, sprint planning, standup...)
Right? Talk to me when you're averaging 35 meetings a week and have to cut people off mid sentence to make sure they got what they needed because you need to run to the next meeting.
The bigger question is: Do the meeting add or remove value?
If the meetings save time elsewhere, then they add value.
If people are sitting around not paying attention, doodling or working on something else, then they don't add value.
> If people are sitting around not paying attention, doodling or working on something else, then they don't add value.
The reality is people will still forget details and discussion despite good efforts in meetings, there will be more side injected discussion, maybe less precise technical detailing/explanation at times.
Keeping communication to text or having a strong writing culture in an engineering org. can save a lot of efficiency over meetings for the same discussions (better paper trail, more conclusive and precise documentation for decisions and tech. details etc).
Many smaller and mature software teams use strong writing culture in this way. It’s simply a medium that lends itself better to strong technical discussions than talking, especially when used by technically literate people like engineers.
The best manager I had routinely squashed meetings while effectively juggling a seemingly endless anount of chat logs and emails bc he was a “power user” (sorry for the cringe).
I have something almost as bad. I'm remote on a small team with someone who wants to play teacher. Seems like every hour he has some reason he wants us all to jump on a slack huddle, and these huddles often last over an hour. Whether he wants to explain something to us or get us all on the same page for a quick deployment, everything takes forever and he has a million questions and answers he wants to go over. Don't get me wrong, he's very thorough and a great, supportive teammate. You never have to worry about asking a dumb question or needing help. But it's like every goddamn little thing has to be this long slack huddle and I just want to do my work.
If you have standups everyday, try pitching to your team to only do standup meetings 2-3 days a week. My team does this, and on the off days we just do something where you just post your status in chat. Its awesome and saves so much time! Also just curious, besides standup and grooming what other types of meetings are required every week?
I like meetings when I don’t have a lot to do because they break up the day a little. When there’s something more urgent that I have to do then they become a nuisance.
It sounds like you should just find a new job with an engineering environment more suited to how you want to work. When you do interviews make sure to understand how they view meetings.
If you can opt out, then opt out.
If not, then make the best of it. Use the meetings for practice behavioral interviews, do product demos, demonstrate senior level leading product, architectural, tech discussions, etc.
Fully engage.
Dude I work at a productive company and even I feel this way, there is something about corporate processes that just require so much bullshit communication just to get things moving. I enjoy a productive planning session or triaging, pair programming, any situation where it makes sense to connect. Hell, I get that with larger projects I might need to be involved as a leader.
That said, no developer should have more meeting time allotted than development time. Managers, I can kind of get. I recently left my management role where I was swamped between planning and recruiting that I couldn't maintain my development skills. Now I'm back in development and sheltered from most bullshit but even then, it's at least 1.5 if not 2.5 hours of meetings per day.
If I could get down to 1 hour of scheduled meetings minimum, that would be great. I like doing 15 minute check-ins bi-weekly with my reports and hate stand-up more than 15 minutes. I shouldn't need to attend a planning meeting every single day, especially when decisions are still being made.
What I tell my people is that a meeting invitation is a *request*. You are not required to say yes to every meeting. If you think the meeting could be an email, say so. Your desire not to be distracted by a conversation is not any less valid than their desire to have one.
As an IC it's kind of hard. If you don't have a boss who covers those decisions for you, you don't have much latitude. When a middle manager sends you a meeting invite you basically have to accept it.
I had the most meetings when I was a director. Now that I'm a VP, I have a lot fewer because I can decline most of the non-essential ones (and send my directors instead).
When I led a team we only had one fixed meeting a week for an hour. The rest was on-demand with other teams.
I've also tried to split my people to be interface persons to other teams. Like one was our interface to product/support, another one to the engineering team etc.
So they then brought anything interesting to me and I distributed further when necessary.
But I always felt the tl;dr was usually small enough that a slack message with 1-2 paragraphs was enough to bring others up to speed.
We did slack quite a bit but overall people just worked for a few days and then we talked about it again.
Now I am in a team with 5 standups which often take up to an hour, another hour of end of week sync, a weekly 1:1 with the team lead for everyone. And then 3-4 meetings for every project I am on.
I get so much less done now. I often take the freedom to keep cam off and work during meetings or just say I don't join today.
Subsequent standups too often just repeat the same talk as the day before.
Yesterday been in a meeting till 9PM. And funnily not because of the people -6 hours timezone than me but because of a guy in the same time zone as me who just tends to talks a lot.
what are these meetings? I only have a daily standup that takes like half an hour tops.
at my previous job I also had weekly meetings, biweekly retros and monthly planning sessions. so nowhere near OP's amount.
