[HN Gopher] Shopify tells employees to just say no to meetings
___________________________________________________________________
Shopify tells employees to just say no to meetings
Author : ilamont
Score : 303 points
Date : 2023-01-03 13:04 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| chadash wrote:
| Before you comment about how idiotic this idea is, the end of the
| article says:
|
| _> The company said there will be a "two-week cooling off
| period" before anyone can reconvene a canceled meeting._
|
| The company isn't saying no recurring meetings. It is saying,
| "hey, we have too many meetings, let's do a reset and think
| carefully about which ones we really need... and by the way, it's
| okay to decline a meeting that you don't think you'll gain value
| from.
|
| I personally think that an occasional reset to figure out which
| meetings are actually necessary is a good idea. Also, sometimes
| there are personal/political reasons for joining meetings that
| you aren't going to get much out of. Having the top management
| say "try to cut down on unnecessary meetings" is a good way to
| give individual employees cover.
| tensor wrote:
| This is also a good way to do nothing for two weeks because
| teams can no longer efficiently coordinate. It's an incredibly
| childish approach to reducing unnecessary meetings, and I'm
| highly skeptical that it has any benefits at all other than
| making Toby feel special.
| rchaud wrote:
| This kind of heavy-handed approach feels like the kind of
| thing I'd do if I read HN religiously and took everything as
| gospel. There are few things more reviled in these realms
| than meetings and MBAs.
| alkonaut wrote:
| If a team requires a synchronous meeting to coordinate that
| feels like an opportunity to replace the meeting with
| something else that is more efficient.
|
| I don't know these circumstances but I completely agree with
| the premise of not allowing indefinitely recurring meetings.
| Perhaps it's better to simply limit them to say 10
| occurrences before they must be reconsidered, participants
| reevaluated and so on.
| [deleted]
| djur wrote:
| It is completely normal, acceptable, even desirable for a
| team of people working on a project to meet regularly to
| coordinate their efforts. That is how groups of people have
| worked together since time immemorial. It is unreasonable
| and dogmatic to expect that every team will naturally reach
| peak efficiency by working fully asynchronously.
| closeparen wrote:
| If people don't have 2 weeks of stuff they can do without
| a video call, those people are at best being kept on
| incredibly short leashes. At a certain density of
| meetings you aren't "coordinating your efforts," there
| are no efforts, all you're doing is having meetings.
| There has to be a space between where the efforts being
| coordinated actually take place.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> Having the top management say "try to cut down on
| unnecessary meetings"...
|
| ... sounds a lot like "make sure you're taking your vacation;
| we want employees to be recharged and energetic!", aka a feel-
| good CYA. My pointless, time-wasting, huge audience meetings
| are all owned by the top-half of management.
| bombcar wrote:
| The vast majority of meetings are scheduled by people "higher
| on the chain" than you - the number of "peer" meetings I have
| scheduled is ... zero.
|
| And everyone knows that refusing a meeting invite from a boss
| or boss-peer (or boss's boss) is career limiting.
| Cerium wrote:
| You should try calling a meeting.
| bbarnett wrote:
| What! Nonsense, I insist we have a company wide meeting
| on this.
| causality0 wrote:
| I don't know why you're being downvoted. There's an inverse
| correlation between the usefulness of a meeting and how
| senior the most senior person there is.
| enumjorge wrote:
| This feels like the tech news equivalent of eavesdropping on
| the couple sitting at the next table at a restaurant, and then
| concluding that because they're having an argument, their
| marriage must be in trouble.
|
| As you pointed out, it's not as strange as the headline makes
| it out to be. "Big organization finds effective communication
| difficult; tries something new" ... big deal?
| rchaud wrote:
| I'm not aware of other companies that fiddle with the Outlook
| admin calendar settings to improve productivity.
| djur wrote:
| I would find it pretty surprising if the CEO of my company
| unilaterally canceled my meetings. Hell, I'd find it
| surprising if my boss did it.
| rchaud wrote:
| > Having the top management say "try to cut down on unnecessary
| meetings" is a good way to give individual employees cover.
|
| It is a good way. Shopify should have considered doing that,
| and let managers make the call, instead of summarily killing
| all meetings remotely and leaving managers to reschedule
| everything from scratch.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Because of status quo bias, "do I need to create a 1 hour
| sync meeting for this" is a very different question than
| "should I cancel the 1 hour sync meeting for this". I'm
| generally on a very low meeting team, and I still have 2.5
| hours a week of meetings that I don't expect would be
| recreated if some calendar glitch deleted them.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > "hey, we have too many meetings, let's do a reset and think
| carefully about which ones we really need...
|
| it's automatically assumed/implied that this is an attempt of
| cost saving / reshift in priority. They'd rather have staff
| focusing on delivering products (code/completed projects) that
| will increase revenue.
|
| I wonder what they are struggling to ship (or if you can make
| the assumption that, the only time you'd cut meetings is when
| you want to prioritize shipping and the fact that you need to
| cut meetings means you're struggling to ship based on XYZ
| standards/opinions (CEO thinks things could get done/out the
| door faster/quicker?))
|
| I wonder what's on their internal roadmap that's exciting +
| going to "sizably" make a difference/grow the company/that they
| are "itching to ship".
|
| https://www.shopify.com/products
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopify
| sib wrote:
| > The company said there will be a "two-week cooling off
| period" before anyone can reconvene a canceled meeting.
|
| That sounds even worse. Talk about infantilizing your
| employees. "No, you don't know your job well enough to know
| that you need to do X, even if you think you do, we're not
| going to let you..."
| counttheforks wrote:
| Sounds pretty nice, good excuse to slack off for 2 weeks.
| "Sorry, didn't make much progress because I needed to discuss
| X with Y"
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| > Talk about infantilizing your employees.
|
| I've worked with some middle managers that I would classify
| as infants.
| Balgair wrote:
| I recently discovered that the most successful slide decks
| that I've pitched to upper management are eerily similar in
| style and verbiage to my kids' cardboard books. The higher
| up I go in an org chart, the lower down I seem to go in
| grade level. More pictures, bold primary colors, little
| text, etc. It's likely just some strange coincidence of my
| evolving style in .ppt, of course
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I've been told by folks at a Big 3 management consulting
| firm that everything for the c-suite has to be in
| Powerpoint--no matter how inappropriate that is for the
| material--and written like it's for a child, or they
| flat-out won't read it. Yes, read it. The decks mostly
| aren't intended to ever be presented, just read.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| In a similar vein, I think all managers should be periodically
| idled for a week or two (maybe rolling blackout style). If it
| turns out the value created by their group remains the same (or
| even goes up!), then the manager has apparently done a great
| job of rearing their employees to be self sufficient and the
| manager can be retired/recycled.
| tensor wrote:
| Shopify is a highly dysfunctional company when it comes to
| management. What you are hoping for in your comment is the
| command control style model where you have very highly
| independent teams that own their area and can move without
| outside interference (though note that this childish no
| meetings thing would still negatively affect the ability for
| even small efficient teams to coordinate well).
|
| However, from what I can tell shopify has the opposite of a
| command and control culture. They believe "everyone is an
| owner" which is another way of saying that no one is an
| owner. The result is that dozens of people need to approve
| every little change because there is no clear ownership
| structure and you can't just tell an adjacent team's manager
| to buzz off. In addition to getting sign off from adjacent
| teams, you need approval from your manager, their manager,
| the manager after that, all the way up the chain often to
| Toby himself.
|
| Everyone is afraid of being shit on from the level above that
| they all need to review. This behaviour is explicitly
| encouraged. In the end you get a bureaucratic and political
| nightmare where everything is designed and developed
| according to the loudest consensus opinion.
|
| Making things even worse, making data-based decisions is
| explicitly discouraged, I guess because it makes things more
| difficult for the loud opinions of main product drivers.
| andsoitis wrote:
| That won't work. Nothing remains static. A new leader will
| emerge or will need to be appointed for the team to remain
| effective over time.
| duckmysick wrote:
| This is perfect if we optimize for short-term value gains.
| Less so if we're looking for something long-term.
|
| Also, I remember a similar anecdote about an executive who
| gave his assistant two weeks off, took their responsibilities
| himself, and concluded he didn't need their services anymore.
| ergonaught wrote:
| Objections to this appear to reduce to, "I demand to continue
| wasting time repeating mistakes!"
|
| Likely to be one of those great ideas that gets ruined in
| implementation because that's how humans do things.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| You're saying this like any and every meeting is a waste of
| time, it's nonsense.
|
| I don't like meetings, I constantly try to remove meetings from
| my team's process, but that doesn't mean that I think the ones
| we have are not useful and a waste of time.
| ergonaught wrote:
| There is almost always a better solution available than
| "recurring group meeting" when the actual value and goal are
| clearly understood.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| I guess they don't use Scrum at Shopify?
|
| Otherwise it will be awkward to manually have to schedule:
|
| - Daily stand ups - Biweekly (or sprint_length) sprint
| planning/review/retros
|
| Those sort of things are built into scrum to keep your team on
| track and prevent problems from being withheld until it's too
| late.
| ResearchCode wrote:
| Scrum is kind of a big red flag these days. One technical
| status meeting a week is plenty (as you'd have pursuing a PhD).
| rchaud wrote:
| A sprint is timeboxed to 2 weeks. A PhD is not.
| rchaud wrote:
| A sprint is timeboxed to 2 weeks. Technically a PhD is as
| well, but with a few more zeros.
