Comment by katzgrau
10 hours ago
There’s a lot of meeting hate here and as a developer, I used to feel the same.
But after bootstrapping a SaaS company and at times struggling through cross-team execution, I’ve come around. A short weekly standing meeting, like the one described in the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution, is actually a powerful tool.
Without it, maintenance, admin, and firefighting will expand to fill the entire week. The meeting forces space for focus, clear commitments, and basic accountability.
It’s not obvious early in your career, but once you’ve got some scars, it starts to make a lot more sense.
This is the way! I run a remote only company, and when the game is on, one meeting per week, 30-60 minutes (at most!) is essential!
However... there has to be an agenda, the agenda needs to be followed, and meeting monopolizers need to be cut short. (americans are very good at expanding meeting participation and to take up all the time, care needs to be taken with them. This is cultural, they love to talk.)
That's about all that is necessary. Then individual syncs can be done per email the rest of the week, or phone in case of emergencies.
I also run an online company but I dont like meetings it is always re hashing things already shared and written before. But it seems like a lot of humans absolutely need meeting to properly collaborate. Why ?
I agree (except about Americans) but would add that the agenda should be published up front, e.g. in the meeting invitation.
I strongly agree that the agenda must be published upfront.
Moreover, when something more substantial must be discussed, e.g. the accomplishment of some project milestone, or a work plan or a proposal for new features or for a new project, a document should be prepared and sent in advance to the participants with the description of the obtained results or of a plan or of a proposal, enabling them to prepare suggestions for improvements or for alternatives, or criticism.
Nonetheless, I may agree with what the previous poster said about Americans and conciseness in meetings (i.e. the lack of thereof).
> A short weekly standing meeting
The problem is that management will see that it's useful, and embrace this meeting. It doesn't take long until the meeting is no longer short, switches up to daily, isn't standing because there's too many people and/or everyone is WFH.
I think one of the biggest problems in management is that managers are super focused on making their management tasks easier at the expense of their reports actually doing the work. In general, they prefer a meeting with 20+ or 50+ engineers in one place, each giving 1 minute or longer feedback, because they can do that every day and in an hour, they know what everybody is doing. But they seem completely oblivious to the fact that now every engineer has an hour less time to do actual work, they've been taken out of their flow state to attend an hour long meeting of which maybe 2 or 3 minutes is relevant to them, and they've tuned out of everyone else's progress reports because it doesn't impact them at all. Management simply don't see that 16% of the productive day for the entire team is wasted, because it's made their job marginally more efficient.
I've worked in exactly one place were the standups literally were a small group of engineers and one PM, and it was literally "I'm working on this, no problems" or "I hit this issue, I'd like to chat to X about it after the meeting" and the entire thing was over in 2-3 minutes - nobody sat down because there was literally no point. In that company, the manager would just catch up with each personal individually to find out what everyone was up to, taking maybe a minute or 2 each day AND after checking whether they were in the zone or happy to be distracted. In that place, once every 2 weeks we'd also have an hour scheduled 1-to-1 about anything the manager or report wanted to discuss about non-project things, but that could end early if nobody had anything else they wanted to discuss.
> Without it, maintenance, admin, and firefighting will expand to fill the entire week. The meeting forces space for focus, clear commitments, and basic accountability.
Author here. You said it better than I did in the post.
It's really about creating space!
No, your claims are too broad, generalizing from specific instance (apparently a small company, high accountability, no diagonal lines or conflicting organizational incentives). A standup meeting to try to ensure visibility and accountability are necessary but by no means sufficient; you only get as much of those as the underlying company culture, plus the seniority of the person running the meeting. People can still turn the thing into a talking shop, filibuster, perpetually roll deadlines, specs that are never fully nailed down, "hidden dependencies" that no-one is held responsible for not spotting, cross-department issues that don't have a single owner. I've been in situations multiple times where I had to call a meeting to diplomatically shine a light on different branches of an org not working well together, or sometimes even actively undercutting each other (or working on a cost-plus/time-and-materials basis).
So your claim "One effective solution is to schedule a standing meeting... works across organizational boundaries too." is way overly strong. Just because you've had an instance or two where it did work, doesn't mean that works in general, for other orgs.
Meetings may or may not be forcing functions, depending on the organization. Sometimes they are. Oftentimes they aren't.
The better mantra to ask is "Who in this organization is actually incentivized to make this project succeed... where specifically is there accountability?" Sometimes, believe it or not, the org doesn't have much of that.
Instead of your claim, I'll tell you the key organizational symptom that I found actually determines accountability, or lack of: (discreetly) find out what happened to the careers of CXOs/VPs/directors/execs/managers on projects that failed: were they promoted/ given bonuses/ retained/ demoted/ reassigned/ fired? (sometimes they get a token punishment/demotion, leave, go found a startup/sit on the beach, then get reacquired at a higher level than what they left).
Author here. I wrote about context being important for any advice you read years ago: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2020/01/13/context-is-kin... I could put such a disclaimer into any post I write, but I think that'd be a bit tedious.
I will say I've seen this work across organizations as small as 2 person startups and as large as 100k organizations (though, to be honest, I was embedded in a team as a contractor in that org).
I'm sure there are orgs where it doesn't work, which is why I said "One effective solution is to schedule a standing meeting".
I like your perspective--accountability is the basis; the meeting is one method, but I'm sure there are others. Do you have other solutions that you've seen work?
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> A standup meeting to try to ensure visibility and accountability are necessary but by no means sufficient; you only get as much of those as the underlying company culture, plus the seniority of the person running the meeting.
Not to mention that having a standup doesn't actually solve the need for 'maintenance, admin, and firefighting'. If your team needs to do a lot of maintenance and firefighting, that work will eat up the whole week until you pay off the technical debt that's accruing it. A meeting won't solve that on its own. If the owners don't prioritize investing your time in paying debt down, you'll be firefighting until the end of time.
Weekly meetings and weekly activity reports are typically fine and useful.
What is bad is that there are plenty of companies that want daily meetings and/or daily activity reports, which always greatly reduce the productivity of developers/designers for no benefits.
meetings are a tool, and when used properly, an indispensible one at that. meetings bloody meetings by John Cleese is an absolute must-watch for conducting great meetings.
however, if all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail: it's when meetings are used inappropriately or to solve the wrong problem that it becomes an issue, and many people make this mistake, which is why meetings end up so universally despised and get such a bad rep
This sounds like something straight from LinkedIn...
> Without it, maintenance, admin, and firefighting will expand to fill the entire week. The meeting forces space for focus, clear commitments, and basic accountability.
Release manager, or whoever manages incidents, will just schedule weekly meeting of their own.
> There’s a lot of meeting hate here
meetings have their role, but the hate at least in my case is when they become a distraction and/or a waste of time. They are susceptible to the organizer and to the highest ranking person in the room and many managers are not up to the task of doing it correctly.