Hacker News Reader

Comment by WastingMyTime89 | Hacker News Reader

I have been both an engineer doing engineering work (I hate the word “maker”) and a manager. I found this article infuriating and still do.

This article is a pure product of this period when software developers thought themselves as extremely special and above such petty issues as having to attend meetings. It’s entitlement masquerading as wisdom. The truth is everyone has to balance their time between obligations and slots they can allocate to do longer work. Writers have to meet their editor. Artists have to plan for the logistic of their exhibitions. That’s part of life.

You can work for a bit do something else and get back to what you were doing. If you can’t that’s an issue with you, not the nature of your work.

View on HN

I don't know about infuriating but I share your perspective.

At the end of the day, most of us expect to get paid for the code we write. At some level, there is a customer who is ultimately paying for this code. You need to communicate with them via some means or you won't be able to do your job effectively. Either you talk to your team on some recurring/ad-hoc basis, or you get to talk to the end customers directly.

Which one would HN prefer? Filtered internal comms channels where you get to whine and moan about basically everything, or the direct fire of the actual customer where everything is on their terms always? What would ruin your "flow" more? A boring 30 minute call where you were informed the customer is "not happy" or a 2 hour, unfiltered rant session from the live customer?

I don't think anybody is suggesting elimination of all synchronous meetings from a workday. There should just be preference given to long, uninterrupted blocks of time where deep work can be done. Many teams even have a single day of the week dedicated to "no meetings" now to provide makers with at least one guaranteed day for deep work.

At the end of the day, what matters is getting your job done. If you hire someone, would you rather they be unproductive and avoid talking about this for fear of appearing entitled? Or would you rather they tell it like it is and get stuff done?

Attending meetings is part of doing your jobs. Meetings exist for a purpose. The whole attitude that all meetings are somehow a waste of your precious time show that you both are unable to grasp what’s happening and are strongly entitled. I’m not surprised to see it fully on display here considering the readership but you have to understand that it’s why people who interact with developers find them hard to work with and is largely responsible for the stereotype of the software dev as some kind of eternal adolescents you see on display in most business.

There is a difference between:

A) “All meetings are a waste of time.”

B) “There are productivity tradeoffs between a managers schedule and makers schedule.”

The article is pretending that having a meeting not only waste half a day but actually waste a full day. Your point B is not reflective of the actual content we are discussing.

The article suggests that makers tend to take on ambitious projects that take large blocks of time to complete. This is objectively true; even today. Most of what is built is ambitious or takes large chunks of time.

Editing some text or repositioning a button or something trivial is 30-min and does not require thought, but most everything is not this. Most everything involves large chunks of time and interrupting this chunk is certainly a disaster.

Most meetings can be done async with a few bullet points. So much time wasted on idle talk that is not productive.

- both a maker and manager

Reply on news.ycombinator.com