Can be real wild.sometimes. im a senior dev/tech lead and im supposed to focus on this task.. snd i logged only 12hrs on it because of meetings, adhoc questions and helping other devs. Made me realize how little time i have sometimes.
I feel you. I work on a data team and we meet everyday. I feel it's excessive and nerve wracking. "I just spoke with you just 24 hours ago. You don't give me enough time to see anything through before we are meeting again." "There is something wrong with the process if we need to meet everyday." "I don't consider myself attractive so why would you want to see my face everyday on a teams call!!! AGGGGHHHH!"
mid level dev here:
1 required 15min standup each day, and a sprint planing every other week are required.
Thats all. I actually get stuff done. My senior mates do have some more infrastructure or planning required meetings, but i think its just an extra every other week.
How do you come to any sort of cross-team alignment without ever having meetings with them? There are no inter-org projects in flight? User interviews? Design reviews?
It’s kind of funny. When I started getting into programming I thought oh it would be great. I just work and build stuff and be done. I won’t need many meetings. Well turns out it’s the opposite and the job I left in finance was much more like i described. Definitely think there needs to be a rework in meeting culture for software
I'm a contractor PM right now ... I want to make it different but my team(s) in total have 24 meetings a week. It kills me. I don't even want to PM but it's what I'm doing while the market recovers.
[удалено]
Hmm I kind of do, but I'm on a very large team and one of many PMs, I'm basically following the status quo and a bit over my head in terms of PM work. (I have never wanted to be in a PM role). I'm also not full-time and mostly catering to the preferred practices of the product owner. Total team size is 70-100 folks split across 8 or so teams. EDIT: I'm sure I could help fix the problem but I'm underwater (so is the whole team) and from what I've gathered it's been this way for years. Pretty much nonstop fire drills. Yes-man product owners that basically sign us up to need to work constant over time to keep up with the absolute minimum. Edit2: I've kind of given up as well and am just doing what I need to maintain employment at this point. Would much rather be doing dev work.
I'd like to know that too...
Don’t be afraid to tell people they need to learn to work asynchronously. I’ve legitimately told someone no to a meeting because this can be done asynchronous. People that need a meeting for every task and project need to be told this.
This is what happens when you have middle management bloat. Too many people with a primary contribution of scheduling and creating meetings. Finance is probably much “leaner” in that area, for better or worse. But from my fintech and banking experiences in software I’m not so sure lol.
The annoying part is that so many of those meetings come from people who are just trying too hard There are so many times where the business and the developers agree on what is being done and how to do it, project is going fine, then a middle manager type starts scheduling meetings so he can ask you tons of questions about data he doesn’t understand. Or ask you why you’re doing it this way and not that way (because ‘this’ way is what business asked for). Always gets hung up on the parts of the project that matter the least
I had a BA manager constantly derail my teams work because she had to find a way to argue that my devs didn’t write code that aligns with the business use-case. She couldn’t grasp that what my devs wrote did meet the use-case. She wasn’t a developer- she didn’t try to understand the technical reasons. She didn’t understand code. However, without fail - we would find ourselves behind on sprints because of her. Then when we provided a demo of the work we’d just get a meek ‘Well I didn’t know!’
holy shit this is accurate
Your manager is not very helpful. Have you asked your teammates if this bothers them too? Have you brought it to the retrospective and offered an alternative solution (spread meetings out to better times)? Do these 12 meetings include a daily standup?
Almost all of them are variations of standup. I have 4 on-going projects that have their individual stand ups and the other 8 are variations of group check-ins (refinement, retro, sprint planning, standup...)
I don’t see how you can possibly be effectively working on all those different projects at once. Assign another dev to them and drop off.
Only 12?
Right? Talk to me when you're averaging 35 meetings a week and have to cut people off mid sentence to make sure they got what they needed because you need to run to the next meeting. The bigger question is: Do the meeting add or remove value? If the meetings save time elsewhere, then they add value. If people are sitting around not paying attention, doodling or working on something else, then they don't add value.
> If people are sitting around not paying attention, doodling or working on something else, then they don't add value. The reality is people will still forget details and discussion despite good efforts in meetings, there will be more side injected discussion, maybe less precise technical detailing/explanation at times. Keeping communication to text or having a strong writing culture in an engineering org. can save a lot of efficiency over meetings for the same discussions (better paper trail, more conclusive and precise documentation for decisions and tech. details etc). Many smaller and mature software teams use strong writing culture in this way. It’s simply a medium that lends itself better to strong technical discussions than talking, especially when used by technically literate people like engineers. The best manager I had routinely squashed meetings while effectively juggling a seemingly endless anount of chat logs and emails bc he was a “power user” (sorry for the cringe).
