The Bane Of Every Developer's Existence... MEETINGS!

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it is Monday December 30th we're right at the end of the year here which is sweet um got a topic for today it is from Reddit it's going to be about meetings which everyone loves meetings right so we'll chat through that I'll give some different perspectives on that um as usual if you want stuff answered just add it to the comments I'm happy to go through that otherwise I go to Reddit for for ideas why is that visor down um and then of course if you want stuff answered more privately just uh message Dev leader on social media that's my main handle it's my main YouTube channel and then a reminder as well that uh on Mondays at 7.m Pacific on that main Channel Dev leader I do a live stream very much about topics like this but because it's a live stream you can

chat with me and I'll answer any questions you want um well within reason of course um but yeah check that out if you like this kind of stuff so with that said meetings um so on Reddit you know kind of a typical I guess you call it like typical kind of complaint or frustration with software development and and meetings like they kind of like how much time are you guys wasting on meetings right because I think it's a I don't think I surprised anyone that meetings feel like extremely ineffective um will depend on your role of course but I think that it's not unusual for people to have that kind of stance on meetings uh for me like as an engineering manager it's a little bit unique because a lot of my my work is meeting with people um but there's different types of meetings

and I think that's what's worth kind of talking through today um I did a quick scan of the comments to see like just different directions that people were taking this conversation like when when they're thinking about meetings like what are the things that their teams are doing um I didn't see anything that was like I don't know uh unexpected I guess I think anything that I was kind of seeing was like okay we have standups we have retrospectives we have different sync meetings we have like oneon-one typee meetings like a whole bunch of different oh man that's not a turning lane what are you doing oh interesting it's a very very early signal um good job yes keep turning um so I figured it would be good to to look at some of these some different angles on them when I think they can be

effective when I've seen them become extremely ineffective and maybe some things we can do um because I'm just blabbing as I drive here I don't have like a like a checklist in front of me to go through all of them so I'll try to touch on as many as I can with different examples but we'll see how it goes um okay so I think maybe one that's pretty obvious to start off with is like a standup meeting um and I know that when people hear about this kind of stuff like we have retrospectives we have standups and stuff like a lot of This Is Anchored In Like agile software development and it's been kind of interesting over the last like I don't know I feel like over the last 5 years in particular there's been like this huge push against agile software development and I

think uh I don't know I feel people love to complain about stuff uh like agile doesn't work it's this part of the system and ah we just want to build stuff and I think the reality is like I don't disagree that there are really terrible implementations of agile that aren't actually agile people just slapped a label on them so I I get that frustration but like I think some of the core Parts about agile are literally like to not have the processes right so if you have processes over people then you're already not doing agile properly so like it's it's not agile I think that's a bad implementation of it and people should be having conversations about that but anyway I digress for standups I think that this is rooted primarily from like agile software development or you know flavors of agile and again I'm

going to talk through these so the the concept is supposed to be that it's a very brief meeting between team members traditionally like a standup so that like you're not sitting down and relaxing and lounging around you're standing up it's it's kind of like almost like a forcing function to keep you uh to try and talk and speak about things in a succinct way and really it's a quick update and the goal is to figure out if people are blocked on things right so if you're doing a standup meeting and you got even if you have a small team and people are going like into the Weeds about implementation details and like all of these things um that's like already not an effective way to leverage a standup um I don't have like off the top of my head you know like what exactly what

the time should be given a team size but honestly I feel like being able to go like 30 seconds to a minute um per person is like probably all you really need um and if so if you had a team of five people having a a meeting that was 5 to 10 minutes long is already giving you some buffer um in my opinion um like that's how I see how standups should be able go right the reality is that in practice this almost never happens almost never and uh I think one of the a couple causes right like one is that as technical individuals people like going into detail I think another thing is that people genuinely and this isn't like a a knock on anyone but people genuinely don't understand the purpose of the standup I think for newer developers I don't blame them

