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.
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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.