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Comment by sombremesa | Hacker News Reader

I tried to advocate for this at my current workplace but got a lot of pushback from people who said they didn't want to spend their whole day in meetings (even if it's just one working day out of 10). Others said they had so many meetings they couldn't possibly find enough time to have that many meetings in a day (doesn't make sense to me but that's a direct quote). Clarified here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27316534

Now I'm realizing my job is actually to attend meetings. I should ask for a raise! Though in reality I'm just going to quit soon.

The sweet irony is that this meeting heavy company of 50ish people uses Zoom without pro accounts...it's enough to make a grown man cry.

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> Others said they had so many meetings they couldn't possibly find enough time to have that many meetings in a day (doesn't make sense to me but that's a direct quote).

My manager absolutely has more than 8 hours of meetings ina given week, and not jut useless ones. I've seen calendars of people a level or two above me where several days a week are wall-to-wall meetings. I don't think it's all that uncommon either. At some point, your job is coordinating and strategizing and communicating what needs to be done, and after a while, beyond meetings being an unfortunate nesesity, the meetings are the work

That's all well and good, as long as people aren't expected to produce a month's worth of software from 40 hours of nothing but meetings.

Unfortunately, they are. Largely due to inexperience and incompetence at the managerial level (zero technical chops once you go any level above IC).

I'm well aware most software companies aren't like this, though. They'd go out of business, like this one will. Almost every key engineer (including CTO) has left this company already - six of them in the three months since I joined. One of them wrote a 10 page open letter to the CEO on the way out. Things are a real mess...

Among other gems in that open letter was a link to this article [0].

[0] https://neilonsoftware.com/2020/09/08/non-technical-developm...

I think people forget that it's incredibly difficult to coordinate a group of people beyond a certain number. We're all walking, talking grey gooey blobs of personality, feelings, ambitions and stubbornness (even managers/leaders). To even attempt at mitigating and guiding such things to team or company-useful outcomes we have to have meetings. Sometimes lots of them. It's the unfortunate nature of such a dynamic and chaotic system.

Anything over 100 seems to get tough.

Federate your business today.

And design the software to enable uncoordinated effort to make progress. It isn’t trivial to do this, and does take some ability to think deeply, but it isn’t rocket science. The speed of software development is proportional to how little I have to think about. If i care about fifty files to add one feature, then the productivity plummets. It I can just edit file small sensible file, and release it pretty quickly, then I can go so fast. And software development speed pays compound interest (tech debt eats interest compoundedly?)

> my job is actually to attend meetings.

It's probably not, though - or, at least one of those meetings is the one where you have to showcase/demonstrate what you "accomplished" in spite of all the interruptions. You do have to produce something in spite of all the time wasted in meetings. I've unironically been told that that's what the weekends are for.

The 'my job is actually to attend meetings' was tongue-in-cheek - perhaps that wasn't as obvious as I thought. These days I code during the meetings, since it doesn't seem to make a difference whether I pay attention.

> I've unironically been told that that's what the weekends are for.

This kind of rings true, I've only been here around 3 months. I did spend a couple of weekends on code in the first month, but overall this company (and my comp) really isn't worth that kind of effort, so I've stopped.

I really only joined this company because I wanted a better work life balance (joke's on me) and my business isn't yet profitable, but I'm actually financially independent so it's tough to muster up motivation to work overtime for free.

Have you ever tried just not showing up.

Or pitting two managers against each other? I would love to attend your meeting but this other team needs this. Let them schedule it out for you?

I went on a kick of replying (and sometimes declining) meetings without agendas, asking "what is the agenda for this?"

And sometimes with an agenda, I will try to reply and resolve whatever it was about asynchronously. There have been several meetings avoided when I replied with something like "this sounds like known bug #1234" or "here's the wiki page documenting this: is there something else not covered?".

My # meetings went down after I started doing this. Maybe it changed the culture in a good way, or maybe people got tired of me and stopped inviting me to meetings.. but either way seems like success.

The threat of a meeting seemed to have worked as intended

> Others said they had so many meetings they couldn't possibly find enough time to have that many meetings in a day (doesn't make sense to me but that's a direct quote).

How doesn't that make sense? If you want to compress all your meetings into one day for every two-week sprint (ten working days), you only need to average 48 minutes a day of meetings to fill that day. That's not an obscene amount.

The scenario is thus: you have, say, 6 hours of meetings relevant to team X per week. However, you tell team X that you have too many meetings on your calendar (from teams A,B,C) and thus do not have room to move X meetings to one day (but you can have these meetings otherwise).

It just sounds like a combination of lazy scheduling and no desire to improve dev experience.

Yeah, lazy scheduling is an easy trap to fall into. People have the wrong cost optimization function in mind while scheduling meetings -- moving an existing meeting is too expensive to consider, while breaking up an engineer's 4 hour block of productivity into 2 1:30 minute blocks is considered totally okay. In reality, the actual cost is the opposite -- moving a meeting costs nothing, but breaking up that block of free time costs an entire day of an engineer's time (something like $1000).

I have a plan for this. I'm writing a small program to move certain meetings to an auto-scheduled state. You pick some blocks on your calendar where you'll accept auto-scheduled meetings. You then say "I want to have a meeting with X, Y, and Z", and the system will use a constraint solver to find a time. The cost function favors bin-packed meetings, keeping entire days free, etc. If existing meetings have to move to optimize the cost function, so be it.

I don't actually know if people will tolerate this. People are creatures of habit, so if you're used to a biweekly team meeting on Monday, it will be weird when it gets replaced with a postmortem review that starts 30 minutes earlier and the team meeting moves to Thursday or whatever. I also think it will be hard to get people to commit to giving the bot a slot to work with. We shall see. If anything interesting comes of this I'll write up something about how it went.

Please do. Sounds really interesting.

There's an extension called Clockwise that does this for Google Calendar. It hugely improved productivity in my team.

https://www.getclockwise.com/

I don't see how it is lazy scheduling to have at least one meeting each day of the week that you cannot reschedule. Finding time for six one-hour meetings is by definition easier than finding time for one six-hour block of meetings.

By definition? Surely finding time in your month for a 3-day conference is a lot easier than finding time for thirty one hour conferences?

If you have a 6-unit block, then by definition you can fit 6 1-unit items - by putting them in that block. On the other hand, if you don't have a contiguous 6-unit block, you might still be able fit 6 1-unit items in (for example) 2 3-unit blocks. Compare memory allocation for 6 1KB blocks versus 1 6KB block, and how it's affected by memory fragmentation.

This is predicated on the idea that meetings are immutable once created, which is part of my original complaint.

Edit: I see what you're saying, that makes perfect sense.

I was only supporting the:

> Finding time for six one-[unit] [block]s is by definition easier than finding time for one six-[unit] [block] of meetings.

that you responded to. As long as there's anything at all with fixed position, you can end up with fragmentation, and even when (you can guarantee) there isn't, the former is just "exactly as easy" as the latter, so the general case degrades to "is by definition at least as easy as".

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