because the other part that I want to call out is that someone should be trying to moderate this and keep it on track right if you're doing a standup meeting and these things are going on for 30 minutes and you only have a couple of people like that's probably not an effective standup now caveat here is that depending on what you're doing in that meeting so I'm saying that might not be an effective standup but your team actually might find that valuable and you're having good conversations like hey like we actually did need schedule some time to talk about this because it is complicated and we do have to get on the same page so it's not that it's bad it's just like that's not really an effective standup so this gets more complicated when you add more people into the mix because there's a

lot more overhead now right so let's say you had 10 people on a team and two people really needed to sit down and talk about something complicated get on the same page about something so if they were leveraging that standup and doing a deep dive on these things and took 20 minutes of the time you're wasting the time of eight other people right and this happens like standups I think many places happen daily it's like a daily standup meeting that's why it's quick and if this kind of thing happens on a regular basis it's no surprise to me that people absolutely hate this they're like why why do we even do this it's such a waste of time okay and so one of the things that came up on Reddit specifically around stand-ups where people were chewing out uh project managers um and when I

kind of talk through this I want to talk about project and product managers they are different roles people will Define them different ways between different companies but just for the point of this conversation when I talk about project managers this is more about coordinating uh keeping things unblocked looking at dependencies especially between teams and things like that so um a lot more coordinating and product Managers from my experience are a lot more focused on what customers are asking for what features we should be building and prioritizing okay folks let me in so what people were saying in the in the Reddit thread was like it feel like again I get the um the sentiment but I think they're kind of like I don't know like kind of taking out their frustration on a group of people so some of the comments were like you know

stand-ups are dumb because we have these non-technical Stak holders that show up and just like make us explain things and like that feels like it's really ineffective um now I'm not going to disagree that a standup meeting might not be the most effective use of that time right so if you have a standup meeting and you have 10 I'm going to just use 10 people as an example it's a easy number to work with you have 10 people and each one has to go spend extra time explaining uh things to a non-technical stakeholder like one at a time basically like kind of uh people were saying like dumbing it down I don't really like saying that uh just like translating it to a non-technical stakeholder like if that's extra time in that explanation that might be a complete waste of time for everyone else that

stand up for one person's benefit so I understand that kind of frustration that can come from that but to me that's not a reason to like say okay well therefore a standup meetings useless now I'm not here to say the other way that you have to do standup meetings like all of these things are just tools right if we understand the goal of a standup meeting is to look for for blockers make sure people can keep moving people are on track right so someone's in their stand up meeting they're like I've been working on this thing for 4 weeks and someone's like dude that should have taken two days like you know a stand up meeting is to try and help catch stuff like that from happening um so like if you're not using it for that purpose and then you're feeling frustrated about it

it's like you just might be using the wrong tool so in this case if people are complaining about explaining things to non-technical stakeholders like yeah perhaps a standup is not the thing you want for that so could you experiment with some other way to get the non-technical stakeholders what they need to be unblocked I'm not going to get into a conversation about whether or not their roles are important or not because that's I think a complete can of worms um because in some cases probably not in some case is probably very important is that a TT up there we'll have to see if we can get closer um but yeah I think maybe you have to go look for another mechanism to get people the information they need and not maybe it's not a standup uh quick anecdote uh I had a team at one

point that uh pretty small team so I think five or six people at the time kind of fluctuated between like four to six I don't think we got more than seven and um we were working in the office so you know just call that out for whatever bias that might uh add but so we were collocated in the office and we we were communicating so actively all the time that standup meetings for us became kind of ridiculous because it was like like what are we what are we doing like we're already talking why are we artificially meeting again when we've already been talking about all these things anyway um so what we would generally do is with our team of developers and I was the engineering manager and a developer on the team it's like a technical manager role and um so like we would

skip our standup a lot because it didn't matter now going back to these like maybe more non-technical roles that would mean that if we did have um you know our product manager wasn't in every single standup meeting and if they needed to drop in and have a conversation like we would just kind of tailor that time to make sure exactly what these people on Reddit were complaining about we would just get on the same page and and chat through it so um it meant that it was not every day so we didn't have that burden of like oh man every day we're wasting 30 minutes doing this but it would be like couple few times a week we'd spend 10 15 minutes kind of chatting through something and if and it wasn't like I don't know did not feel taxing small team um and like