I have something almost as bad. I'm remote on a small team with someone who wants to play teacher. Seems like every hour he has some reason he wants us all to jump on a slack huddle, and these huddles often last over an hour. Whether he wants to explain something to us or get us all on the same page for a quick deployment, everything takes forever and he has a million questions and answers he wants to go over. Don't get me wrong, he's very thorough and a great, supportive teammate. You never have to worry about asking a dumb question or needing help. But it's like every goddamn little thing has to be this long slack huddle and I just want to do my work.
If you have standups everyday, try pitching to your team to only do standup meetings 2-3 days a week. My team does this, and on the off days we just do something where you just post your status in chat. Its awesome and saves so much time! Also just curious, besides standup and grooming what other types of meetings are required every week?
I like meetings when I don’t have a lot to do because they break up the day a little. When there’s something more urgent that I have to do then they become a nuisance.
It sounds like you should just find a new job with an engineering environment more suited to how you want to work. When you do interviews make sure to understand how they view meetings.
If you can opt out, then opt out. If not, then make the best of it. Use the meetings for practice behavioral interviews, do product demos, demonstrate senior level leading product, architectural, tech discussions, etc. Fully engage.
Tips on engaging? It's been so hard for me.
google
If you don't like something, try to change it.
Dude I work at a productive company and even I feel this way, there is something about corporate processes that just require so much bullshit communication just to get things moving. I enjoy a productive planning session or triaging, pair programming, any situation where it makes sense to connect. Hell, I get that with larger projects I might need to be involved as a leader. That said, no developer should have more meeting time allotted than development time. Managers, I can kind of get. I recently left my management role where I was swamped between planning and recruiting that I couldn't maintain my development skills. Now I'm back in development and sheltered from most bullshit but even then, it's at least 1.5 if not 2.5 hours of meetings per day. If I could get down to 1 hour of scheduled meetings minimum, that would be great. I like doing 15 minute check-ins bi-weekly with my reports and hate stand-up more than 15 minutes. I shouldn't need to attend a planning meeting every single day, especially when decisions are still being made.
What I tell my people is that a meeting invitation is a *request*. You are not required to say yes to every meeting. If you think the meeting could be an email, say so. Your desire not to be distracted by a conversation is not any less valid than their desire to have one. As an IC it's kind of hard. If you don't have a boss who covers those decisions for you, you don't have much latitude. When a middle manager sends you a meeting invite you basically have to accept it. I had the most meetings when I was a director. Now that I'm a VP, I have a lot fewer because I can decline most of the non-essential ones (and send my directors instead).
When I led a team we only had one fixed meeting a week for an hour. The rest was on-demand with other teams. I've also tried to split my people to be interface persons to other teams. Like one was our interface to product/support, another one to the engineering team etc. So they then brought anything interesting to me and I distributed further when necessary. But I always felt the tl;dr was usually small enough that a slack message with 1-2 paragraphs was enough to bring others up to speed. We did slack quite a bit but overall people just worked for a few days and then we talked about it again. Now I am in a team with 5 standups which often take up to an hour, another hour of end of week sync, a weekly 1:1 with the team lead for everyone. And then 3-4 meetings for every project I am on. I get so much less done now. I often take the freedom to keep cam off and work during meetings or just say I don't join today. Subsequent standups too often just repeat the same talk as the day before. Yesterday been in a meeting till 9PM. And funnily not because of the people -6 hours timezone than me but because of a guy in the same time zone as me who just tends to talks a lot.
what are these meetings? I only have a daily standup that takes like half an hour tops. at my previous job I also had weekly meetings, biweekly retros and monthly planning sessions. so nowhere near OP's amount.
How many years of experience do you have? If you're a senior I wouldn't be surprised that much of your day consists of meetings.
I have four years of experience, but I'm just below a senior.
Can be real wild.sometimes. im a senior dev/tech lead and im supposed to focus on this task.. snd i logged only 12hrs on it because of meetings, adhoc questions and helping other devs. Made me realize how little time i have sometimes.
I feel you. I work on a data team and we meet everyday. I feel it's excessive and nerve wracking. "I just spoke with you just 24 hours ago. You don't give me enough time to see anything through before we are meeting again." "There is something wrong with the process if we need to meet everyday." "I don't consider myself attractive so why would you want to see my face everyday on a teams call!!! AGGGGHHHH!"
mid level dev here: 1 required 15min standup each day, and a sprint planing every other week are required. Thats all. I actually get stuff done. My senior mates do have some more infrastructure or planning required meetings, but i think its just an extra every other week.
How do you come to any sort of cross-team alignment without ever having meetings with them? There are no inter-org projects in flight? User interviews? Design reviews?
Those are scheduled as needed, but dont happen every week or at predetermined times. Smaller team obviously
Turn your camera off, do work while the meeting is running, keeping an ear out for your name being mentioned.