Comment by nyrikki
1 day ago
> Everybody in a meeting should give input or they shouldn’t be in the meeting
At several companies I was at this rule would have removed the last slack time I had to fix, refactor and maintain systems.
I actually asked a manager to add me to a monthly 2 hour 50+ people reoccurring meeting just so I could do some refactoring.
I guess that is a form of Malicious compliance.
I think the better rule is to empower people to remove themselves from meetings they don't need to attend. Inviting anyone and everyone in case they might be needed is a real problem at most big companies I've worked for or with.
Agree - and it can come about out of positive intentions -- "I know you care about the XYZ Component and we didn't want to leave you out of the loop about our plans for it"... but if in fact your inclusion was primarily just to keep you apprised, it may have been better to send you the briefly summarized agenda ("We plan to add a reporting feature to the XYZ Component which will store data in ... and be queryable by ... and are discussing how to build that and who should do it") and if you decline because you have no input to provide, just send you an "AI Summary" or transcript after the fact so you know what they ended up settling on. That's what I hope the addition of AI stuff to tools like Zoom will lead to, ultimately.
Get your other developers in on it and schedule a 2 hour "dev sync" and then just don't meet.
I don't understand this at all, why not just skip the meeting and spend the time refactoring? If you need the meeting as an excuse to prevent somebody else from claiming your time, it's time to look for a new job... that's super dysfunctional.
Even if it’s the latter, it doesn’t make sense, because you can just block off time in your calendar as « Focus Time » to work on things.
At most companies you can’t see other people’s calendar event names, but even if you can, I highly doubt someone would look at an event and overlap it without asking you first.