I said we were just using it to get alignment um but the development side of things like purely on the engineering uh aspect like we were already in sync around the clock so it didn't really matter for us so that's one example um used up a lot of time on standups uh retrospectives I think are another one again this comes from like agile software development I think some people some people absolutely hate retrospectives and I think that's because they're not being used effectively uh and I have been in retros that feel like a complete waste of time um and so my my advice for retrospectives if are if people aren't kind of challenging what's going on like doing a bit of an analysis and reflecting on what's actually happening uh Sprint over Sprint and again I'm using the word Sprint here you don't even have

to use a Sprint some interval of time okay just so people don't get you know totally triggered by the word Sprint like if you're doing a retrospective and reflecting on some period of time whatever you want to label that um I would say if you're not analyzing and challenging what's going on you're probably not going to have an effective retrospective like the goal isn't just to say good work team let's do it again like celebrate the things that worked well try to understand why they worked well and talk about that's not going well so some of my best retrospectives like that I can remember being in were not comfortable and we would talk with our small team and we would talk about the things that we like were kind of driving us nuts like hey this this is really not working well for us and

that could be something within our team that could be something that we're interfacing with another team on and we're like hey look like this working relationship we got to do something about this because it's impeding our ability to do good work so we would talk about these things and it was a safe place like it it would feel like you could feel the temperature in the room going up and that's not because we were yelling at each other or like um you know just like picking on people and shouting like not at all it was because people cared about what was going on and they were speaking about these things that they were you know for a lack of better word like passionate about making better so in my opinion if you're not challenging things and trying to come up with how to make things

better it probably is going to feel like a waste of time because what else are you doing there I I should add and I kind of hinted at it but like I think celebrating things that worked well is important I don't think having a whole meeting just patting each other on the back is is like is necessarily worth the time CU you don't need a meeting for that and actually some people may not appreciate being kind of like celebrated in that way that's a whole other conversation um about recognition patterns and stuff for people some people hate being called out in public some people really like it um but anyway I don't think that's like the most effective use of a retro but I think it's valuable to call out things that are going well but if you're not taking that time to reflect on

things and trying to improve them I think that's a that's a huge missed opportunity um so that's my my take on retrospectives um I'm trying to think if there's anything else really to add but like in the past and I guess still to this day when I talk about how I how I've historically run teams uh I like to think about continuous Improvement and I find retrospectives are a formalized way to try and get that to happen so you don't need you truly don't need a retrospective if you're constantly doing these things or finding ways to have it come up naturally right if the team is very vocal and willing to try things out and like have conversations person almost merged into me not very smart um absolute dummy um then if you're doing those things regularly kind of kind of like what I was

saying for our standup meetings right it's a tool if you're already if you're already getting that stuff done pardon me I don't know where my voice is going um if you're already getting that stuff done you you may not need a meeting for it at all um but for us it was just an organized way to do it so just an example I would say in more recent times uh like some of the teams that I'm running right now like we don't do retrospectives at all um why I think like some of the stuff that my current teams that I like I don't I don't force process on the team if that makes sense so uh my stance especially coming into a team is that I'm not there to go like impose change if I'm creating the team from the ground up I will set

up some things as a as a starting point so for example if I were creating a team from scratch you know I'm the first person on the team before I start bringing people in I would say just as a starting point we're going to have two we Sprints we're going to do a retrospective at the end of the Sprint and depending on if we're like on the size the team and whatnot we'll have a like a standup or a sync meeting whatever that needs to look like but I would start probably with something like that and we'd go from there but I would from day one I would be telling people on the team look the whole point of doing this is so that you have mechanisms to drive change in the team I'm not going to sit here and tell you what's best but