| ResearchCode wrote:
| But a project is. Get rid of the sprints.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| davidg109 wrote:
| Meetings absolutely need to be more scrutinized. In every last
| organization I've worked for, I've endured countless meetings
| wasting my time and others time with no agenda, endless fodder
| about staffs' kids hockey games, etc. which could have been used
| for productive time. Kudos to Shopify for recognizing this and
| hopefully instituting a sea change.
| singron wrote:
| https://archive.ph/LgL96
| SpeedilyDamage wrote:
| As a practical matter, this seems like it will only cause meeting
| makers to spend a bit of extra effort scheduling "non-recurring"
| meetings periodically. As someone who occasionally does schedule
| meetings, this really is not that challenging, especially if
| meeting volume is overall low; no conflicts, it takes seconds.
|
| Wouldn't it be better to measure outcomes and sentiment, and
| allow teams to adapt to what works for them? "Hey your team isn't
| really enjoying all the meetings you call, maybe try having fewer
| to improve your team's morale?" vs. "No recurring meetings for
| anyone!"
| bretthopper wrote:
| This is an editorialized title. Bloomberg's is "Shopify Tells
| Employees to Just Say No to Meetings"
| [deleted]
| waylandsmithers wrote:
| I agree with many here that this is heavy-handed, but my
| experience suggests that the symptom it's treating is very real-
| once a recurring meeting is created it never really goes away (in
| my experience sometimes it does if the meeting owner leaves the
| company or moves to a different job function).
|
| So I like the idea of throwing all meetings into the "konmari"
| method of tidying, where you completely empty your closets and
| then decide what should be kept, rather than trying to pick out
| which things should be discarded.
| taterbase wrote:
| An excerpt from the book Peopleware: Productive Projects and
| Teams.
|
| _Status Meetings Are About Status_
|
| _A real working meeting is called when there is a real reason
| for all the people invited to think through some matter together.
| The purpose of the meeting is to reach consensus. Such a meeting
| is, almost by definition, an ad hoc affair. Ad hoc implies that
| the meeting is unlikely to be regularly scheduled. Any regular
| get-together is therefore somewhat suspect as likely to have a
| ceremonial purpose rather than a focused goal of consensus. The
| weekly status meeting is an obvious example. Though its goal may
| seem to be status reporting, its real intent is status
| confirming. And it's not the status of the work, but the status
| of the boss._
|
| _When bosses are particularly needy, the burden of ceremonial
| status meetings can grow almost without bound. We know of one
| organization, for example, that runs daily two-hour status
| meetings. When participants are off-site during a meeting, they
| are expected to call in and participate by speakerphone for the
| whole duration. Nonattendance is regarded as a threat and is
| subject to serious penalties._
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| We have status update meetings that don't even include the
| manager. I also find them kind of suspect, but what's the
| explanation for those?
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Coordination, mentorship, peer review, banter and
| camaraderie.
| brailsafe wrote:
| "So what time is it where you are? Wow, 6am!? And the
| weather?"
| lucisferre wrote:
| Bad management.
| lucisferre wrote:
| Generally speaking, it is important for a well functioning team
| to have a status and sync-up meeting. When well run, it
| provides a way to batch what could end up being lots of
| individual ad-hoc interruptions throughout a week to a single
| point.
|
| Again, generally speaking, no one should have more than one of
| these meetings a week unless they really have a good reason to
| be actively involved in multiple independent teams.
|
| The real meeting-smell is when people have lots of weekly
| recurring meetings. If you're not a manager then two would be
| expected for most people, a 1hr team meeting and a 30min 1-1
| with whomever they report.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| If status isn't being communicated well enough through
| general chatter and the multiple _status tracking tools_ (
| "what do you mean, multiple?" everyone almost certainly uses
| at least Git and some kind of issue tracker, and it's not
| Git's main purpose but that definitely _should_ convey some
| amount of status-related info) we 're supposed to use daily,
| for the project manager to have what they need with nothing
| more than a couple impromptu "hey, what's up with X?"
| questions to the right people per week, something's seriously
| fucked up.
|
| Granted, more often than not, something's seriously fucked
| up.
| paxys wrote:
| I disagree. Most status meetings are useless at best and
| harmful at worst. If there really are blockers then people
| should be raising them immediately, not up to one full week
| later in the next scheduled sync. And if all blockers are
| addressed promptly as they should then what is the point of a
| delayed status update?
|
| Like the parent post mentions these kinds of meetings are for
| the benefit of managers and executives, not people working on
| the project. And this validation shouldn't come at at the
| expense of everyone else's time.
| Kaytaro wrote:
| Not every issue/question/complaint is an immediate blocker.
| Status meetings are great to queue topics or issues that do
| not need to be immediately addressed but if left ignored
| too long could snowball into a more serious thing.
| crent wrote:
| Don't you think that blockers affecting long term timelines
| will have ripple effects for higher level planning? Not
| everyone involved in that communication will be clued in to
| the day to day messages.
| notpachet wrote:
| Former Shopify dev. For what it's worth, this isn't the first
| time they've purged all recurring group meetings. It happened
| several years ago as well. Surprised the article doesn't make
| mention of that; maybe their source hasn't been at the company
| long enough to know.
|
| I won't comment on the merits of this at large, but it was
| annoying for me at the time because I had several recurring calls
| with external partners, which were all summarily axed. The bot
| didn't discriminate between meetings with 3+ Shopify employees,
| or 1 Shopify employee and 2+ external contacts. Hopefully they
| fixed that this time, because it was embarrassing having to
| explain to partners why all of our recurring meetings had gotten
| deleted.
| canucklady wrote:
| Also ex-Shopify. Tobi has done this a couple times, and IMO it
| comes from a place of narcissism. It's applied very arbitrarily
| across the entire org at random times. It very much feels like
| he wants to do something big and visionary instead of the
| boring day-to-day of actually managing like an adult, so he
| just throws bombs that generate headlines.
|
| Even for devs who didn't have a lot of external meetings it was
| a pain because the executive leadership is basically just
| undercutting the authtority of managers. When I was there
| Shopify's middle management was extremely ineffectual because
| devs basically had free reign and executives didn't put any
| effort into top-down management, they just focused on "vision"
| (like joining the doomed Facebook crypto project, or hiring
| interns based on their esports experience)
| zyang wrote:
| If you are a self-made billionaire you should be allowed to
| be a little narcissistic. But seriously this is more like a
| sign of panic. This quarterly numbers is going to be bad.
| a4isms wrote:
| "Free rein," it's an equestrian term.
|
| https://writingexplained.org/free-rein-or-free-reign-
| differe...
| idontpost wrote:
| [dead]
| JeremyBanks wrote:
| [dead]
| lvl102 wrote:
| Does Tobi even work these days? Sometimes I think he
| prioritizes playing video games over running a multibillion
| dollar company. It's frustrating because Shopify could have
| been much bigger as a result of the pandemic if they had
| someone with a bit more ambition.
| agd wrote:
| This seems odd to me, given that he looks (from the outside
| at least) to be one of the most ambitious CEO's around.
| E.g. Building a fulfilment network to compete with Amazon.
| JeremyBanks wrote:
| From the inside, he has an ego like Elon and focus like
| Dorsey. Several of his executives are very good at
| managing him, but he lives in and broadcasts from a white
| void detached from reality.
| thecoppinger wrote:
| Can I ask what your source for this is? Perhaps you're an
| ex-employee?
|
| I never worked under Tobi directly (or even close), but I
| was almost always thoroughly impressed with his
| communication and direction. I think I have a totally
| different take than the one you stated. The only axis I
| could see Elon & Tobi both sitting on is being members of
| the tres comas club.
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| Paging @xal
|
| /s
| yoru-sulfur wrote:
| Tobi still actively works on project within Shopify.
|
| I've worked on projects within the last year that had
| (pretty heavy) direct involvement from Tobi.
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| Tobi is cool as fuck.
|
| Your experience reminds me of the saying, sometimes "the
| best people to work WITH are the worst people to work FOR".
| ourmandave wrote:
| This reminds me of SNL's Undercover Boss Starkiller Base
| ~ Kylo Ren
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaOSCASqLsE
|
| Kylo Ren as Matt: "He said Kylo Ren has an 8-pack. That
| Kylo Ren is shredded."
| yowlingcat wrote:
| Are you saying this based on speculation, or based on
| having worked with or for him at Shopify?
| acomms wrote:
| Not OP, but I worked for Tobi when I was at Shopify. He
| is indeed cool as fuck.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| [flagged]
| granshaw wrote:
| Ooof I sense a juicy backstory here
| rr888 wrote:
| Not really, I come from a similar country. If you're
| ambitious - move to the US or UK, if you want balanced
| lifestyle - stay and don't work too hard.
