I agree there are some useless meetings. I would, however, classify more meetings as unproductive but important. That represents a different problem and necesitates a different solution but seems to beguile engineers. Does an unproductive meeting need to be cancelled or fixed?
Finally, I have experienced meetings where one person who believes the meeting is useless and just runs it off the rails. The meetings can BECOME useless because of that person's behavior. Others may see it as valuable for alignment, clarification, ideation, many other reasons even if you don't. In my experience, the people who are willing to act on a belief a meeting is useless more frequently misunderstand what the goal of a particular meeting is, misunderstand the role of meetings in engineering/technical work, or just are generally premaddona assholes.
Declaring a meeting useless for everyone is rarely a productive solution. The idea that technical work is primarily and individualized activity is about as outdated as waterfall project management.
You can constructively engage in a conversation of 'what is the purpose of this meeting in the short and in the long term' without talking about the cost. If we reduce everything to that metric of observability then coders should be paid in lines of code written not thinking done.
If this happens I'll do well. Just don't ask how I "write" the code that gets submitted.
Many organizations cannot handle discussing or even innocently questioning their communication problems openly.
I would never use this calculator, for the record. There are ways to redeem the time, including trying as much as possible to make the bad meeting worthwhile.
- We have 10 min standup every day
- We have 30 min sprint planning every week
- We have 30 min retro every week
Beyond that we will talk as necessary between people. In reality pushing back is pretty effective at determining if a meeting is important. If they don't move it for you, you didn't need to be there.
At my workplace we now have 90 minute daily standups because it was perceived the employees are not doing enough quick enough. It has obliterated any hope of progression in a single work day without overtime (unpaid!) since these typically will run over by a long margin, eating up what little time we had for actual development.
I want to work where you work.
sometimes it can be hard to break out of routines and have frank conversations, and it's certainly easier to complain behind closed doors, ignore or otherwise be passive aggressive... but all that does is create a toxic environment where fear, speculation and rumor rule the day. i think the correct answer is to pull the organizer aside and provide direct feedback on the utility of the meeting... 9/10 times, they will listen and respond in a positive manner.
email the organizer, making sure to CC everyone, asking for the meeting's agenda.
a more congenial approach would be to provide your understanding of the agenda, perhaps as a question, and then asking if there's more or another alternative: "it sounds like we're going to collectively make a decision on [x]. is there anything else on the agenda for this meeting?" even better if you do this one-to-one and, if needed, suggest the meeting invite be updated accordingly.
It seems like your job is more meeting-centric than the average engineering job. I'd hate to juggle meetings daily instead of working on the same problem for hours uninterrupted.
Making the meeting host compete feel like they're constantly competing for your attention is just really demoralizing.
Or, even better, normalize showing up to a meeting, and if you feel like it is useless/irrelevant to you after 10 minutes, just stand up and leave. You never know ahead of time if the meeting would be useless for you or not (ok, in a lot of cases you do, but more often than not it isn't super-decisive). But after 10 minutes, it becomes a bit more obvious whether you would benefit from staying or not.
Saw a senior engineer from our sister team do it once, then he explained his logic to me later regarding this. At first i was afraid, thinking "ok, he is a senior engineer, he can do whatever without negative consequences, and I don't think I can afford to do it as an entry level engineer [at the time]".
One day I tried it, and never looked back. No one had any issues with it, and it had made me so much more productive. Then a new manager for my team came along, saw me do it once, and asked me about it, like "why did you do this". I explained to him the exact same reasoning as for why I was doing it. He ended up having zero issues with it after my explanation either, and had even mentioned this approach to other people on the team who were struggling with meeting overload as a recommended approach.
This is why meetings in general are net negative. There’s little need for scheduled meetings. Just do one stand up per week, ad hoc calls when needed, but mostly just let people work.
I tried doing this. Was told I need to attend more meetings. So I asked how many? They said, "it depends". "It depends on what?" "On how often we want to meet."
So whatever the hell that means. I think I need to meet every week for some reason. Just to prove 'something'
I had a colleague with this problem. Kept being told that they had to attend meetings and they thought the meetings weren’t useful.
They left and solved their problem, but the group problem remains.
Sometimes I can’t fix cultural issues despite working really hard, so moving to a new team or company is the best move. Also, I think there are people who like lots of meetings so it may be a function of people finding the right culture fit for them.
You can also accept a meeting invite with the proviso that you will participate if you are actually needed.
If you have a problem, learn to handle it like a professional adult. Talk it out. Propose alternatives. If you find yourself in a 127-person Zoom call that isn’t relevant to you, just leave and send a note to the meeting organizer that you’re not available for such meetings and ask them to please let you know if anything comes up that is specific to you.
Making a scene by holding up an app and being passive aggressive about the point you’re trying to make is not a productive way to communicate. It likely won’t have the intended effect, either.
Correct, I simple ask if I can be excused from the meeting.
Which I find myself doing occasionally, since a lot of people do not bother looking at anyones busy/ free calender and I end up being quadriple booked
- it's work time. I don't really mind how I spend my working hours. It's 8h and no more (well, with WFH, it's more like 5h or so, but the point stands)
- if the meeting is pointless, I just disconnect. So, the meeting is actually like a break for me. I grab a coffee and let it go
- if I have too many pointless meetings that do not let me do "my job" (but remember, pointless meetings are your job as well!), well let it be. In the standup of the next day I will clearly state: "I spent 2h attending meeting X". If someone asks "why aren't your Jira issues done on time?", I just answer "Oh, I was working on something else (meeting X)".