I will help you try to put these things in place that we feel like as a team will make us better so I don't feel like it's my place to go commanding the team like you must have a retro you must do this if they're stuck if I feel like genuinely there's some challenges on the team and things are stuck then I will um start suggesting things and saying let's try it to demonstrate to people hey look like if we want to see change here's how we go about it but again digression so um on the retrospective point I think there's a couple people complaining or suggesting like Sprint timelines I saw someone suggesting six week Sprints um I know I can say with confidence that if I had uh one of my teams in the past moving from two we Sprints to six week

Sprints that would have been completely useless for us um I think on some teams like probably right now based on the pace of delivery and how things roll out I would say having longer Sprints would be beneficial but that's just because of sort of the nature of how Stuff lands on the teams that I'm on now in previous teams that would have been terrible but again I think these are things you can talk about with your team so that's sort of a meta point with all of this by the way um maybe I haven't been very clear about it but meetings are tools right like I think if if we understand what the goal of that tool is or the goal of the meeting if it's not serving that purpose we should be talking about it that's why I was trying to say with the

standup meeting like what's the goal of it if that's not what's happening like let's have a conversation I I don't think it's I you know if I had people coming to me and saying like hey we do this thing and it just doesn't feel good we would change it we've literally like not even reporting up to me but even with my own manager we've had things uh you know over the past few months where people have said hey this meeting we have doesn't feel effective anymore like it's really long we understand what the goal is but like that's not really what's happening and it's been refined and we've cut the time in half so like again understanding what the goal of the tool is and then having a conversation about it it's not to like if we're just venting about things and complaining then like

there's not really a lot of opportunity for improvement but I think if people are there's nothing wrong with like you know being frustrated by things but come with Solutions right like if you're frustrated with you know what what's being discussed in the meeting like okay do you understand the goal of those things if so like what's your proposal right like come come with some solutions or suggestions to try right I think that's a that can go a really long way so we talked about Sprints a little bit in terms of the length we talked about retrospectives at least my opinion on what the goal of them is how to do them effectively um I should a quick note when I talk about that stuff for Retros I don't mean that every retro needs to feel like you're in a heated battle and everyone should be

nervous before going in but I I want people to feel empowered that they should be able to talk about things that they want to see improvements in like that's what I want to see come out of that uh otherwise I don't see a huge benefit in doing the Retro if we're not going to reflect on those things and we talked about standups uh another quick note on standups is like I found with remote teams and going cross geography doing a daily standup would be hell it would be absolute hell and that's because I feel like um at least the way that we're set up right now it would just feel like extremely inefficient um so we end up doing not daily stand-ups but like almost like a weekly sync or in some some cases like bi-weekly so again adjusting the tool adjusting the Cadence for

getting the value out of it and if people started feeling like hey twice a week is too much or it's not enough like cool let's have that conversation right if you had retrospectives that's a great you know forcing function to get you to talk about these things otherwise just bring it up in general like we should people should feel comfortable to be able to talk about this stuff at least that's how I approach managing teams um and then something else like I only got a little bit longer on the highway here but something else that came up on the thread that I think is important is like um people were saying well there are these other meetings that are like more ad hoc right and I think that that's a valuable thing to call out is like we talk about these like recurring meetings like

like uh standup or retrospectives by the way um we run live Services where I where I'm employed at Microsoft so like we have like a a service review as well so not quite a retrospective but we'll talk about like um Liv site issues or things that came up from Partners um and just like a review of the health of the service so kind of like a almost like a little retrospective but not from like a not so much from like a development life cycle kind of thing if that makes sense so that's just another example of like a recurring meeting but these oneoff meetings I think this is a different kind of angle on things right I think a lot of people complain about the recurring meetings because they take up time and they don't see the value in them and truly the way they're

