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Comment by elpakal | Hacker News Reader

Maybe sharing some research from GitHub will help? https://github.blog/2021-05-25-octoverse-spotlight-good-day-...

> In our study, going from two to three meetings per day lowered the chances of developers making progress toward their goals from 74% to just 14%. And developers who average just one meeting per day have a 99% chance of knocking out high quality work — it really is about getting focus time and connecting with our colleagues to brainstorm ideas.

> With minimal or no interruptions, developers had an 82% chance of having a good day, but when developers were interrupted the majority of the day, their chances of having a good day dropped to just 7%. By minimizing distractions and creating focus time, we not only get work done, we create better and less stressful days for ourselves.

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There's just so much evidence that extensive meetings are a detriment to software developers. Despite that, companies still hire developers, pay them a lot of money, then prevent them from actually doing quality work with constant meetings and interruptions. I don't get it. If you're a dev manager, you should be doing everything you can to protect your team from wasteful and pointless meetings. Any meeting, particularly standing ones, should require a very strong justification for its existence, because the impact on developer productivity is huge.

At my current job (and most previous ones), the default answer for any organizational problem seems to be "we'll just schedule another meeting" or "we'll open a new Slack channel, and invite everyone to it".

I tried doing this and my team said they are not "code monkeys" and want to be involved in every meeting and discussion.

Go figure. :)

If the alternative is that you're excluding them from all decision making and planning, then yeah, they're going to feel like code monkeys, and that sucks. There's a middle ground between "we have lots of meetings where all planning and decisions are made, and everyone has to be present" and "our devs don't come to any planning meetings, and we just throw all the work to them when the decisions are made".

A good first step is having more asynchronous discussions.

It's also not a good idea that all of your time is related to a codebase or two (i.e. don't put all your professional eggs in one basket). Imagine if those projects go poof or something critical happens. When you're 100% invested you're seen as 100% responsible when the baby management blame game comes. Give me some meetings, give me some non-software soft tasks. If all you do all the time ever is code, good luck changing careers should you ever want to, you're going to have limited other experience.

Also, if your entire job is mopping floors and the floor is dirty, you're going to get shit for any and all dirt on the floor, regardless of how reasonable the expectation is that you could have gotten to the specific mess observed at the specific time. Youre 100% on floors so why didn't you fix this unreasonable request. Meanwhile, if you clean floors half the time and clean windows the other half of the time, you have a valid excuse as to why the floors aren't perfect, at least in some peoples skewed perspectives of expectations. This is why I always advise people have a little split up of their time but not an extreme amount. It gives a clear out to unreasonable expectations. If you wanted the floors so clean I wouldn't do windows half the time, and so on (just be careful not to convince someone it would be a good idea to commit you 100% to a task).

Exactly.

I think you have to delegate ownership down; "you have total control over everything and we won't second guess your decisions." This doesn't happen, so we just have meetings with the "owners" to try and convince them to do our thing. The result is less stuff getting done.

It's positively painful to try to get people to understand this incredibly simple concept for some reason. People just can't wrap their brains around the idea that this type of work requires focus, and that breaking that focus derails the whole activity for a period of time.

”for some reason”

Are they the ones having to do this kind of work?

Probably not, right? At least in some cases?

There’s at least part of the answer.

Question in my mind becomes: how do we get the people who aren’t doing this work to understand and empathize with the productivity needs of those who are?

I’m out of answers because everything that probably can be said about it HAS been said about it from people far smarter than I am-from blog post to published airport book to published academic studies-and yet here we are still having this conversation amongst ourselves as developers and engineers.

I just don’t think it’s possible unless the people making the distractions have once been the people being distracted, and even more so there are people whose livelihoods depend on meetings happening (scrum masters for eg). Just IMHO there will always be friction between people who cant afford to be distracted and those that need to be distracted when people like this work together.

Maybe we need to get rid of the managers and instead take turns being manager.

I'll focus three days a week and manage one day a week. The other four members of my team do the same. The fifth day is for meetings, and if we don't need all day for that, it's for going outside.

Good managers should be asking you what you need and removing organizational roadblocks to make that happen. They should be in a lot of meetings because they’re shielding you from meetings, filtering the important things and bringing them back to the team in some sort of regular format that isn’t a daily meeting.

Most managers are not good managers, however.

I am fortunate enough to have this kind of manager.

* Most managers are not good managers, however*

There it is.

I deliberately chose to step back from management and went back to being an IC despite getting feedback from my former direct reports that genuinely almost made this cynical fucker cry about what a great manager I was for them.

Truth be told, as much as I really enjoyed the presence of, and admired the people reporting up to me and what I was able to do for them, and how they made ME a better manager and engineer, I never want to be a manager ever again.

By my own standards, I’m not good at it and the stress it brought, eh. Just not compatible. Glad I learned that lesson. I’d much rather be on the doing end, the next time I find myself in management will be when I finally have the means to cut loose and work for myself full time.