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| Aussie?
| croes wrote:
| So classic german-canadian spirit: I will do it perfectly
| ... tomorrow.
| [deleted]
| gernb wrote:
| I'm sure there are other solutions but in my building tons of
| meeting rooms go empty because they've been booked for
| endless reoccurring meetings that no longer reoccure. The
| solution was to clear all of the reservations and say to
| rebook if you still have meetings
| tomhallett wrote:
| Was that solution "cancel meetings" or "clear all physical
| room reservations from meetings, but leave the meetings
| alone"? Sounds like there's a slight difference there.
| paxys wrote:
| It's bizarre to automatically cancel all meetings even if it is
| just company employees involved. Yes some meetings are
| pointless, but that doesn't mean _all of them_ are. People are
| just going to waste more time setting them all back up again.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > all recurring group meetings
|
| What about when you are working on something but you also
| message somebody on Slack/Teams a question and they instantly
| hit you back with "hey, instead of talking through it on chat,
| let's both stop everything we're doing and join a call"?
|
| By all means, I get it that sometimes (not sure how to measure
| it/what the answer is) it's quicker to "bite the bullet", hop
| on a call, screenshare, etc.
|
| but it does seem almost like a communication style preference.
| some people are super quick to want to jump on a call no matter
| what. and then the question becomes does it "impede" those
| whose communication style is not to jump on a call. it's like
| "rude" to say "i'd prefer not to jump on a call with you",
| forcing them to go from "call communication style" -> "type
| communication style"
|
| it really makes me wonder if some people are on 1 on 1 or small
| group calls basically 4+ hours out of the day (by choice. not
| scheduled meetings or on call incidents)
| dagw wrote:
| One advantage with "call communication" is that I can clear
| the problem in single 'block' of time and then get back to
| what I was doing know that the problem was put to bed. With
| "type communication" there is a risk I'll be pinging every 10
| minutes with "no that didn't work, got this error message,
| any other ideas?" for an undefined amount of time, constantly
| taking me out of my flow.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| On the other hand, there exist people like me. I simply can
| not do research while on a call.
|
| It has happened plenty of times that I had a simple
| question during my research, and the other person very
| helpfully decided to help me solve the problem, instead of
| just answering. The result is always that it takes hours of
| both of our times to get little done, and the problem
| actually gets solved afterwards because the research was
| not all done yet.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| It gets worse in huge orgs, each team tends to have its own
| protocols.
|
| To talk with "foreign" team, you have to figure out if they
| are teams / meeting driven, slack driven, use webex, only
| reachable via email, have their own weird thing, ignore
| everything that doesn't come through a manager, or only
| respond to service now tickets, or require a ticket AND and
| followup (via one of the above methods) to get them to look
| at the ticket.
|
| Figuring out how to talk to all the different people you need
| to takes several months and a lot of people leave before
| working it out.
|
| If you stay long enough you end up with an informal network
| of people in the company you know and trust and work with
| them to get anything done. Often these are helpful ICs
| working around non-responsive management.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| The one guy I knew who'd consistently turn a quick async 5-
| or 8- message Slack between two or three people into a
| 15-minute _scheduled_ phone call also double-booked a whole
| lot of his time and didn 't seem to do much aside from say
| one or two not-very-useful things in meetings before leaving
| in the middle of it for the next one.
|
| I think he just wanted shit to stick on his calendar for the
| sake of having a (more than) full calendar, which I'm
| guessing he found useful for advancement or deflecting
| criticism. Given some of the other stuff he did and said I
| think an awful lot of his behavior was one kind of career-
| hack or another.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I'm one of those people who almost always wants to
| immediately get on a call to solve a problem rather than
| typing it out. I get that it's tiring being on calls all the
| time but it's also much more effective to have a call for
| most types of work conversations, even as a software dev.
|
| Here's the way I look at it.
|
| If you are asking me a question where my reply isn't time
| sensitive, and it doesn't need to turn into a conversation
| about my answer, that doesn't need to be a call.
|
| If you just want a status update on XYZ from me, which may be
| a short conversation, that probably does not need to be a
| call.
|
| If you want my help with just about anything code related,
| that's a call. Screensharing is way easier for me to see what
| you are talking about, and it's much easier for us to be on
| the same page if we're both looking at the same thing.
|
| It's also a massive peeve of mine when someone asks a
| question on messaging, refuses to have a call, and then
| proceeds to take forever getting back to me. It's one thing
| it I say something like "Try this, this, and this. Let me
| know what works" and then I can get back to my work.
|
| But if I'm trying to step you through something and you
| sometimes reply immediately, sometimes in 5 minutes,
| sometimes in a half hour, then you get to have calls whenever
| you want my help from then on
| miked85 wrote:
| > _I 'm one of those people who almost always wants to
| immediately get on a call to solve a problem rather than
| typing it out._
|
| I say 'no' to random requests for calls every single time,
| I'm sure I'm not alone.
| Scea91 wrote:
| So how would you follow up in this situation when its you
| asking for help? Would you just say no and ask someone
| else, or try to figure the thing out by yourself?
| DangitBobby wrote:
| > It's also a massive peeve of mine when someone asks a
| question on messaging, refuses to have a call, and then
| proceeds to take forever getting back to me.
|
| I agree. When someone asks for help, I want to give them my
| undivided attention so we can get the stuff worked out
| immediately instead of having split attention so I'm not
| helping you as effectively and I'm not able to focus on my
| work. I want to sort it with a call because it's MUCH
| faster. Let me call you so I can return my full attention
| to my own shit.
| zippergz wrote:
| I really think "more effective" and "easier" are about
| communication styles and personality, not incontrovertible
| truths. I completely believe that to you it's much easier
| to handle these things on a call. Please believe that for
| me it's much easier to handle in a written format. Neither
| of these styles or preferences are wrong, and I reject the
| premise that either is better or worse. They're just
| DIFFERENT and people with a given preference proclaiming
| that it's THE easy way, or _the_ right way, is the source
| of a lot of conflict. I think we'd all do well to be more
| understanding and empathetic about the fact that different
| people are comfortable with different ways of
| communicating, and both sides (in reality there are many
| more than two sides) should try to meet each other in the
| middle more often.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > I think we'd all do well to be more understanding and
| empathetic about the fact that different people are
| comfortable with different ways of communicating
|
| This isn't about being comfortable it's about
| communicating clearly and effectively.
|
| Some (Many?) people are just not good communicators
| regardless of the medium. However we learn to communicate
| verbally long before we learn to write, and most people
| communicate verbally in almost 100% of the interactions
| in their lives.
|
| Additionally we first learn to talk about things with a
| lot of visual association. We use the shared ability to
| point at a visible thing and understand _this is what we
| are talking about_. You can even use this to communicate
| crudely with people who don 't speak or read any language
| that you do.
|
| Beyond all of that, writing clearly and reading
| comprehension are both additional skills that are needed
| for good written communication to occur, and all parties
| involved in the conversation need to have both of those
| skills to make it an effective communication style.
|
| Given all of that, I'd say that if _good communication_
| is your goal, and it should be, then defaulting to verbal
| communication with a shared context (screen sharing or
| in-person or something else) is realistically likely to
| be better than written communication in almost all cases.
| evanwise wrote:
| I was giving you the benefit of the doubt in the previous
| reply but this is so arrogant it's quite silly. If you
| want to force your preferences on others be my guest but
| don't be surprised when some people respond negatively.
| Verbal communication is often imprecise and vague. I
| can't count the number of times I've had to write up a
| detailed summary of a meeting to ensure that two
| different stakeholders didn't just take away what they
| wanted to hear from the conversation. There have been
| many times where having a paper trail of my conversations
| has me allowed to prove that, yes, I did indeed inform so
| and so about that problem weeks ago. There are also many
| people, myself included, who have difficulty processing
| and producing spoken language (either through speech and
| hearing impairments or ASD or any number of other
| conditions). Your preference is just that, a preference,
| not a universal truth.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I'm really curious what part of my previous post you are
| taking so much issue with that you're calling me arrogant
| for it. I don't feel like I said anything terribly
| controversial. Are you angry that I suggested that many
| people are actually not very good communicators? You gave
| a bunch of good examples of people being bad
| communicators in your reply, so I feel like you agree
| with me on that?
|
| I said most people learn to speak before they learn to
| write. Is that untrue?
|
| How about the idea that you can communicate (crudely,
| sure) with gestures even with people you don't share a
| common language with?
|
| How about the idea that both writing comprehensively and
| reading comprehension are high level skills that many
| people don't possess enough to truly communicate
| effectively via writing? Do you disagree?
|
| I don't think it's unfair to say that verbal
| communication is a cornerstone of the (near) universal
| human experience.
|
| This isn't just "my preference" is what I'm getting at.
| I'm pretty sure it's just the human default.
| evanwise wrote:
| Verbal communication may be the default option but there
| is a reason we often defer to (carefully constructed)
| written communication in complex domains. While emotional
| nuances may be clearer (to some) in verbal communication,
| the details of complex ideas often are not. Have you ever
| tried to "talk code" at someone without the aid of
| written code? It's woefully inefficient and prone to
| miscommunication. Writing allows you to externalize state
| and forces you to make explicit unstated assumptions that
| may simply go uncommunicated in verbal exchanges. Indeed,
| in your examples, the screen share on which the code can
| be read by both parties seems to be doing most of the
| clarifying work, that is, you are cheating and using
| written communication anyway.
|
| >I said most people learn to speak before they learn to
| write. Is that untrue?
|
| This is true but completely irrelevant. Most people also
| learn how to dance before they learn how to write, that
| does not mean interpretive dance is a suitable medium for
| conveying technical information.
|
| >How about the idea that you can communicate (crudely,
| sure) with gestures even with people you don't share a
| common language with?
|
| This is an edge case, and again, kind of cheating as you
| are attributing the benefits of visual aids to the verbal
| format. It does not provide any evidence that spoken
| communication is universally better.
|
| >How about the idea that both writing comprehensively and
| reading comprehension are high level skills that many
| people don't possess enough to truly communicate
| effectively via writing? Do you disagree?
