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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

At work it is routine for people to create long phone meetings, invite 50 people who all are expected to be online, talk for hour with no decision, plan another meeting for later to talk about it again. People only show up because if they don't they will be blamed for anything that goes wrong which will spawn more unpleasant meetings. The actual decision needed could be done in a couple of Slack messages between two programmers, but the end result is massive wastage of time where no one can get any work done. Because no work is accomplished, more meetings must be held to decide what to do to fix it. Of course as a programmer I am expected to get everything done within a small window of time which of course doesn't include all the meetings, so I have to be masterful of what time I have to avoid being called into meetings about why I didn't get things done on time.

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Consider the alternative - two programmers make a quick decision over slack, then they both just get to work heads down building for 2 weeks. Say they run into a big issue and realize they have to throw that work away and start again. They just wasted ~160 developer hours of time. Alternatively if they had just scheduled that 1-hour meeting up-front with 3 other people who have complementary experience they might have caught this at the beginning and the meeting would only waste 5 hours (to be conservative, lets say 10 hours since the meeting might take each person out of their flow for an extra hour. Though in my experience if the meeting is mostly a brainstorm about the thing I'm working on, it's just as likely to do the opposite where I go from a vague dread of how much there is to do to being excited and having concrete first steps to jump into).

If they had done this for 15 separate projects, 14 times that meeting could actually have been a waste of time, but on the 15th project they saved all this time and they'd still come out net ahead due to the meetings.

What makes this even more pernicious is that there's such a huge discrepancy in possible time wasted, but depending on personal preference it might feel very different to the people involved. For "hacker" or builder types, any meeting at all might feel like a brutal waste of time even if it saves time in the long run, they'd personally rather waste a few days building the wrong thing than sit in a bunch of meetings. But manager types can take this to the other extreme, they feel productive in meetings and end up scheduling too many of them. As always finding a good middle ground is important.

> The actual decision needed could be done in a couple of Slack messages between two programmers

In my experience, those two programmers rarely have a good enough understanding of existing codebase and momentum to make good decisions. Without meetings, there is little way to avoid these problems.

Programmers are good at implementation, not (necessarily) decision making.

Also, meetings only make sense if everyone is focused on decision making; this is a company culture issue more than anything.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, talk.

Nice idea, but doesn't work in practice. Without talking regularly with key stakeholders, you have no idea whether you're building the right thing - and frequently you won't.

If you define productivity merely as writing lines of code, then sure, meetings are a waste of time. But if you define productivity as delivering something genuinely valuable, then talking often makes you much more productive.

I'm not sure you're going to the same kind of meetings as the ancestors. Of course you need context and feedback. The kind of meetings that often happen in a certain type of business involve way more people than necessary, most of whom also lack the context to make informed choices, and prefer to continually change the subject to draw or divert attention to/from themselves. Product meetings with savvy stakeholders pulling in a mostly unified direction are awesome. Even when people disagree, as long as they agree on the rules of the game and try to work for a win-win things tend to work out pretty well. Talking in circles offf-topic for 2 hours whilst people play with their social media isn't productive in anyone's definition.

Those who can't, send an email about it.

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