How do you balance writing code with constant meetings? | Hacker News Reader

How do you balance writing code with constant meetings?

Some days are quiet and I can concentrate on writing code, but those are a rare occasion. It has become increasingly common to have multiple meetings through out the day. To make matter worse, the better code I write, the more meetings I get invited in.

As I get more comfortable with my abilities the constant stream of interruptions is bugging me. How do I deal with this? I've talked to my boss that I am into too many meetings and he has said I can go offline and skip meetings, yet he expects me to be in meetings because he requires my expertise for complicated technical subjects that come up.

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Something the VP of Engineering did at my current employer was to put a daily "Focused Work Time" calendar blocker on all devs' calendar from 8:00 AM until 10:30 AM. The understanding this has communicated to other departments is that developer time is precious and interrupting them for menial crap isn't just a "hey, can I get five minutes of your time" but something that is significantly more disruptive and time costing. The bulk of meetings (status reports, incident reviews, training, info sharing) happens early in the afternoon, usually right after lunch when one's motivation to get into serious mental activity is less than from 3pm to 5pm.

This has been awesome but would haven been impossible if not driven by a VP with the backing of the CEO. Things like this -- or "adopting agile" -- have to have backing from above and buy-in across departments to have any chance of success.

That's part of the problem. It has to come from the top, and for management working is meeting. It's how they get information and delegate. It's why in most companies that kind of approach is not brought up.

If I could have a half day work, half day meeting breakdown it would increase my productivity for sure. What grinds me down is if I get done with a meeting, and I have another meeting in 25 minutes it's simply not enough time to waste energy to get to the right headspace just so that I can stop right after I get there.

> As I get more comfortable with my abilities the constant stream of interruptions is bugging me. How do I deal with this? I've talked to my boss that I am into too many meetings and he has said I can go offline and skip meetings, yet he expects me to be in meetings because he requires my expertise for complicated technical subjects that come up.

I don't get it. Attending meetings is work as well. If you got distracted because of meetings and you couldn't finish your "coding tasks", then that's fine because you finished your "meeting tasks".

Some days, in the standups I say:

- yesterday I did attend 2 meetings, couldn't focus on Jira issue XX because of that - today I will continue on Jira issue XX, but since I have 3 meetings, I will need more time to finish

My managers: all right

I would suggest you simply find another place to work.

By reading your post, I don't think you'll really be satisfied here -- I think this will be a recurring theme, and will slowly drain you out. Most managers seem to not get this at all -- we programmers HATE meetings, and unless it's ABSOLUTELY ABSOLUTELY necessary, I'd rather be left out of all meetings.

I HATE meetings, the most I can muster is 2 meetings/week (scrum). Right now, I have my own business, and even when I meet with contractors, I still very seldom have more than 2 meetings/week.

This is one of the reasons I left a job a few years back - 2 meetings/day, it was simply driving me insane.

This is somewhat tangential but how did you go from writing code to having your own business? I am always curious how the transition happens.

I actually like working here. I brought the meetings thing up with an upper manager that my manager reports to. He actually feels this is a problem that needs to be solved better in the whole company. But those things sometimes lead nowhere.

I've always hated big companies, because of the red tape/politics. I've slowly gravitated to freelancing/working from home, and I've been doing it (WFH) since roughly 2003.

I've lately had a client almost for 10 years, and towards the end, I really really wanted to create my own product. I won't bore you with the details, but it's a video editor and I will launch it in about 1 month.

I have saved up enough money to last for 1 year no matter what happens. So it's a risk -- it may or may not pan out.

If it doesn't, I'll go back to consulting.

Coming back to meetings: with this client, I had 2 meetings/week, I didn't really enjoy it, but on the plus side, they were very thorough (the meetings were very short, 15-30 minutes)

Do you have detailed agenda presented to you about the meeting on what it is about and what the it aims to achieve ?

I would suggest asking for agenda notes to be included as part of the meeting invite, with the agenda being part of an email or part of visible documentation that is available to the participants. This forces people setting up invites to evaluate if their needs can be accommodated on an email or by a RFC and allows you to respond to the matter when free without waiting for a meeting to happen. You would also then have access to a thread of information, in case new participants are called in and they need to be backfilled.

I follow the advice of Greg Crenshaw: Schedule everything in your calendar. That includes coding. Time before and after meetings for preparation and review. Reading and answering emails... You get the drift.