|
| Reading comprehension and the ability to write cogently
| are basic skills of any knowledge work. I think people
| who are poor communicators are probably poor
| communicators regardless of medium, so this is a red
| herring. In general, the things you are saying are true
| to some extent but do not constitute an argument for
| verbal communication being universally better than
| written (your claim). Rather, even if I am charitable and
| ignore the clearly fallacious parts of your argument, at
| most you've shown that in some circumstances verbal
| communication has some advantages (a much weaker claim
| which does indeed seem rather uncontroversial).
|
| >I don't think it's unfair to say that verbal
| communication is a cornerstone of the (near) universal
| human experience.
|
| >This isn't just "my preference" is what I'm getting at.
| I'm pretty sure it's just the human default.
|
| So, those of us with hearing problems or speech
| impediments are simply inhuman? This is the arrogance I
| was talking about. Your assumption that your preferences
| and the way that you work most efficiently is universal
| when it is clearly not. Again, you are free to conduct
| yourself in this fashion but it won't make you many
| friends.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > This isn't just "my preference" is what I'm getting at.
| I'm pretty sure it's just the human default.
|
| Not OP, but if I were to guess, the "arrogant" part is
| the sentiment you express here combined a little bit of
| what comes off as "talking down" in how you argue to
| support it.
|
| > You gave a bunch of good examples of people being bad
| communicators in your reply, so I feel like you agree
| with me on that?
|
| Many of the examples of "bad communicators" were showing
| how written communication can work around some of those
| flaws.
|
| Good communication _is_ hard, and it involves not
| assuming that your preferred /standard methods are the
| best in every context. You have to be willing to adapt
| based on who you are communicating with and what you are
| discussing. If someone is barely literate, written won't
| work well except for pretty simple things. If hearing,
| (or quality connectivity, social anxiety etc.) are an
| issue then you'll struggle using just verbal.
|
| It also isn't always just one or the other. One person I
| work with really struggles with expressing ideas clearly
| in the written form, yet also struggles with
| understanding complex ideas if he doesn't have a written
| reference. Neither one of those issues is very uncommon
| in my experience.
|
| While I'll agree that verbal does serve a large role
| (probably largest in this specific context/scale), I
| don't agree with you apparent suggestion that it should
| be the default / universal method nor that other
| preferences / needs are invalid.
| mejutoco wrote:
| I agree. IMHO It is "easier" for the person asking to go
| on a call because the effort will be offloaded to the
| person being interrupted, whereas if the person at least
| tries to explain it properly in written form, they are
| the ones making the effort.
|
| When I ask for help I try to be the one doing most of the
| work, at the very least describing the problem
| accurately, and not forcing others to solve it on my
| terms.
|
| There are reasons to go on a call but to default to a
| call IMO is an expression of the dynamic above.
| nightpool wrote:
| This is definitely true, but I think there's a clear
| time-commitment component to it that you're missing in
| GP's answer: "It's one thing it I say something like "Try
| this, this, and this. Let me know what works" and then I
| can get back to my work. But if I'm trying to step you
| through something and you sometimes reply immediately,
| sometimes in 5 minutes, sometimes in a half hour, then
| you get to have calls whenever you want my help from then
| on"
|
| If the choice for me is going to be spending 5 minutes to
| help you debug something over screenshare where I can
| actually look at what's happening and get backtraces,
| context, poke at things , or it's going to be 10+
| messages over an hour and a half, then I think the
| screenshare is going to be better for the team most of
| the time, EVEN IF in a vacuum i prefer text-based
| communication.
| fhd2 wrote:
| Absolutely agree. For some reason, empathy seems to be
| above average lacking in successful people, so they
| struggle to understand that what works for _them_ will
| not work for _everyone_.
|
| That's probably what happened here, and I see it so
| often: CEO can work best under pressure, can communicate
| best in a call, whatever: In an almost selfless gesture,
| they aim to produce these good (for them!) conditions for
| others.
|
| And since they are unable to understand that this doesn't
| work for everybody else, they get (at least a bit) upset
| because the only remaining explanation is that those
| people don't _want_ to be productive, or don't _want_ to
| communicate effectively.
| evanwise wrote:
| I can understand the gripe about people who don't respond
| promptly during a chat and I too sometimes just call people
| like that, but in my experience much of the time when
| someone wants to "hop on a call" they essentially want me
| to hold their hand through something that can be easily and
| clearly explained in a few sentences of text (maybe with a
| link to an article). It seems to be more about personal
| comfort than any efficiencies in communication. Which is
| fine ultimately, but it should be recognized as a
| preference rather than some panacea for communication woes.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Yikes. No.
|
| For one, calls don't result in a searchable log. If I
| remember I talked to someone about Foo, I can search for
| that in my Slack history. If someone else asks me the same
| question about Foo, I can just send them a screenshot from
| our earlier conversation and we're done. I can also talk to
| 4 different people about four different issues at the same
| time in chat, but I can only be in a single call at a time.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| God, there's nothing worse than going back to find
| something I remember talking about in Slack and seeing
| the damn "call ended at..." thing right where I'm pretty
| sure it should be. Now let me go see if I took notes in
| some other program. OK even if I did I missed some stuff
| that would have been there if we'd just used the goddamn
| chat instead of having a call. Ugh.
| soiler wrote:
| I'm surprised more people aren't talking about this, I
| find it to be far and away the biggest reason for me to
| avoid calls. so many problems don't just happen once, and
| I find that the people who prefer to jump on calls are
| also the people who prefer not to write or share any
| documentation about what they know. I take notes often,
| but it's always easier to just have the logs available.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > I'm one of those people who almost always wants to
| immediately get on a call to solve a problem rather than
| typing it out. I get that it's tiring being on calls all
| the time but it's also much more effective to have a call
| for most types of work conversations, even as a software
| dev.
|
| I find it interesting that something measurable like this
| feels (not saying it is) like an opinion.
|
| It's my opinion (maybe because I'm a semi-effective text
| communicator?) that handling it "async" on chat is more
| often than not quicker. Maybe I'm wrong/biased? I wonder
| how something like this is measured. It does feel like
| people who want to not accept calls are in the minority
| based on my experience/the response this is getting.
| idontpost wrote:
| [dead]
| wheels wrote:
| I understand what you're saying, but for many of us, the
| threshold is much higher for a call.
|
| I tend to, and I know I'm not alone here, accomplish most
| of my work in very focused blocks that often take me
| multiple hours to get into. Often I'll go a whole work day
| without being able to get there, and often when I'm in the
| flow, I'll work 12+ hours because that's how I'm most
| productive.
|
| Your 5 minute call may cost me 3-6 hours of productivity.
| Once I've pulled my head out of what I'm working on, it's
| not a given that I can jump right back in. Sometimes that's
| worth it. It's possible not having that call may cost you 3
| hours of productivity. But because some people have
| different work styles, people who focus easily (or are
| working on easier problems) often don't think of the costs
| for those who don't.
| nightpool wrote:
| Okay, but in this situation _you_ are the one that asked
| _them_ for help with your code. There 's no "interrupted
| productivity" here if you're already blocked and waiting
| for advice or help with something. And besides, if you
| spend 3-6 hours working on completely the wrong thing
| because you were "in the zone" and that misunderstanding
| could have been resolved with a 5 minute call, then the 5
| minute call is worth it every single time.
| wheels wrote:
| You're assuming both people are working on the same
| thing. I'm assuming they're not.
|
| You're also assuming there's only one task the developer
| could be working on. That's a very rare scenario.
| nightpool wrote:
| The person you're replying to said "If you want my help
| with just about anything code related, that's a call.
| Screensharing is way easier for me to see what you are
| talking about, and it's much easier for us to be on the
| same page if we're both looking at the same thing."
|
| I think that's an entirely reasonable position. How does
| this depend on "If both people are working on the same
| thing"? If I'm trying to help you debug something, and it
| feels like pulling teeth when I know I could solve your
| problem with a 5 minute screen-share, I'm probably going
| to choose the 5-minute screenshare over the hour-and-a-
| half of 10 different messages spread out over random
| intervals. The GP said the exact same thing:
| It's also a massive peeve of mine when someone asks a
| question on messaging, refuses to have a call, and then
| proceeds to take forever getting back to me. It's one
| thing [if] I say something like "Try this, this, and
| this. Let me know what works" and then I can get back to
| my work. But if I'm trying to step you
| through something and you sometimes reply immediately,
| sometimes in 5 minutes, sometimes in a half hour, then
| you get to have calls whenever you want my help from then
| on.
| zls wrote:
| I'm having trouble following. Presumably the person
| you're interrupting is also doing serious-business-focus
| work.
|
| First off, since you're the one interrupting them, common
| courtesy suggests you should try to accommodate their
| communication preferences.
|
| Second, that five minute call is saving you 45m of text
| back-and-forth, which lets you get back to focusing
| faster. Not to mention saving the helper frustration, if
| you're regularly leaving five minute gaps between
| replies.
|
| And not even getting into the pernicious effects of
| having a culture where pseudo-synchronous instant
| messaging is broadly preferred over synchronous calls. In
| such cultures, all communication is so inefficient that
| everyone is in several conversations at all times; good
| luck ever achieving focus in that environment. There's a
| reason why Cal Newport hates Slack, and he literally
| wrote the book on focused work.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Second, that five minute call is saving you 45m of text
| back-and-forth
|
| Except five minute calls tend to last 60 minutes...