implemented there might be very little value so I'm not dismissing that but this idea of like oneoff meetings um I think are great so for example if we go back to the like the beginning of this rambling I was talking about a standup meeting where there's two engineers and have to get on the same page right and there's 10 people so eight of them are kind of like wasting time or whatever um like that's a good example of like hey just go like schedule a quick call between the two of you or if you're in person like go jump in a meeting room after like go do that don't take the opportunity and like consume other people people's time just go set up a quick sync between the two or three of you whatever it is because clearly like if you're getting into the weeds

and discussing something that probably needs to have a conversation it's not that the conversation itself is bad it's that you're using everyone else's time and it's not an effective use of their time so don't do that the same kind of thing where we have um say you want to do like a review of something we've seen this with like design reviews and we want to make sure that everyone on the team understands the design that's going to be implemented but then you invite a whole team of people and then you only have like two or three people that are actually having a conversation about the design and everyone else is sitting there like what the hell are we doing here so you know that kind of situation reduce the audience reduce the audience significantly so you have a very meaningful conversation and then share out

the results of that and that's the meta point in this section is like if you're going to do these one-off conversations and like people really do have to go dive deep on stuff you don't need to have everyone else with you there necessarily but it would be helpful if you can share the learnings or the outcomes with the team right so hey yeah like in stand up me and John took this thing offline we met up after and I was talking with John about how we're going to go implement the next phase of this thing and uh we arrived at like you know uh solution a is actually going to be better than solution be uh here's a couple of notes and send it out in an email or put it into your your teams or your slack Channel whatever whatever communication medium you guys

use right um but like give people the update so it's not like no one gets you know an understanding of what's Happening um but you don't need to involve everyone when they're not going to actually be involved um so I think that can be awkward for some people when I kind of said this earlier too like when you're moderating meetings like standups or anything um it can feel uncomfortable for people to like tell people like hey like in in a polite way like hey shut up and take this offline um he wouldn't tell people to shut up of course but the point is like you kind of need to interject to say hey look like respectfully other people are not getting the benefit of this that does not suggest that what you're talking about is not important and I think that's confusing for some people

it makes people feel awkward either the person who needs to interject or the person who feels like they're being cut off right the point of stopping that kind of conversation is again not to say what you're saying is not important the point is to say there's a goal of this meeting there's a particular audience for this meeting and if you're not sort of in line with that let's just make sure you have a conversation about this separately out of respect for everyone else's time on this meeting right that has no suggestion about the the topic not being valuable but some people can either take that the wrong way and feel like oh like you're cutting me off that doesn't feel good I feel like that's less common it happens uh and then people don't like and I know this is even awkward for me right

and I've been doing this for a while but like it can feel awkward for me to interject cuz I'm like ah like this actually you know people are having a good conversation but at some point I have to be like look I'm looking around at the meeting and I'm like there's 10 other people here doing this kind of looking around or like they're not they haven't unmuted in you know 20 minutes I'm like no like it's it's clearly not you know an effective use of their time so um we got to stay on top of that kind of stuff so okay I'm at work that's meetings um meetings aren't going away but I think we should be having conversations about how to make them more effective if you don't feel like you have room or space to be able to talk about those things I

would try um try getting you know more in line with your manager and that's a whole other topic and and of itself but uh I I personally feel like you know I would I would want people on my team to be able to come to me and talk about that kind of stuff if they didn't feel comfortable just talking to the whole team about it right I would love if people were just like hey team like by the way we do this meeting and like I'm just wondering if we could make it more effective like hell yeah but if someone was like I don't know if I feel comfortable doing that and they said hey Nick like I've been thinking about this could we talk about this or what are your thoughts like I would be more than happy to have a conversation like that

because again I always talk about my role as an engineering manager is to allow my team to do their best work possible if there are meetings that have a purpose and they're not fulfilling that purpose or not doing it effectively I want to enable that to be done effectively so that's that we'll have another topic on the way home uh so thanks for tuning in and I'll see you next time