Half of those meetings are business MBAs asking “Why isn’t more getting done on this project?”
The other half are about useful things, like what to do next, how your interfaces will look like, and “if you need help, just tell me, I can escalate it”.
Isn’t that just the NBA? And what are those guys doing in business meetings?
The job is defending people who get work done from people who don’t get work done.
Ex test lead, this 100%.
My job was to organise the work between the workers, keep the business away from my subordinates, and only waste their time when they had the complete information being asked for the specific reason.
And if I wasn’t doing one of the things above, my job was to pick up the horrible things that no one else wanted/I had experience and domain knowledge in (eg : accessibility testing)
0900 till 0930 - 15 min standup meeting.
0930 till 1000 - focus time.
1000 till 1100 - Pre meeting for customer meeting at 1100.
1100 till 1200 - Customer meeting.
1230 till 1300 - Post Meeting catchup.
1300 till 1330 - focus time.
1330 till 1430 - JIRA board update meeting.
1430 till 1500 - priorities review meeting.
1500 till 1645 - focus time.
1645 till 1730 - EOD standup.
“Are you don’t yet? Why aren’t you done yet? Help me update infinite plans that will be outdated in a week. Also, I just promised a bunch of stuff… all that stuff we already promised, I think you can do that faster.”
When I was a dev, I once had a PM with no technical skills that decided he would “learn to program to help catch us up”… He did not succeed.
Hey, at least he had the right idea. He saw that the delay was due to a lack of skilled workers and tried to fix that problem instead of just talking more about the project. That’s more awareness than most PMs have in my experience.
PMs act that way because people above them ask for updates regularly. Bad PMs don’t know how to push back. If you need things done faster, the answer is usually “we need more resources”.
You get focus time?
Also, what the hell is the point in an EOD standup if you’re gonna have another one in zero working minutes?
That concept is lost on so many people and I don’t understand why. One of the last teams I was on had two weekly meetings. One was 9:00 AM Monday morning and the other was 4:00 PM on Fridays. They were both running through all of our projects and always seemed surprised that the Monday update was the same as the previous Friday update.
It is to their advantage to be act surprised, therefore they are “surprised”, see? This was your “opportunity” to show how dedicated you are the company, having worked all weekend long…
Because even if you’re not working, you’ll probably think about problems overnight
So what’s the point of the EOD one?
I honestly see zero benefit in it unless it’s a 24h operation with a shift handover.
We do standups twice a week. At worst they run a half hour for my team of about 10 people. Usually we’re done in 15-20 minutes. Please tell me it’s just an absolutely made up joke that you have an hour and 15 minutes of stand up meetings every day. I would shoot myself.
I had a job that had > 1hr standups for our two man project because we met with QA, BA, and management and they wanted everything changed every day so we had to explain why we couldn’t do anything with constantly changing requirements every morning.
How long did you last there? I would have quit before the first meeting was over.
Does a lot happen between an EOD standup, and the morning standup? Pick a lane lol
Well yea, plenty happens between 1700 and 0900. That is why the 15 min standup takes 30 min.
They need to have full calendars so that they look productive. Those meetings are for them, not for you. You still have to attend tho.
Got to hate those meeting where you are marked as optional but you are required to attend.
No, this is incompetent management.
Senior engineers write enabling code/scaffolding, and review code, and mentor juniors. They also write feature code.
Lead engineers code and lead dev teams.
Principal engineers code, and talk about tech in meetings.
Senior Principal engineers, and distinguished technologists/fellows talk about tech, and maybe sometimes code.
Good managers go to meetings and shield the engineers from the stream of exec corporate bs. Infrequently they may rope any of the engineers in this chain in to explain the decisions that the engineers make along the way.
Bad managers bring engineers in to these meetings frequently.
Terrible managers make the engineering decisions and push those to the engineers.
There is a reason I keep refusing to take the “Lead” position. I know what I’m good at.
I’ve worked for startups too; everyone does everything all at the same time! Let the chaos reign! But it is fun in its own way.
I work for a large company now after the startup I worked for was acquired. Hierarchy, bureaucracy, layers, we’ve got it all. For worse and for better though, it allows me to focus and specialize on what I’m awesome at and furgeddaboddit (ahem! delegate) the stuff that I suck at to those who excel at those tasks.
I came here to say the same.
People in the technical career track spend most of their time making software, one way or another (there comes a point were you’re doing more preparation to code than actual coding).
As soon as you jump into the management career track it’s mostly meetings to report the team’s progress to upper management, even if you’re supposedly “technically oriented”.
Absolutelly, as you become a more senior tech things become more and more about figuring out what needs to be done at higher and higher levels (i.e. systems design, software development process design) which results in needing to interact with more and more stakeholders (your whole team, other teams, end users, management) hence more meetings, but you still get to do lots of coding or at least code-adjacent stuff (i.e. design).
Do you have excess creative energy?
Pour it into discussion that achieves nothing of value.
