Comment by Trasmatta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Trasmatta | Hacker News Reader

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Re: meetings, I really think we need more tech companies taking the initiative to cut out meetings entirely. I think many companies would be shocked to find out that work would continue on, productivity would actually go up, and reported employer happiness would improve.

I think it would be a "2020 remote work" style revelation for many teams. Many teams thought remote work would never work out for them, but when they were forced to do it, they found it actually worked great.

That being said, I doubt many companies would ever find the idea tractable. So we should start with something simpler: you should never schedule more than 2 hours worth of meetings for your developers in any given week. And those 2 hours should be very carefully considered, such that they don't segment their day.

The amount of wasted productivity that comes from endless meetings is staggering. Not to mention the mental health hit of trying to do challenging knowledge work while having your day constantly interrupted.

There's a place for meetings, but if you're efficient, they should be rare, small and short.

No, you don't need a weekly project update meeting. I can send you something out of Jira and if there is an issue, you can post a reply to it, or email me. And I can spend time thinking about what you've written and write a careful reply. Only when that still doesn't work, do we do a synchronous meeting, at which point we cover only the points of contention, and with as few people as necessary.

The other beauty of tools like Jira is that the conversation is preserved. Why did we approach the problem that way? Well, go look at it. You'll have someone asking why we can't do a thing and a reply pointing out the problems of that and hence why we have to do it this way. You don't get all of that from the email of the meeting.

>The other beauty of tools like Jira is that the conversation is preserved. Why did we approach the problem that way? Well, go look at it.

I wish this is how it worked IME. IME "documentation" or rather a document would need to be created explaining the decision. No one reads the documents anyways! Referring to the ultimate source of truth, the conversation, preserves EVERYTHING that went into it. "But I don't want all the details so please create a document." You want a document? You know what you want in it? Why don't you go and write it? Seems no one can be bothered to research and read anymore. /End rant

I tried this, it didn't work well for my team.

For whatever reason, my team generally likes having scheduled times to discuss certain topics. I always give them optionality on the meeting however (i.e. we regularly review if a given meeting is causing more pain than it's solving)

In that situation, I think just the goal of minimizing the amount of meetings to the best of your team's ability would still help. Preferably 2 hours or less total, but 3 or 4 might be okay if special care is taken to when they are scheduled.

My meetings all get scattered throughout the week haphazardly such that getting even a few hours of dedicated work done is almost impossible on many days.

I wish there was a true measure for opportunity cost.

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