Be generous with the estimates.

And personally I liked to push the responsibility back to the organiser of the meeting, if there is a conflict with the schedule, i.e. affects my deliverables: sure, I can attend that meeting but that means X gets delayed. Is that okay?

Like many engineer-minded people, I consider (possibly wrongly) meetings as a waste of time. This way, I don't have to weigh meeting time against coding time myself. And everyone is aware of the trade-offs needed to be done.

The other answers here are mostly suggesting reactive steps to the situation that you are being flooded with meeting invites and need to respond to them (block time in your calendar, decline meetings). These are good strategies that work in a broad range of environments, because attending meetings is a personal decision for you as an individual.

I'd like to at least suggest the proactive approach - to try to cut down on meetings. The meetings you describe sound like they are doing the work of either a planning session or a backlog refinement session, but are done on an ad-hoc basis throughout the week. If the people scheduling these meetings are inside your sphere of influence (your team, or close neighbouring teams), can you try to encourage a culture where this sort of work is confined to a start-of-week planning session and a mid-week refinement session? Even if these are 2-3 hours each, at least the scheduling is predictable, and more importantly, timeboxed. If they're done on an ad-hoc basis, you can easily lose track of how much time is spent in these meetings, and you can end up "planning/designing" work much further into the future than is really necessary. Also, no meeting ever takes less than 30 minutes and all meeting expand to fill the time allocated to them, so you might find that six 30 minute sessions spread throughout the week could be completed in one 2hr meeting in a single solid block.

This obviously only works if you have some kind of influence over the people scheduling these meetings, which is why I say that the reactive approach of blocking time/declining meetings is more broadly applicable, but it's worth a shot regardless.

I like this approach. In my case it's 50/50. However even improving half of the meetings would be a huge change.

There are 2 things that I do to help mitigate this:

1) Block off a day (or two) for no meetings

2) If there is no agenda, no clear reason for meeting, I decline or email them asking for clarity for the meeting reason. If it is something that can be answered via email or slack, I typically try to encourage a response via those methods.

The biggest issue with meetings is the context switch, so if you can consolidate as many of them as possible, rather than having them peppered through your day, I find that to be the best way of dealing with them.

edit:

I forgot to add that I try to encourage people to schedule meetings during my non productive times. For me, the mornings are typically my least productive time, because I am tired, groggy and just starting to get oriented for the day. If I schedule them during that time, it allows me to use my afternoons which are my productive time for actual work.

> 1) Block off a day (or two) for no meetings

Having analyzed my own productivity patterns it seems that I can at max work on code for 2 hours straight without a break. After that I need time to reset, stop thinking about code so I can re-evaluate my design choices, variable names etc. That time appears to be about 1 hour.

So in theory if I had a day or two of no meetings, I wouldn't be coding the whole day. Ideally I would be the most productive having 2 hours of uninterrupted time in the morning, and another 2 in the afternoon, but that's really hard to delineate.

> 2) If there is no agenda, no clear reason for meeting, I decline or email them asking for clarity for the meeting reason. If it is something that can be answered via email or slack, I typically try to encourage a response via those methods.

The thing that gets me is that most meetings are tangentially useful to me. No one posts meeting minutes though, so unless I am there I don't know what the end decision is which might or might not affect me. I have debated doing this, asking for an agenda, but I seem to hesitate.

> I forgot to add that I try to encourage people to schedule meetings during my non productive times.

I do this as well, but there are so many instances where I am all primed to write code and a meeting is about to start in 15-20 minutes.

See if u can book yourself blocks of time everyday so that people cannot assign meetings to you. I did that occasionally and everytime someone throws me a meeting I just decline it if it conflicts with that block of time.

Since making my post I have started doing this. If nothing else it gives me a feel on when I can write code.

I often get same thing. If I think the meeting might benefit me or it critical to get my way then I go along. If I think it might be simply making up numbers, I check in with the PM and see why the meeting has been called, if I'm not needed I tell my manager and then I block in the time in my calendar. I tell the PM to call me only if they think I'm needed for s short comment one something important.

I often block in an entire afternoon with 1hr bookings to stop people seeing free time show up in my calendar when they're looking to call a meeting, then I put on the do not disturb in MS Teams and get some work done.

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