Team Meetings Are a Waste of Development Time
Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash
Software developers typically hate meetings. It is obvious why developers usually consider work to be coding and solving problems, and this is encapsulated by The Secret Developer’s opinion.
“This is certainly true for me. I tend to think getting work done is submitting pull requests and understanding the system. For me, meetings are simply a waste of time.”
The value of meetings should be contextualized within your working environment and colleagues. Let us look at the context of The Secret Developer, and see if we can decide whether I hate meetings is an appropriate response to their environment.
The Case For Meetings
Yes, developers do complain about them, but they are crucial. Team meetings, client meetings, stand-ups — they’re all about aligning our goals, discussing project progress, and brainstorming solutions to problems.
“I do agree with this to some extent. It really does matter how the meetings are carried out though. Only in one company (Revolut) have I seen meetings really carried out by developers and those developers having any true responsibility.
For each other company, I’ve dealt with meetings that are rather top-down. Developers get told what to do (and sometimes solutions are presented to them). Low engagement comes from meetings for the wrong reasons, or meetings that could be replaced with a Slack message.”
The Case Against Meetings
Too many cooks spoil the broth
It can be argued that meetings are ineffective when there are too many participants in any given meeting.
“I’ve participated in stand-up meetings that simply have too many participants. We have low engagement as people do not answer questions or share their expertise, simply because we have low expectations and no real responsibility within the group.
Sure, these might be problems wholly within my own company but I doubt I’m the only one to experience this kind of stuff.”
Bad practice
This blog has discussed many bad practices for the last 24 months or so.
“We have meeting-free Fridays. Apart from the meetings that we have. So we don’t have any meeting-free days, although our written policy says we do. It’s not the only policy that is broken.”
Low engagement
The Secret Developer has seen many meetings where developers tend not to answer questions.
“When people have their name called and answer with ‘what was the question’ I think it’s really telling.
I just code during meetings. Or write blog posts. You?”
Messages over meetings
Some meetings could be replaced by text, which is much more efficient in terms of time and resources.
“I wish stand-up meetings could just be the status of tickets. Why they aren’t is because if there are blockers, we could work together to solve them, I get that. However, since we don’t seem to listen to each other or really work to solve issues that’s a moot point. Unless meetings are carried out effectively, we shouldn’t have them.”
Developers should be developing
A simple argument this one, but a favorite of The Secret Developer:
“Software engineers, developers, coders, or whatever you want to call them should spend the majority of their time coding.
Since that is their main responsibility and what they’ve been taken on to do that shouldn’t be too hard to fathom.
So I have no understanding of how we expect software developers to spend 30%+ of their time in meetings. Who is doing the software development if the time is being spent on this type of task.?”
Conclusion
As ever there isn’t anything ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, it all depends on the context.
The point is we need to work together to deliver features. We need to share the direction for the software project and organize the developers. If you’re working as a team, does it matter how it is done?
“It does matter how we work on an individual level. Software developers should enjoy and want to code. That means they get better at their work and produce iteratively better products.
Make sense?”