|
| > pseudo-synchronous instant messaging is broadly
| preferred over synchronous calls.
|
| Yep, you should go fully async.
| wheels wrote:
| I read the grandparent differently than you and
| _nightpool_.
|
| I read the first two paragraphs as general policy, and
| then the following lines as specific cases. To come to
| the interpretation you guys had, you have to assume that
| the fifth paragraph supersedes the first. It's possible
| that's how the author meant it, but that's not obvious.
| The first paragraph implies virtually always preferring
| calling, independent of which direction the help is
| flowing.
|
| Addendum:
|
| I don't love Slack, but my company is small, and the
| number of messages per day is in the 10s. Nevertheless, I
| have notifications disabled for _all_ messengers, because
| I also find them interrupting. I only see messages when I
| 'm switching windows anyway. I have the same on my phone:
| I only have visual notifications. I disable sounds and
| vibrate. When I'm either being particularly productive,
| or particularly struggling to focus, I close all
| communications apps.
| don-code wrote:
| I've noticed this as a cultural difference between "self-
| improvement" type engineers, and "dark matter" type
| engineers.
|
| Self improvers are the ones reading Hacker News, going to
| conferences, and generally trying to hone their skill.
|
| Dark matter developers are a class I've shamelessly stolen
| from https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-
| the-un... - which is definitely worth a read for the context,
| but the gist is that they're in this as a 9-to-5.
|
| The trouble comes where the two groups meet. We can all learn
| about how to ask better questions and more generally improve
| our communication skills, but it's vastly more difficult to
| _make someone care_ to do so. We've all seen and empathized
| with https://www.nohello.com/, but if you link it to a dark
| matter coworker who behaves exactly this way, chances are
| they will see it as an attack, not as a recommendation - and
| that attack reflects poorly on you, rather than on them.
| [deleted]
| DangitBobby wrote:
| So which one of these groups prefers a call?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Well yeah. Simply throwing a link at someone with no
| context is always going to come across as combative.
|
| I've had a lot of luck with "Hey, I appreciate that you
| always ask how I am when you're reaching out to me, but
| when you need something from me you can just ask upfront.
| You don't need to say Hi and wait for me to reply before
| asking. That way I don't keep you waiting and I can answer
| you as soon as I see your message"
|
| You don't have to tell them that you actually want to
| prioritize them based on their question, and absolutely
| will keep them waiting if you don't think it's urgent.
| scudsworth wrote:
| if you've actually sent this website in response to someone
| chatting you, i guarantee that they think you're an ass.
| self-improvers too
| molotovh wrote:
| I've always seen it as part of someone's profile or
| status message. But more often, it's just sort of a
| silently agreed-upon philosophy among our team. "Hello"
| without context isn't ignored, exactly, but it's
| automatically the lowest priority. That approach is
| pretty common across our whole team.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| It's "rude" to say you're busy? I too prefer calls (not with
| Teams though), just because you can look at code together and
| also have some interaction with remote colleagues. But if the
| other person has no time, no problem. Why would that be rude?
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > It's "rude" to say you're busy?
|
| I think this misses the point. How do you navigate this if
| you never want to do the voice call and always just handle
| it over text? I'd have to lie (every time they want to call
| me) saying "I'm busy". It's like you accepting the call is
| insisted/expected.
|
| I'm talking about preferring to never do a voice/video
| call.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > How do you navigate this if you never want to do the
| voice call and always just handle it over text?
|
| It's fine to have preferences but to expect your company
| and team to let you always do things your personal
| preferred way is pretty unrealistic. I don't think even
| the CEO of any company gets to have their way 100% of the
| time (although they almost certainly get their way more
| than anyone else in the company does)
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > It's fine to have preferences but to expect your
| company and team to let you always do things your
| personal preferred way is pretty unrealistic.
|
| Another way to say this is "if you work a remote coding
| job, it is expected that you hop on a video/voice call
| pretty much whenever one of your teammates/managers/co-
| workers wants you to whenever they have a question they
| don't feel like typing out" because it's basically just a
| socially accepted norm. The majority of people prefer you
| stop what you're doing, get into a socially
| uncomfortable/awkward situation, and you're "the victim"
| until the person on the other end will let you hang up.
|
| Repeat that 4+ times a day on average 5 times a week and
| that $120k/yr comfortable soft 8am-5am "IT" job starts
| looking less attractive/more soul sucking/5-10 years in
| you're dreaming of buying a van and moving into a cabin
| in the woods.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| Then... move to the woods?
| crent wrote:
| I don't think that's another way to state that... The
| original statement is a bidirectional statement. Meaning
| you should also be able to decline calls and the other
| party will have to respect your preferences some of the
| time. It's just basic balance and social graces, really.
| natpalmer1776 wrote:
| White lies like "I'm busy at the moment, can you send me
| a message describing the issue instead?" are socially
| normal and expected in a professional work environment.
|
| Why? -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| Someone else could probably explain (or disagree &
| explain) better than I can.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| <cynical-but-true>
|
| It's because we've built an industry-wide culture of
| never broaching a topic of feedback that _might_ be even
| a _little_ uncomfortable. So it 's frowned upon to say
| the thing that would _actually_ help both the other
| person and yourself -- and, often, the other person would
| have no idea how to hear such a thing anyway.
|
| What we mean:
|
| "The exercise of writing out what you want/mean will help
| you clarify your own thoughts and end up saving us both a
| lot of time. It would make the whole company better if we
| were all disciplined about doing that first, genuinely
| trying to make progress asynchronously, and then only
| jumping on a call if really needed."
|
| Instead, we say:
|
| "My internet has been weird all week. Do you mind if we
| do this one over chat?"
|
| And then we hope that, after the 25th time we say this,
| they'll figure out the common-sense basics of human
| communication and empathy on their own.
|
| </cynical-but-true>
| natpalmer1776 wrote:
| With slightly less cynicism, in many cases most folks
| outside of "the industry" will engage in the same
| behavior and most folks won't ever be conciously aware of
| this behavior.
|
| On a whole people tend to do a good job of working
| together in a way that minimizes instances of anger,
| dislike, or irritation. Not everyone is good at it, and
| few people are aware of what behaviors contribute to this
| cohesion.
|
| This is one of those behaviors.
| dagw wrote:
| If you are asking someone to take time out of what they
| are doing to help you with something, I think it is only
| polite to try to be accommodating to their preferred
| means of communications, be it calls or text.
| chollida1 wrote:
| > I'm talking about preferring to never do a voice/video
| call.
|
| That would drive me crazy.
|
| I think you'll have to accept that somethings have to be
| face to face. And some companies prefer to do things that
| way.
|
| I guess you adapt or go to a company that can guarantee
| you'll never have to speak to someone at all.
|
| But face to face is the oldest form of human interaction.
| Its going to be hard to get along in the real world if
| you really don't like it.
|
| I'm trying to imagine how you'd do something like a lay
| off over chat or an interview or a performance review?
| That just seems like living life on the hardest possible
| mode.
| uxp100 wrote:
| A video call isn't face to face...
|
| I for one prefer actually face to face, then text chat,
| then voice chat, video chat never. Screen shares are
| almost always a signal that this call will be a huge
| waste of time, but I suppose it's fairly necessary if you
| insist on voice chat.
|
| Video chat is obviously here to stay in the software
| industry, which is why I've left it. I worked started
| working remotely from 2015 onward, felt ambivalent about
| it, but the the proliferation of video meetings with the
| pandemic really made it bad. I worked in office in 2021
| and 2022, but once the genie was out of the bottle, you'd
| get calls all the time. Used to be you could just send a
| status report to sync up with overseas teams, but now,
| why not a daily video call? just a bizarrely irritating
| and draining way to spend your day.
| joegahona wrote:
| I hope this is additive and not too much of a tangent, but the
| folks at 37signals (Basecamp) have a similar philosophy. A couple
| links below to some good articles on their philosophy. Honestly
| I've never worked anywhere where 1:1s and synchronous stand-ups
| aren't the norm, and any attempts at async stand-ups I've had
| have been really bad ("Slack stand-up today!"). But I'm intrigued
| by it.
|
| https://37signals.com/how-we-communicate/
|
| https://37signals.com/group-chat-problems
| dfee wrote:
| I had a product manager at my last job, who took the feedback
| from a retro, "we have too many meetings, we have no time to
| focus", and created a new recurring meeting, "how to effectively
| manage your time" (30m, weekly).
| falcolas wrote:
| Meetings are how humans share state. Most people's writing skills
| are not up to replacing the back and forth synchronization that
| happens in meetings. And big meetings have value in avoiding
| games of management telephone.
|
| Canceling all recurring meetings may work for awhile, but I
| imagine it won't be long before there's a permanent action item
| for every meeting to schedule the next one. And it also won't be
| long before senior management is made exempt.
| rainsford wrote:
| Maybe others have different experiences, but I've never found
| state sharing sync meetings to be very good at accomplishing
| their intended goal. There's inevitably too much that goes on
| between meetings for the meeting to cover everything, and even
| if it could, decisions and communication have to happen outside
| of the regular meeting for things to actually get done in a
| timely manner. This tends to lead to such meetings being
| incomplete and/or redundant. In theory a regular sync meeting
| could be used for things that both benefit from real-time back
| and forth and are low enough urgency that they can wait for the
| next meeting, but that's hard to coordinate and one of the
| downsides of having a recurring meeting is that it encourages
| low effort agendas and pre-coordination.
