I was chatting with a colleague on a feature that is loooooooong overdue and proposed to kill a meeting and use the time saved to write the damn thing.
He replied to me
Believe me, I would like to drop a meeting, not sure which one.
To which I replied
That’s easy, anyone of them
and gave my thoughts on meetings.
If there is a need for bi-weekly meetings to integrate XXX and XXX, we’ve got a problem that meetings can’t solve.
I have a radical take on meetings, especially regularly scheduled meetings:
- assuming n persons in the meeting you waste most of the time n-2 people’s time (and if n>10, it’s likely n-1 people’s time)
- people tend to not prepare meetings. They instead think about the issue at stake while in the meeting and thus wasting n-1 people’s time. Force people to write ideas in a (somewhat short) email, and that will force them to think about the issue more deeply and synthesize.
- a need for a regular scheduled meeting is a sign of lack of trust, lack of natural communication and/or lack of proper task isolation: in any case, better treat the problem at the source than patching with a meeting.
The key to open source success is multiple but one big component is extreme resource/time stress. This constraint leads to:
- very focused teams
- limited need for sync-up style communication (hence the usual small core team)
- proper separation of tasks to limit waste
I am not against communication, I am against communication wasting time (the asymptotic version being pure noise). I favor 1-1 communication personally as the most efficient brain-picking strategy.
I think that meeting is a great possibility to meet other people working on the same project. For example, I was working as a Java developer on a big project with a lot of other IT guys (DB administrators, Network & Security experts). Sometimes, it was very helpful to meet them during the meetings and listening to their explanations and/or their experience. Often, we can’t see and we don’t know that the problem we are trying to solve is already solved by someone else, maybe from the different IT-field.
Yevgen, I suspect what Emmanuel is mostly talking about is conference call meetings, which are quite common in organizations where folks are spread all over the world.
Occasional face to face meetings are useful for the reasons you describe, although they too can easily become time sucks. But at least you can easily have productive side discussions with people.
Conference call meetings are horrid, evil time-sucks. The only one I like is one where for whatever reason only 2 or 3 people ever show up, so it turns into a useful 1:1 or 1:2 interaction.