So, pointless meetings are actually not bad. Just keep your soul free of noise, work (code) when you have time for it.
Also, if you think you are attending too many useless meetings, it’s your responsibility to let them (or at least your direct report) know. They might not be aware that you aren’t needed.
Fair point. I don't think I'm at work to "just clock my 8h". I actually enjoy what I do most of the time; it's just that I don't fight anymore against, imho, pointless company bureaucracy. But above all, my philosophy is: work is work; sometimes it's enjoyable, sometimes it's not.
> Also, if you think you are attending too many useless meetings, it’s your responsibility to let them (or at least your direct report) know. They might not be aware that you aren’t needed.
Sure; I never said "don't give feedback". I was just assuming the scenario in which pointless meetings are "inevitable" for whatever reason and we have to come up with (although I know it's a joke) apps like the one we see here in this post.
Must be nice to not have hard deadlines while on salary.
But if the reason I don't get a salary raise is because I don't deliver on time because I am working on other company-related stuff (i.e., attending meetings) then either: a) I didn't communicate this clearly to my manager ("hey, I spent a significantly portion of my time on meetings") or b) the company thinks meetings "is not work".
So, if it's "a)", it's my fault; but if it's "b)" then I probably already quit (who wants to work in such a company?)
What I realized over my relatively long IT career is that maybe developers just don’t get why meetings are necessary. Not saying all meetings are equally useful, many of them are in fact a waste of time. But many engineers are narrow-minded and outright reject all the benefits of getting into the same room and discussing a problem.
I am not a fan of meetings, but I like a weekly meeting for a project or our department. What I don't like is pointless meetings where things are repeated that are written more concisely in the gitlab issues or in an email everybody should have read.
The point of meetings is to bring all the relevant people onto the same information level and discuss potential issues, however a lot of the more detailed stuff should be consumed beforehand individually.
Client, prospect and customer meetings are absolutely necessary and you should prioritize those no matter what.
Internal time wasting meetings are the pinnacle of the art of not working and should be avoided at all costs.
I’m yet to experience a 100% black-and-white phenomenon in the Universe. We’re all not equal in how we see the work and how we process the information. That’s why we need to compromise and try to underhand why meetings are scheduled.
Ok, suppose programmers are 100% exempt from the internal meetings. Engineering managers and product owners then go ahead and just make every single decision there is. How’s that? The meetings are often used for people to sync on the progress and issues. Moreover, technical people can give their input and help non-technical ones to better understand the limitations, issues, etc.
Also customers can waste your time!
No matter how you say it to those kinds of people, expressing that meetings are keeping you from getting engineer-related work done will be viewed extremely negatively.
I’ve been in IT decades and still don’t know what the best answer is.
If the person who schedules the meeting does this, it opens up a conversation where you can say "I read what you sent out - everything looks good and I don't think I'm needed for this meeting".
Wouldn't want to work at a place with a culture like that.
You may want to consider renaming the tool, it's overlapping with getclockwise.com, which is quite popular.
Yes, sometimes that's hard due to being in a toxic environment, but in that case, a passive-aggressive measure like a meeting cost calculator will go over like a lead balloon too. (Source: I tried ;)
Same goes for "multitasking". If a meeting doesn't have value, don't attend, or leave as soon as that's clear.
If most meetings have no value to you, have a hard look as to why. Sometimes, it's because there's a meeting culture. But sometimes, it's because you're missing the point. (for meeting organizers: Spell out the damn point in the agenda, will you? You have an agenda, right?)
There’s lots of people who I think enjoy meetings because it demonstrates power. Calculating how much their meeting costs will make this worse because it’s easier to see how powerful a meeting is.
Separately, I don’t think that time consumed as a cost is unknown to participants so quantifying it doesn’t help much. Kind of like how calories on the Burger King menu doesn’t result in fewer double whoppers with cheese ordered.
To help prevent pointless meetings, what I do is reject meetings that don’t have agendas or clear objectives. I explicitly decline and say “I don’t know what this is for” and sometimes I find out what the reason is. Sometimes it changes my mind, but usually blank invites mean not so great meetings.
And then, I try to never schedule meetings unless there’s no other solution. And I send simple agendas, and if necessary, homework with a time estimate needed to process (eg, read this background before we meet). Sometimes if I’m feeling froggy, I’ll actually mention something about how it’s a 30 minute meeting with the context and background done beforehand or a 60 minute meeting if we want to walk through everything together.
I’m not sure how objectively valuable this is to the org, but it makes me feel better. And I’ve had multiple people comment that they appreciate it and use my reputation and approach in deciding whether to attend in my meetings.
Ten people losing twenty minutes sitting there waiting.
So many meetings have so many people that just lose time by going to the meeting and provide no updates or don't receive any new info just because the meetings are big and unwieldy
https://pilabor.com/blog/2021/04/tips-and-tricks-for-meeting...
Sometimes it leads the death of many man-month projects, or worse.
The terminal UI is one thing. From my personal experience, displaying the running cost of meetings in my Zoom camera would always be a bad idea. It's an optional feature of this program so it doesn't detract away from the entire idea, just saying that from my experience, managers already know that meetings cost money so displaying the cost of the meeting is pointless, you need to instead argue why your manager is wrong that the cost of the meeting is worth it.
Some empowerment required, cross-functional explanations on my part.
While in my country, engineers are paid around 50k$...