|
| Maybe this isn't so bad for a small number of meetings or in a
| very small organization, but the other problem with regular
| sync meetings is that they tend to proliferate, especially as
| you go higher up the management chain. If you don't just work
| exclusively with a single group of people all working on the
| same effort, your entirely calendar can fill up with sync
| meetings. It can even become comical in cases where the Venn
| diagram of who is working on what significantly overlaps and
| you end up seeing many of the same people over and over again
| with a slightly different audience and topic each time. No
| joke, I have seen this lead to the creation of another sync
| meeting with all the people from the other meetings, but then
| the other meetings also stay on the calendar because people
| also want that smaller group discussion. Very easy for it to
| get out of hand, so I tend to like the idea of a regular reset
| to cancel all those meetings and then add them back as needed.
| falcolas wrote:
| > I tend to like the idea of a regular reset to cancel all
| those meetings and then add them back as needed.
|
| I also approve of this kind of house-cleaning. Calendars,
| like any other storage device, get a lot of built-up cruft
| too. Mine have even had some absurdly long-interval meetings
| with people no longer with the company.
|
| But I think that Shopify took it a bit too far by banning
| them all going forward as well.
| hirundo wrote:
| > Meetings are how humans share state.
|
| We've just found better ways to share state, like emails and
| chat apps. They don't require synchronous attendance, they
| allow more space for thought and correction, and they are
| naturally part of a record that you can reference and copy.
|
| These forms don't share emotional state as well as synchronous
| presence and so don't completely replace it. But the modern
| workplace has less use for sharing emotional state than other
| things.
| radiator wrote:
| You must be working in a magical place where all contributors
| express themselves clearly in writing and read long emails.
| falcolas wrote:
| The very next sentence addresses those other ways.
|
| > Most people's writing skills are not up to replacing the
| back and forth synchronization that happens in meetings.
|
| They may be technically better - for some definition of
| better - but they're going to be poor replacements in
| reality.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I go back and forth on this. On the one hand, I detest
| excessive standup meetings and sprint retros. On the other
| hand, people do tend to pay a little bit better attention
| during them compared to "everyone post your status in slack
| at the end of the day".
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Maybe other people share useful state in meetings somehow. To
| me they're annoying background noise I zone out for until some
| key word like my name triggers my attention. I must not be
| missing much because I'm recognized one of the top performers.
| If I'm ever in need of a career change I might consider
| Shopify.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| > I imagine it won't be long before there's a permanent action
| item for every meeting to schedule the next one
|
| Would still be a repeating meeting. The way it is entered into
| the calendar software does not change that.
| falcolas wrote:
| Yes, that's the point. Recurring meetings are important, and
| folks will work around the stated policy with its technical
| implementation.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I find it is very true that recurring meetings often have low-
| value content but nevertheless the discussion manages to fill
| up the time. Given that meetings with an actual agenda are not
| banned I could see this potentially being an improvement.
| AntiRemoteWork wrote:
| [dead]
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Are they still reeling from the layoff last year or something?
| hintymad wrote:
| Sometimes having a lot of meetings is not due to poor process but
| poor culture. If teams have to seek consensus and buy-in, mostly
| due to fear of having failures, every step of the way, then they
| will have tons of meetings. If every single design has to go
| through a 20-person committee, then there will be tons of
| meetings. If a company value so-called "coordination" over
| engineering, then there will be tons of meetings.
|
| On the other hand, if a company assigns a huge chunk of
| responsibility to every engineer and value "show and tell" or
| "freedom and responsibility" in general instead of "get
| permission first", then there will be very few meetings, just
| like Netflix did in the early 2010s, or as AWS did with true
| 2-pizza teams. The question is, does the leadership in your
| company has the stomach or means to cultivate the culture of
| encouraging individuals to carry out big enough tasks?
| shmatt wrote:
| This is just another flavor of the Musk-esque belief that the
| ratio of delivered production code to man hours is too low.
| Engineers should be coding, not in meetings. This is a plausible
| thought for anyone with 1-2 years experience, and a frightening
| thought from anyone else
|
| Yes there might be some fat to cut but this approach just sounds
| terrible
|
| In reality projects will go in random unwanted directions, or TBs
| that used to be recurring will be manually created one at a time,
| and things will continue just like before this decision
| emodendroket wrote:
| This is the first time I have heard the suggestion that
| management is going against engineers' wishes by scheduling too
| few meetings.
| moneywoes wrote:
| No stand ups?
| gregshap wrote:
| Banning recurring 3 person meetings initially sounded overly
| reactionary and reductive to me. It does sound like proliferation
| of meetings has become a growing problem and I wonder how much
| the video-off-zoom-attendance is a contributor.
|
| The article implies that they previously had multiple 50+ person
| meetings per week(!!) "Big meetings of more than 50 people will
| get shoehorned into a six-hour window on Thursdays, with a limit
| of one a week."
|
| As someone who has never worked a company larger than ~300
| people, can anyone enlighten me on what kind of meetings would
| have that many attendees, outside of say a quarterly all-hands?
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Department all-hands, business unit all-hands, product line
| all-hands... Every level of a large business feels like they
| need to do all-hands with some regularity. If you don't do them
| people complain that they feel "disconnected" and don't know
| what everyone else is working on. One problem it's that
| depending on your team and product some higher-level orgs
| matter a lot or not at all. The folks running those orgs of
| course also get mostly to interact with people to whom other
| efforts in the org matter most.
|
| Then you have central efforts liked software supply chain
| security, DE&I, etc
| trynewideas wrote:
| > Department all-hands, business unit all-hands, product line
| all-hands... Every level of a large business feels like they
| need to do all-hands with some regularity. If you don't do
| them people complain that they feel "disconnected" and don't
| know what everyone else is working on.
|
| The best setup I've seen required only managers to attend
| such meetings, and those managers could open up invites to
| team members if they wanted them, or if they had something
| worth presenting. The meetings were all recorded anyway, so
| if someone felt like they missed something after the fact or
| couldn't attend, they could watch it at a more appropriate
| time.
|
| The only real "all-hands" meetings we had was off-site, in
| person, and bi-annual. The only department that had more
| frequent all-hands meetings was sales with their quarterly
| kick-offs.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Agreed. I started telling my team that most of these are
| optional and then updated a Slack threat with highlights
| radiator wrote:
| Do you mean you threatened your team in Slack?
| codethief wrote:
| At the client I work for we have 2-3 meetings every other week
| that are frequently attended by 50-100 people. One is a "demo
| meeting", where teams present their work, the other one is
| called "architecture guild", where people discuss the system's
| architecture, how to improve it, recent changes and
| developments etc. Attending the meetings is not strictly
| mandatory, though.
|
| All-hands happen, as you say, approximately every 2-3 months.
| zdragnar wrote:
| The one company I worked for over 300 people that held a weekly
| meeting made it entirely optional- it was an end of the week,
| end of day Friday meeting where someone would give a demo of
| either something cool they built or a success story for a
| client. I don't believe more than half the company showed up on
| a regular basis, but it was a really nice social hour for
| people who wanted to partake.
|
| This predated COVID by many years, and remote work was only
| just becoming a thing, so we had custom built video streaming
| software once we opened additional offices so that the whole
| company would see the demos, if not so much the in-person
| chatter and snacks before and after.
| gregshap wrote:
| I really like this, especially when overlapping/doubling as a
| social happy hour. A former company did something similar, I
| always enjoyed seeing what other parts of the company were up
| to.
| agd wrote:
| Many companies have weekly all-hands. E.g. My previous company
| had a weekly all-hands for the entire company (150 people).
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| we have one at my company, and it feels like a bit much. A
| lot of repeated talking points/useless info because we have
| an hour to fill every week
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| My previous company (during Covid) had _3_ all-hands each
| week (~300 people). It was a little over the top
| bombcar wrote:
| Zoom-video-off has been the best thing to happen to crappy
| meetings since forever. Now you don't even have to drag a
| laptop down to a meeting room and roughly pretend to pay
| attention like you're in a boring 101 lecture class again.
| buggy6257 wrote:
| "no it's okay I just brought my laptop to take notes, just
| like the other 45 engineers in this meeting."
| trynewideas wrote:
| At one point at a previous company of 300-400 we had UI demos
| that invited 100+, sprint demos that invited 50+, a weekly all-
| hands that invited everyone, a bi-weekly departmental all-hands
| that invited 150+, and a Friday social hangout that invited
| everyone in the same office. Add monthly departmental retros
| (100+) and group learnings/feature enablement (50+), quarterly
| trainings (150+) and off-sites (50+) and it was a bit much. And
| this was all pre-pandemic with most of the company in one
| office/location -- we already saw a lot of each other even
| without these meetings.
| swarnie wrote:
| My company has around 3000 people split in to six legal
| entities and sub divided in to a further 18 operations most
| people would call "companies"
|
| A 50+ person meeting could be the global team brief (monthly),
| the regional team brief (weekly), kick off or milestone meeting
| of any project branching across multiple legal entities, change
| to global policy such as HR or finance, further meetings for IT
| to plan and implement these changes.
|
| The list really goes on.....
|
| I tend to mute myself and do some housework. I find i can get
| 99% of the detail from 5 minutes with the slide deck and the
| minutes.
