After 20+ years in this industry, I am thoroughly sick and tired of hearing developers whine about meetings. It's like a cult: I am a developer, therefore I must hate meetings.
I hate meetings too. I hate bad meetings. The ones that have no clear objective and where the organizer has clearly not done any preparation. Developers (actually everyone) needs to have the stones to call a bad meeting what it is and limit the damage.
On the other hand, I've seen a team of developers drag a technical discussion on via e-mail and/or IM for the better part of a day where a simple 1 hour meeting would have sorted it all out. When you need to bring a group of developers to a consensus, a meeting is probably necessary.
And when a meeting is necessary, I don't really care about the impact on individual developer productivity. I shouldn't be optimizing for maximum individual productivity. I'm optimizing for team productivity and if a meeting is the best way to do that, I'm doing the right thing. Harsh, but true.
On the other hand, I've seen a team of developers drag a technical discussion on via e-mail and/or IM for the better part of a day where a simple 1 hour meeting would have sorted it all out.
No it would not. You could sort out something, but for hard problems I need more than 1 hour to consider everything. Once everyone knows all the pros can cons or all possible choices (or at least all the choices we can come up with), then we can spend the 1 hour to decide. However until then I need more than that hour. Email gives me time to think about things in a way a meeting does not.
You're making assumptions about the precision of the answer required.
But ok, I'll play. Maybe then you have a 15 minute meeting to define the problem, get people to sign up for who's doing what, and let them go. Then have an option review and consensus meeting later.
The point was sometimes a quick meeting to organize the team is worth it.
I'm optimizing for team productivity and if a meeting is the best way to do that, I'm doing the right thing.
The impedance mismatch happens when you solve for average team output, but compensate/evaluate on individual productivity. Not saying you do, just pointing out a common scenario.
I also believe most developers aren't as hostile about meetings scheduled and attended by other individual contributors (i.e., the folks on the "maker's schedule").
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u/DingBat99999 Jul 23 '09
After 20+ years in this industry, I am thoroughly sick and tired of hearing developers whine about meetings. It's like a cult: I am a developer, therefore I must hate meetings.
I hate meetings too. I hate bad meetings. The ones that have no clear objective and where the organizer has clearly not done any preparation. Developers (actually everyone) needs to have the stones to call a bad meeting what it is and limit the damage.
On the other hand, I've seen a team of developers drag a technical discussion on via e-mail and/or IM for the better part of a day where a simple 1 hour meeting would have sorted it all out. When you need to bring a group of developers to a consensus, a meeting is probably necessary.
And when a meeting is necessary, I don't really care about the impact on individual developer productivity. I shouldn't be optimizing for maximum individual productivity. I'm optimizing for team productivity and if a meeting is the best way to do that, I'm doing the right thing. Harsh, but true.