

Why Do Developers Hate Meetings? - bloggergirl
http://www.quora.com/Who-do-people-hate-meetings

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jarin
10 minute "What did you do yesterday, what are you doing today, and do you
have any roadblocks?" meeting first thing in the morning = good

2 hour "We need to figure out how to monetize our shelf space and maximize
user engagement" meeting right after lunch = bad

Developers hold productive micro-meetings all throughout the day via IM or
Campfire.

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michaelpinto
In my experience it's not that developers hate meetings, but they hate
meetings that don't produce anything. You'll developers working out a spec on
a white board for hours on end — they do that because they love to do that. On
the other hand bring them to a meeting about project management and they feel
that you're cutting into code writing time.

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bloggergirl
That's an interesting insight. In my experience, very few meetings produce
anything. If a company wants to keep its developers happy but needs to have a
few of them in meetings (e.g., to answer questions, comment on process), what
to do???

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makecheck
The net results of many meetings could be summed up in E-mail threads or
things like wiki documents. So often the first step is to prefer those
mechanisms. (Bonus points if people in the organization can be trained to be
brief, so that threads and documents are focused.)

The net contributions of many people in a one hour meeting could often be
summed up in 30 seconds, and it's even worse when those people _had no
relation to anything else that was discussed_ (and therefore had no other
reason to be there). So step 2 is to realize that either the meeting was meant
for fewer people, or should have allowed attendees to speak for 30 seconds and
then leave.

The very worst possible meeting is one that is at preset intervals, for preset
lengths, with no agenda (e.g. weekly one-hour meetings with 20 people), that
starts late with phone and projector problems. That is essentially telling
your employees that you don't care about their time.

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JonnieCache
pg wrote what may well be the definitive work on this subject:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html>

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LanceJones
I'm a UX manager at a software company, and I am definitely NOT a fan of
meetings (most people think that managers like meetings). My team is comprised
of writers, designers, and developers... all valuable employees whose time I
respect, and they all say the same thing about meetings... that they're an
interruption to their productivity and creative "flow". I try to shield them
from as many meetings as possible and they often thank me for it.

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olihb
I think everybody hates meetings that are not focused. From my own experience,
the worse meetings are when it's not relevant to my projects, workload or
interests.

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ratsbane
PG described the worst thing about meetings in the makerschedule essay. Two
other meeting evils:

\- Meetings that expand to fill the time scheduled for them

\- Meetings with more people than required to solve the problem at hand