| prismatix wrote:
| https://www.read.ai/
| mr_tristan wrote:
| This seems rather extreme, and likely to cause a lot of backlash
| due to how disruptive calendar manipulation is.
|
| At my company, we have started "async weeks", where, basically
| once a quarter, we try to basically use async communication
| instead of recurring meetings.
|
| First, this is executed without a lot of shock. You know it's
| coming and plan around it. But two, it does help promote writing
| - teams experiment with doing one or two things differently. It's
| a slow roll, but I'm seeing a bit more adoption of written tools,
| like doing reviews in Google docs instead of just reading them,
| etc.
|
| Importantly, the lame "status update" meetings have become much
| more tighter and focused. We used to pack things into these
| generic one hour sessions, and now more meetings are starting to
| have better focused agendas, people get used to saying "you know,
| maybe only two of us need to discuss this...", etc.
|
| Taking a week 2-3x a year to iterate and experiment with process
| changes like this feels pretty useful. Teams _should_ be doing
| this frequently if they're "agile", but I've rarely seen that
| actually pan out in reality. But it's a lot easier to take than
| the CEO surprising everyone electronically the first week back
| after a break.
| chadlavi wrote:
| Sorry but that's nuts. Teams that work together on the same
| project should regularly get together in a synchronous
| conversation. Doesn't have to be everyday or anything but this is
| ridiculous and extreme.
|
| It would seem reasonable to me if it were "no meetings with more
| than 5 people" or something, depending on how their product and
| development teams are structured. But... three is verboten?
| emodendroket wrote:
| There's nothing preventing them from meeting multiple times in
| a day if they want; they just need to have a purpose for
| meeting rather than having a standing meeting whether or not
| they have things to discuss.
| Maximus9000 wrote:
| I agree. I've been a manager for almost a decade now and I've
| swung to both extremes on meetings. Some recurring team
| meetings are a good thing. Personally, one of my favorite
| recurring meetings is the retrospective meeting after a sprint.
| Yes, we could just toss all of that feedback onto an online
| retro board, but the interaction in the retro meeting is where
| the real gold is.
| ResearchCode wrote:
| Just get rid of the "sprints".
| carlivar wrote:
| That's an easy thing to say. The harder thing is what
| system should replace sprints, and why is it better?
| ptr wrote:
| The argument is usually that sprints just add overhead on
| top of picking the highest prio work from the backlog.
| Ie, sprints don't have to be replaced with anything since
| there are no benefits.
| cpeterso wrote:
| If you keep your product backlog groomed, your team can
| use Kanban and always be working on the top priority.
| Sprints add overhead to create a separate backlog that,
| in my experience, seems to roll over sprint to sprint.
| ptr wrote:
| Sprints are also detrimental to "soft values" in my
| experience:
|
| * Engineers rushing to wrap up for the sprint (stress and
| decreased quality is bad for morale)
|
| * Engineers getting monitored and measured on a task
| level since all tasks need to be estimated
| (micromanagement, lack of trust)
|
| * Agility is decreased since everything needs to be
| planned (lack of autonomy)
|
| Sprints tend to become "phony deadlines", a key component
| in "Teamicide" (from "Peopleware").
|
| I've been trying to come up with benefits but I'm coming
| up short. Wish someone could tell me!
| qqtt wrote:
| The benefits usually amount to "it's not waterfall" - a
| line which really hasn't been relevant in decades.
|
| I get the sense most managers stick to scrum and all the
| unnecessary overhead mainly because they are creatures of
| habit. Pushing a non-scrum system in an organization that
| fully embraces it is hard (especially when senior leaders
| enjoy the micromanaging aspects of it).
| yamtaddle wrote:
| The benefit is a social one of being able to tell
| "stakeholders" that their shit's getting bumped to the
| next sprint if they keep trying to toss extra junk on the
| pile this sprint. The time cut-off is helpful for keeping
| jackasses up the org chart at bay, _when_ it 's done
| correctly and you're actually allowed to say things like
| that, and follow through. The chunked time makes it
| easier to justify a larger time-cost to monkeying with
| the short-term schedule, which makes stakeholders be more
| considerate.
|
| That's in the unicorn-rare case that you're in an org
| that can do "agile" _right_ , but still has the problem
| of clueless stakeholders shitting everywhere and no
| discipline or expectation that PMs are empowered to tell
| them (politely) to fuck off without the support of this
| kind of framework. Otherwise, yeah, they're not that
| useful. You can track velocity and such without them, so
| that's not a good reason to have them.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| Specific to retrospective meetings, they're also kind of
| therapeutic. There's a lot to unpack after a really stressful
| project, and its nice to have an outlet to direct some of
| that energy (ranting, celebrating, venting, whatever).
| Getting to bond with a coworker over a shared struggle is an
| important but often overlooked part of a healthy work life.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Teams that work together on the same project should regularly
| get together in a synchronous conversation.
|
| I'm beginning to think most HN posters do not talk to their co
| workers outside scheduled meetings.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I'd prefer to talk to my co-workers when necessary, and not
| any more than that. That could mean slack messages to discuss
| a certain issue, or even the occasional status update team-
| wide. Anything beyond that is a farce imo, and just shouldn't
| be shoe-horned into remote working or software dev culture if
| it's not there organically. I get no value out of it, and
| wish others would rely less on that for socializing.
| [deleted]
| jasonlotito wrote:
| One-on-ones are the reason for that. Two people mean both are
| actively involved. Either listening to someone speak to them
| directly, or talking to someone directly.
|
| > Teams that work together on the same project should regularly
| get together in a synchronous conversation.
|
| This doesn't prevent that. It seems that it only prevents you
| from automating the decision on when to do that. If you need to
| synchronize, you can. However, if you don't, there is no need
| to hold a meeting. But people tend to make meetings opt-out
| rather than opt-in. This seems to enforce an opt-in approach
| first.
| chadlavi wrote:
| Teams work in cycles. This would mean, for example, that a
| monthly/quarterly retro with the whole team is now not
| allowed. That's bad.
| tlholaday wrote:
| It's worth experimenting with ...
|
| - any team member can propose an ad-hoc whole-team meeting
| at any time.
|
| - any two team members can propose an ad-hoc whole-team
| meeting at any time.
|
| - any team manager can mandate an ad-hoc whole-team meeting
| up to four times yearly
|
| The Shopify rule is "no team member and no manager can
| mandate a recurring meeting with more than one other
| person."
| watwut wrote:
| Any team member thing suits few dominant or extroverted
| personalities. But people who are not comfortable
| socially won't propose whole team meeting.
|
| Also, I would expect the management to be the ones to
| care the most about hoe team functions overall. They
| should be the ones to notice communication is dying or
| that we are splitting into subgroups or that someone is
| isolated work wise (unable to get answers to questions or
| whatever).
|
| Team dynamic is literally work of leadership, so they
| should be able to decide on meetings.
| throwaway892238 wrote:
| > Teams that work together on the same project should regularly
| get together in a synchronous conversation.
|
| This generalization is clearly not strictly true, but people
| stick to it anyway without thinking.
|
| _Who_ should get together, exactly? _When_ should they? _Why_?
| _What is the goal_ , and _are they meeting that goal_?
|
| Almost every single recurring meeting I've been in has not
| considered these things seriously. It's just generic people
| making a generic meeting to talk about generic things to make
| it _feel_ like work is getting done, when usually, at the end
| of the meeting, you realize the entire meeting could have been
| an e-mail.
|
| The only useful purpose of a generic, purposeless, recurring
| intra-team meeting is to reinforce social working
| relationships. They aren't going to solve a bug or ship a new
| feature or solve a design decision in one of these meetings.
| They exist solely to talk about work without doing work,
| because the interaction between humans smoothes the social
| dynamics of doing work. But nothing actually gets done.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Anyone who does Scrum remotely will probably have a standup
| as a daily recurring multi-part meeting. No one loves those
| but I think they can be useful.
| Lyngbakr wrote:
| In my experience, a standup bot in a Teams/Slack channel
| can often replace those. If there's a blocker or nuanced
| issue that would benefit from in-person discussion, then
| hopping on a call makes total sense. In contrast, having a
| meeting by default makes no sense to me.
| bfgoodrich wrote:
| [dead]
| naravara wrote:
| Presumably they can still schedule the synchronous
| conversations one at a time. They just can't set them to
| "recurring."
|
| I have no idea how they make policies like these work with
| business partnerships though. I could live with a rule like
| this internally, but it's hard to get time on a client or
| partner's calendar and, when you do, recurring meetings let you
| reserve it.
| kube-system wrote:
| That's part of how recurring meetings get out of hand.
| They'll get scheduled as an 'easy' way to maintain a cadence
| when people have a busy schedule, regardless of any
| particular instance's necessity. If someone works with a
| dozen different groups, this sometimes results in evenly
| spaced 5 minute status updates interrupting someone's workday
| every half hour.
| naravara wrote:
| The alternative is spending all day coordinating with 10
| different people's secretaries to schedule time on their
| calendars with them. It's much easier to cancel instances
| of a recurring meeting than to have to schedule each one
| each time.
|
| Of course, if it's just a 5 minute status update you should
| just send a memo.
| kube-system wrote:
| That's right. But I find that meeting organizers are
| reluctant to cancel instances of a meeting even when they
| don't have much to share, because they are unsure in
| advance if others on the meeting may have something to
| bring up.
| naravara wrote:
| I always send a "I am good to cancel today's meeting
| unless someone has something they would like to discuss."
