Why Developers Abhore Meetings
Tags: devops, development, learning, productivity
Published: 2023-07-13 23:04:51

*Practical tips for leaders and engineers to improve the quality and productivity of meetings*

Nobody enjoys days with long endless meetings, or a thousand short ones sprinkled throughout, but as a developer, these days are the least productive and most disheartening.
This article aims to point out what makes for ineffective meetings, and how to establish healthy and productive meeting culture in a team. I'm hoping to provide a unique perspective as I've done work both as a developer, and a product manager within the last year alone.

## The Developer Struggle
If you're a developer you know the pain of staring at a problem, diving through dozens of files and lines and methods to get an understanding of the issue. You finally get a grasp on what's causing the issue and are planning on taking action when all of a sudden *PING* a meeting is starting.

After attending a meeting you probably didn't need to be at, you come back to look at the code and need to catch the train of thought that left the station an hour ago. Even if you were documenting your actions from earlier, it's hard to grab that context again. 

This context loss is even more painful when you're having trouble getting your local environment to build. You could spend hours troubleshooting problems before you even get to implement your feature. 

At last, you finally get to writing some code and BAM it's lunch. Another 30 mins to an hour later you have to restart the cognitive process.

As a developer, you run into new problems every day and are working hard to find creative solutions to them, whether it's planned in the story or some new update breaking your local environments. Being pulled away to other tasks in the middle of work can be jarring and slow down the problem-solving nature of the work.

This is a small example of how even one meeting can disrupt a productive flow.

## What Makes a Meeting Unproductive?
Having meetings is oftentimes unavoidable, but how can we shift from having a lot of unproductive meetings to having a healthy routine of effective meetings? First, we need to understand what a bad meeting looks like.
### Too Many People Invited
If the audience is too big, engagement will be lower and people will be less inclined to chime in. The bigger the group, the more people will think "This doesn't involve me, why am I here?" 
### "That could've been an email"
This statement comes up way too often in the working world. The meeting starts and ends with only one person talking, and spewing out information that doesn't need discussion. With no discourse between other teammates, people will wonder why this info wasn't sent out in an email or announcement.
### No clear agenda from the beginning
When there is no agenda for a meeting, the discussion may revolve around a general topic, but it is only through dialogue that the actual problem being addressed can be identified. This is one of the main ways a 30-minute meeting can be stretched to an hour.
### Rabbit holes are followed
A byproduct of bringing up good questions is that sometimes they lead the group off-topic. When the facilitation doesn't table the pursuit of that specific thought, meetings get off-topic and end up wasting valuable time. Also if no one is taking notes and tracking these topics, valuable insights will be lost.

All of these characteristics unfortunately compound into the creation of extra meetings. The original topics are left unanswered, more questions have come up and what's the solution to answering the original problem and all these new ones? You guessed it, more meetings.
## Creating a Solution
Fortunately, many of these issues have simple solutions and can be addressed by establishing team normals. 

If you're the person who is running the team and holding these meetings, try to implement a couple of techniques to drive efficiency as a whole.

### Establish core working hours 
Work with your team to set aside a block of time so that they can expect to work uninterrupted, this can greatly increase productivity and team morale. The chunk of time (say 9 am to 12 pm) will contain no scheduled or unscheduled meetings unless absolutely necessary. A couple of benefits: 
* Teammates will feel free to tackle problems because they understand they won't be interrupted by a pop-up meeting.
* The team will feel like the work they are doing is valued because specific time is allocated for it.
* Other entities trying to schedule meetings with your entire team will have a better understanding of what your availability looks like.

### Establish team meeting norms 
Meet as a team to establish what meetings look like internally. Does everyone need to have their webcam on? What meetings are recurring? Where do we keep track of our "parking lot" topics for later? What do we do when a meeting is going over time?

Solidifying and writing down these expectations will help the team have a better idea of what meetings will look like. They should understand what meetings happen every week, and what unexpected meetings with other groups will look like. Make it a collaborative effort so that meetings no longer feel like they are owned by just one person, they should be owned by the team!

Re-visit these norms every once in a while so that new members can feel like their input is valued as well, and things to get too stagnate.

### Always have an agenda
If you've ever gotten an invite from your boss with the only subject being "1:1 time" you know the pain of the unknown. You begin to search your mind for any possibility of what you did wrong, or what happened recently that could bring this topic up. A clear meeting agenda should dissipate those worries, and have the topics laid out in the open.

If everyone is on the same page before the meeting even starts it will be much easier to stay on topic, stay focused, and ask the right questions. It should contain the problem being addressed, who is invited, and how long the meeting is expected to go.

All this will establish who needs to be at the meeting, if it's strictly a technical meeting, it should be noted that only developers need to attend. This crucial information will let everyone know what to expect and facilitation will be much easier as you can parking lot many topics by referencing the agenda.

## The Developer's Role
If you're a developer in all this, you shouldn't feel excluded from encouraging these ideas. Your opinion should matter in how meetings are handled even if you're just attending!
* Encourage good meeting practice by speaking up when you feel the discussion is off topic
* Voice your opinion on how recurring meetings are being handled. If they aren't effective, ask to collaborate as a team on fixing them
* Participate in discussions - unique perspectives are often the key to coming up with solutions. Your point of view could be the answer!
* Actively advocate for core working time if you feel you don't have enough time in the day to produce effective code

Developers can become undervalued and overworked if the leaders don't understand how even simple meetings are taking away from work. It's not always understood how much work is done just to get things up and running sometimes, so be an advocate for yourself and make your opinion known.

## Conclusion
Meetings can be incredibly useful, but also incredibly arduous, we should all strive to make them effective. We should constantly be evaluating how we are conducting them to make sure we haven't slipped into ineffective habits.

These tips are nothing groundbreaking, but they are good reminders to look at how we are respecting our and our coworker's time. 

Hopefully, you can bring these to your team and see a positive change in how you work together. Good luck! 

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…Until Next time =)

Originally posted on [Medium](https://medium.com/@livelongandponder/membership)
Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash