Comment by 9rx
5 days ago
Interesting stuff! I wouldn't say a lot of it applies to my personal experience — much of it sounds more like what I do — but understood that no two organizations (or people) are alike.
> Meetings.
This seems to be where all of their time is spent as best as I can tell as an onlooker. But what goes on in those meetings, in your experience? "I worked on meeting with Mary to deal with X so that we could Y. No blockers." doesn't make it to standup, strangely enough. Which is sad as that is the only information I'd want to know about from a standup! I already know about what the developers are doing. Their work is highly visible.
I don't mean to imply that there is no reason for those meetings, or that they are somehow easy, but I'd love to know what it is all about. One part just because I'm plain curious, one part because I wonder what information isn't making it back to me that would improve the ability to do my job, and one part because I want to know if is something I'd want to take more involvement in.
> But what goes on in those meetings, in your experience?
It's all over the map, but here are some examples
- Weekly planning meeting with higher-ups to discuss what their priorities are for the next few weeks
- Weekly Product Status meeting to discuss what the teams accomplished over the last week, any blockers, etc
- Standups, for a while I was running them for (and managing) 3 different teams
- Meetings with design to go over mockups and point out issues before they reach the team ("That's not possible with our current data", "that is an expensive lookup currently", etc). Let them know what is/isn't possible (or rather, isn't possible without a bunch of work, almost everything is "possible" if you have unlimited time)
- (every other week) Process improvement meeting to go over changes we might want to make to the (growing) company, re-evaluate processes we have in place, etc.
- Weekly demo meetings, though developers are in this
- Twice a week architecture meetings, though developers are in this, discuss problems we need to solve and how we want to solve them. Equal parts "present an idea to the team" and "I have a hard problem, help!"
- Monthly check-ins with my direct reports
- Weekly Planning meetings with the team, though developers are in this
- One-off meetings with individuals or small groups to discuss a plan for a feature/bug/etc (so with some developers but not all)
- PR meetings, some PRs benefit from being on a video call with the developer so they can explain their reasoning/code/etc. Sometimes it's due to the size/complexity of the PR, sometimes it's due to the person who wrote the code (who might need more guidance than others, I don't advertise this)
- Solo PR "meetings", if I don't block the time out, my schedule will fill up
- One-off meetings with business about urgent issue or new ideas they've had
- Interviews, this is temporary but currently every free minute of my day is scheduled to talk with potential new employees
- One-off meetings to help a developer with something they don't understand or need help solving. This is rarely visible to the rest of the team as I don't advertise "Johnny needed my help yesterday"
- Production issues. I'm not sure how common this is or if your manager does this but I get tapped for the vast majority of production issues due to my familiarity with the code (and having written parts or at least worked with most of it).
- HR-type meetings, to discuss an employee. These are, thankfully, rare but when it does happen there are normally multiple over a week or two
- PIP-type meetings, another things I, obviously, don't advertise. When I need to meet regularly to talk with an employee about their performance
Not listed here is the "prep time" for these meetings. Some require little/no prep but others I'm expected to present info in and so I need to collect/organize it so I'm ready to go. Things like "ticket/backlog refinement" fall into this category as well. Sure I just have a 1hr planning meeting per team but sometimes it takes me that long or longer to go through things business wants worked on, fleshing them out, asking them questions to clarify, etc.
None of this is to say "Your manager's meetings are all legit", I have no way of knowing that. Just like I have no way of knowing how my experience lines up with other people in, ostensibly, the same role. "Manager" can mean a bunch of different things.
One small thing I'll tack on, sometimes I don't share the subject/contents of meetings because I know it will be depressing/distracting/unhelpful. I don't share every whim of the business side of the company or every bug mentioned because it's not what we are currently working on and it will be a distraction. Also, sometimes I have multiple meetings in which I'm pushing back/"fighting against" a proposed path forward. There is no reason to let the rest of the team know about that since it will only anger or distract them.