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Comment by LoganDark | Hacker News Reader

I used to do software dev without meetings. It worked just fine. I would send whatever I did once it was done, and get direction on where to take it next. Maybe this breaks down in companies with more than a few leaders, or where the leaders can't otherwise keep in sync.

Also gave me plenty of opportunities to go above and beyond. I miss when that felt safe.

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This depends entirely on how well the requirements have been communicated, right? If you could go for long periods without meetings on large projects, it means either you had great PMs or you’re very good at collecting relevant info and planning in advance. Or, it could mean that your target was quite flexible and open to interpretation. I don’t doubt it, and I’ve known some developers who could do what you did, deliver something great without that much back and forth. I’ve also known many developers (probably most TBH) who will focus on problems the customers don’t have and endlessly go down rabbit holes that have no bottom. Heads down software engineering for big-O and data structures seems to be a lot more fun for some people than fixing weird hard to repro bugs with vague repro instructions that customers complain about. Many very good devs still need to check in and iterate and get some steering, especially if the requirements have not been well or fully explained… which in my own experience has been more or less always. ;)

Maybe my definition of meetings is different than yours. To me, meetings are voice or video calls where multiple people talk about progress and direction, raise issues to the others, etc. and the leaders can make calls across the whole team at once. Staying in constant communication doesn't count as much because it's more async and incremental.

You’re right, my definition sounds different. Your comment left me with the impression that you meant you weren’t talking to anyone. Meetings in my book are any scheduled discussions, regardless of how many people are involved. 1:1s are still meetings.

1:1 meetings are still meetings, but casual messages about progress and direction (without a scheduled time block or synchronous call or whatever ) don't count to me.

Maybe those were some very detailed requirements you were getting, the deliveries were straight-forward, or you already knew the space pretty well. Or you're the only dev there. Somehow most teams just keep tripping over each other and need near constant management to ensure they're delivering what the stakeholders expect.

They weren't particularly detailed, but I did know the space quite well. I was a heavy user of other products of that type, and knew very well what I wanted out of one.

The problem is that your case is extremely rare. Most people work on systems that they never would use themselves or even know existed if not for working on it.

Wherever I work, I try to turn the system into something I would use myself. I am not always successful in this, but it drives a lot of my UX decisions, and it seems to work fairly well.

> I used to do software dev without meetings. It worked just fine. I would send whatever I did once it was done, and get direction on where to take it next.

You didn’t collaborate with other engineers? Or what if the spec you were given was unclear in places? Forgive me, but the style you describe sounds incredibly collaborative, super transactional.

Funny story actually, there were a few other engineers but not very much collaboration. They were resistant to sharing source code or algorithm details, so I had to essentially reverse engineer how their other products worked. I was good enough at it that I came up with several features they didn't know were possible. They eventually ended up letting me go and cloned my design, which I thought was weird, but it was developed for them in the first place so not a big deal.

The lengths to which devs will go not to collaborate.

To be fair, it's a very secretive industry, and betrayals are quite common. Worse, a lot of those betrayals are done on pure impulse without even thinking through the consequences first, so you can't actually build incentives against it because they'll just be ignored.

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