| Takes no more effort than just cancelling.
| weitzj wrote:
| What I found an interesting approach at a company I worked was
| that I think every quarter everybody has to empty their calendars
| completely and should schedule meetings not on specific weekdays
| xal wrote:
| Hey, "in perpetuity" isn't right. We have done this multiple
| times before and it's part of the culture. One culture value is
| "Thriving on change" and the recurring meeting GC run is one
| opportunity for people to discover if they do!
|
| Historically we did this event in `rand(600)+300` days
| anniversary of the previous run (to make it somewhat
| unpredictable) but we had enough chaos during COVID so that we
| queued this run to get a fresh new start this year.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| Maybe I just don't work in a toxic workplace, but I love speaking
| with my colleagues over video. Keeping comms going in slack and
| speaking face to face are not mutually exclusive. You don't work
| with avatars, you work with humans.
| debacle wrote:
| When a company does this, it's generally a knee jerk reaction to
| engineering telling product that development pace is slow because
| of "all the meetings."
| mgraczyk wrote:
| The comments here seem to misunderstand dynamics at big
| companies. Engineers often find themselves in meetings with 10s
| of people where there is no one person who could unilaterally
| reevaluate the usefulness of the meeting.
|
| Everyone in the meeting may be thinking "this is a waste of
| time", but each person doesn't know that everyone else is
| thinking that, so there is no natural processes to discuss ending
| the meeting. Worse, there is sometimes a perverse incentive to
| keep meetings going to maintain control or power.
|
| This change shifts the equilibrium from "default on" to "default
| off" in a way that probably would not happen organically at a big
| company.
| fronterablog wrote:
| A small step in the right direction.
|
| When will we see a company forbidding Slack and Teams?
| shopify_burner wrote:
| They introduced Facebook Workplace today, as well, for "async
| things". Public slack channels now have a membership cap. All
| the "social channels" have limited posting permissions and
| people were mass-removed from other work channels. Slack is
| supposed to be just for DMs, I guess.
|
| I guess I'm not entirely mad, Slack has a lot of downsides. But
| feels like they only half-assed solving for that set of
| problems.
| kayamon wrote:
| How would you prefer people talk to each other?
| zffr wrote:
| I used to work at Apple and for a very long time we used
| email for most things, and iMessage for anything urgent.
|
| IMO it worked great, and I prefer that to slack.
|
| Email is much more linear and more permanent so it's much
| harder to lose things. It's also much easier to search for
| things in email IMO. The extra friction invoked with e-mail
| can also be good for cutting down on unnecessary
| communication.
| mozman wrote:
| I was at a company that used IRC and had a very clear
| policy: responsiveness isn't a measure of performance
|
| Using your own client allowed you to squash notifications
| and other silly engagement tactics that plague slack today
|
| It was wonderful
| idontwantthis wrote:
| You can stop notifications in Slack now, and I don't know
| what the other engagement tactics are.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| > other engagement tactics
|
| Bots that can't be completely muted, for example. The
| best you can do is disable notifications for messages
| created by bots (except slackbot) but as far as I can
| tell you can't stop the dreaded "red dot" from appearing.
| mozman wrote:
| I use the browser version and override favicon,
| notifications are also disabled and I have some
| greasemonkey scripts to modify behavior. It's a moving
| target though
| raverbashing wrote:
| Email is good for one-offs and "general shout-outs", for
| everything that involves a discussion it is pretty bad
|
| Slack conversations and threads are a good sweet spot for
| team discussions
|
| > can also be good for cutting down on unnecessary
| communication
|
| Or you're discouraging conversations that didn't need to,
| but it would be better in the end if they happened.
|
| You can always enter DnD on Slack and attend to DMs as
| needed
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Doesn't that end up with an email inbox full of 1 line back
| and forths as people relentless grind the little details
| down to nubs?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| With slack, you have two inboxes: your email, and also
| your slack notifications.
| zffr wrote:
| Nope. If a thread was getting long we would just schedule
| a meeting to make a decision.
|
| I can't remember ever seeing a thread of just 1 line back
| and forths (although I have seen this on slack). The 1
| line emails I remember were usually from some higher up
| person who was signing off on some decision and that
| ended a thread usually.
| Edd314159 wrote:
| Not the worst thing in the world. I'm not saying it's
| necessarily better than a meeting, but at least you have
| a paper trail and automatic log of decisions made.
|
| (A collaborative doc would probably be a better venue for
| that, of course.)
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>a very long time we used email for most things
|
| The only thing worse than email for communication is
| talking on the phone....
|
| I would love to kill email completely
| wombatpm wrote:
| Phone calls are ok. Voicemail is the real waste of time
| phpisthebest wrote:
| 100% disagree, I absolute hate when people call me and do
| not leave a VM.
|
| Unless I have prescheduled a call with you, and I am
| expecting our call you are going to VM, i do not answer
| unsolicited calls even from people I know
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I agree - many people said "email sucks!" and then pushed
| communication ideally suited for an email into slack. We'd
| do so much better if we taught people how to pick the right
| channel for the intent vs. big, dumb generalized rules.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| Apple also uses Radar which is more effective than other
| bug trackers.
|
| You can file a bug with some product and someone from the
| other side of the campus will typically reply within days.
|
| I think part of it is a user interface issue, interacting
| with Jira is such an unpleasant affair that often only PMs
| in a company will interact with it in any depth.
| adwww wrote:
| Often PMs are the only people with adequate permissions
| to actually achieve anything with Jira.
| snarfy wrote:
| Email is much better. Instant messaging is constant
| interruptions.
|
| https://heeris.id.au/trinkets/ProgrammerInterrupted.pdf
| adwww wrote:
| Right until you're involved in a long email thread that has
| nothing to do with you, and no way to opt out.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Turn off the damned notifications.
| bm3719 wrote:
| IRC + email + VCS system works fine for FLOSS projects.
|
| tmux can also be used for screen sharing, if anyone needs
| support or wants to pair on something.
|
| One nice thing about using this comms stack is it doesn't
| exclude people who are on slow internet connections.
| Video/audio is grossly inefficient for transfer of some bytes
| of raw information versus text.
| justusw wrote:
| I don't know many great alternatives, but usually people will
| point to email in this case. And great documentation
| (wiki/FAQ/Readme) to preempt a lot of potential questions. I
| find those work well for me and it's what a lot of people
| like because it reduces the amount of urgent but non-
| important interruptions in their work.
| chadlavi wrote:
| Call me crazy but I would like to occasionally talk to and
| see the faces of my teammates in real time. We're not
| robots in factories. We're humans. I love remote work but a
| workplace is different from, say, an Internet forum.
| wildzzz wrote:
| One thing I've noticed is that people are less prone to
| personal discussions over a conference call compared to
| in person meetings. We only rarely do in person meetings
| now because of how quickly we can get through a meeting.
| One thing that contributes to this is the fact that you
| are sitting at your computer with plenty of other things
| to work on other than the meeting. When you're sitting in
| a conference room, there's no work distractions so people
| find other things to talk about, whether it's what they
| did that weekend or other work discussions that are
| unrelated to the meeting. One other thing is that since a
| Teams meeting feels less "official", we can have multiple
| status meetings a week where it's not mandatory to call
| in for every one of them. Our in person status meetings
| were once a week and would go for at least two hours
| since it was easier to get people together for a long
| time once a week than a short time multiple times a week.
| A status meetings once a week was simply not enough
| because of how quickly things changed throughout the week
| so by Wednesday, the plans for the week could have
| changed or someone's progress may have been halted due to
| a problem. Very inefficient!
| SpeedilyDamage wrote:
| The reality is that many people don't want to talk to anyone
| else, and ultimately want to be paid to do little or no work
| at all.
|
| So many folks are completely disconnected from the
| performance of their group (whatever structure that group
| takes), that stuff like this starts to sound appealing.
|
| Nobody who wants to get things done (that actually benefit
| the group) would advocate for not collaborating with other
| members of the group, but folks who want to maximize
| extraction with minimal effort would.
| tlholaday wrote:
| Thoughtful people who want to get things done recognize
| that other people's time is a scarce resource that should
| be allocated deliberately, not routinely.
| SpeedilyDamage wrote:
| No, that's not it; you can both understand how scarce
| time is as a resource and still accurately believe
| spending it with others is more productive than spending
| it alone, depending on the work (and software engineering
| falls into the "time more productively spent together"
| set).
|
| Periodicity is an arbitrary line upon which to draw
| acceptability, so when one draws it there's usually a
| reason other than, "I want to maximize effectiveness."
| JTbane wrote:
| I wish the company I'm at would do this, I have a mandatory daily
| morning meeting that gets longer and longer, now 45-90 minutes
| with tangential discussion.
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| I recently quit a company where we were having daily morning
| meetings of 30 minutes or longer, plus weekly sprint check-ins
| and weekly sprint reviews, and quarterly PI planning events
| that were several days of 6-8 hrs/day.
|
| I like technical work, design and coding and interaction with
| customers to understand their needs. I'm okay with
| approximately weekly status updates and ad-hoc quickie get-
| togethers to figure something out, but I hate stand-ups (so-
| called) that feel more like justifying one's job or trying to
| sound productive (I knew for a fact some of those fancy updates
| people were giving were just covering for watching Netflix and
| Youtube 4 hrs/day) :)
|
| It seems to me Shopify's approach might have some merit, even
| if it seems heavy-handed and clumsy.
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