As the article mentioned, managers are dumping management tasks on subordinates (because they themselves are overworked).

I just got a big dose of this at a client I just left (because they were working us way too hard). They have a career track that includes not being a manager but instead a principle engineer or whatever. The managers were punting management work to these principle engineers. People who had already decided they were not managers and were not going to focus on those skills. They were basically forced into it, micromanaged people like crazy, burning everyone out.

This, after rebooting the project a few times because they couldn't get traction. As soon as the project got traction and was getting accolades this happened. Their senior lead developer (at the cusp of being forced into management) left the same time I did. I would be surprised if the project is not in crisis mode soon.

The people distracting (PMs, Managers) are often the ones charged with getting the most out of the people being distracted, and honestly I don’t even think it’s their fault. They don’t see the work happen unless they are in a meeting where it’s done, and their schedule is mainly meetings so that is their impression of doing work.

http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

FTA:

When you're operating on the manager's schedule you can do something you'd never want to do on the maker's: you can have speculative meetings. You can meet someone just to get to know one another. If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why not?

Here's why not:

Taken in context of the essay written, this amounts to optimizing my time due to a lack of my superiors optimizing theirs. Taken on its own, I don't really care how my managers choose to spend their time as managers. But when the power differential surely speaks to the reality that managers will always concern themselves with what I'm doing-perhaps by nature of the manager/subordinate relationship-I think I'm in the right to expect some kind of reciprocity in making time for one another.

Good managers make the time for their subordinates. Average managers stumble upon the free time. Poor managers constantly reschedule.

I'm not against getting to know my coworkers and making time for general socializing as a means of "taking a break", but in the context of "makers schedules" and "manager schedules"...sorry. No.

I don't (necessarily) disagree with the essay (at least not as much as I usually reserve a certain amount of reticence for Grahamisms), but the suggested solution...eh. I need to hear a better motivating reason than this because this isn't about some hypothetical problem between me and people I'd like to get to know via "speculative meetings". This is about managers demanding so much of our time via "just in case we need you" meetings and turning right around asking us to be productive and meet deadlines in spite of said meetings.

Is it possible that some companies with e.g. VC funding behave in a similar way to an employee who counts dollars on the clock, padding time with busywork to make it through another payday?

There may be a much broader culture of unproductivity, which manifests in this and other ways.

I've been working remotely as a developer for 11 years, and I'd quit any job that requires an average of more than 3 video calls a week. It's just not possible to get things done in that environment, and if management can't protect you from that level of unnecessary distraction, it's a red flag that the company has bigger management or trust problems.

even daily standups? or do you mean 3 video calls outside DSU?

Daily standups are far too much. There's simply no need to discuss so much. It's a waste of everyone's time. I do one video standup per two week sprint, with a daily text status update and the end of each work day that's something short, sweet and human like, "Hey, I worked on automated testing all day today. There were some tests that were flaky in Safari, but I finally figured it out. Will start on the Firefox bug by mid-day tomorrow. Feeling slightly behind on this sprint, but I think we'll still manage to get everything done on time as long as I don't run into more problems with the tests."

Daily standup might be the worst offender.

People end up waiting until standup to ask questions, creating a culture that doesn’t simply message one another for simple things. If something is brought up in standup, now product and project mgmt will want to understand and weigh the value of something that could literally be as simple as, “I need access, how do I generate a key?”

Also I hate being interrogated every morning about what I did the day before.

Daily standup removes the need to remember anything, or even picture the system/ product in your head because you can just ask someone else every day and get what you want. No need to think! Process over people!

Stand-ups in general are cancerous enough to warrant an outright ban. That way, if you do have them they have to be conducted clandestinely and very quickly.

My personal experience is that daily stand-ups are mostly pointless, distracting, and a detriment to productivity. IMO, if you absolutely need them, you should prefer doing them in a daily Slack thread, asynchronously.

Stand ups are just peer pressures on productivity with management oversight. I better have something to say at the standup or say X was completed or it'll look bad at me, not the effort.

In theory standups are great because the team works together to solve blocking problems and doesn't worry about productivity. In practice it's just another mechanism to push productivity.

And yet, this ritual is key to propping up people that actually accomplish nothing for long periods of time.

Tomorrow I have 6.5 hours of meetings. Today was about 4 hours.

Estimate the salaries of the people in the meeting and calculate the cost to the company. Fun to think about while listening the two managers argue about a detail while the rest 8 people wait politely.

Come to think of it, if you have 8 people in an hour long meeting, then the meeting will cost at least the lowest paid participant's daily salary (assuming 8 hour work day).

I actually sat in a meeting a few years back as a consultant - with 6-7 other consultants and 1 or 2 employees of the company we were assigned to - all billing $150 to $500/hr - as we discussed which cost center we could bill the $35/month SAAS tool we needed to use for the project we were developing.

We probably spent 3-4 years with of those SAAS fees in that one 45 minute meeting discussing which cost center should be billed.

Client (a fortune 50 company) didn't see any issue with this.

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