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Comment by cjonas | Hacker News Reader

I'm on a project that started with a deadline before we really even knew what we were building (months away from that deadline and we still don't). Despite seemly unlimited budget to throw at it, technical debt is out of control and we're already moving slow.

I get pulled into 8 hour meetings every other week where 30+ people try to "plan" our way into building faster.

There are countless challenges with this project, but the forced timeline is by far the worst of it.

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> I get pulled into 8 hour meetings every other week where 30+ people try to "plan" our way into building faster.

Somehow we've thus far managed to keep our "as few meetings as possible" culture. Our original founder (whose since been let go, if that's any indication) hated meetings and had rules that were basically:

    1. No meetings that could be an email
    2. No one has to be in a meeting who doesn't want to be there
    3. No PowerPoints

Other departments have bi-weekly day long planning meetings. We have hour long "goals for the quarter" meetings, quarterly. Once in a while a retro when PMs from higher up force them on us.

Retros can be great though, to be fair. If approached as a way to adapt ways of working - e.g ”we’ve had to many pointless meetings that could have been asynchronous slack messages.”

> I get pulled into 8 hour meetings every other week where 30+ people try to "plan" our way into building faster.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

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