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".
Oh, and how to prepare for the meeting on staging the discussion for the rollout of the plan for the new strategic initiative (first iteration)
I’m not exaggerating by that much, tbh.
Major in Not Business Administration? :D
Also:
MNBA may refer to:
-
2-Methyl-6-nitrobenzoic anhydride, a condensing agent used in chemistry laboratories
-
Mongolian National Basketball Association
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 Help me update infinite plans that will be outdated in a week.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.
If a PM has enough time to try to learn programming on the side, then they are a shit PM. A PM should shield the team from unneccessary meetings, be the main initial contact point and the initial refinement guy. Those are 4 seperate jobs at once.
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".
If you need things done faster, the answer is usually "we need more resources".
Like having 9 women to make a baby in a month?
"we need more resources" is bounded by the rate at which you can incorporate new teams members without absolutely destroying your productivity, or having a bunch of untrained fools running around breaking things (of course the later is standard at many places already, so I guess it doesn't always matter).
The right answer is usually : "No". Or at least "Prioritize". Or "This is what we need to get it done" at which point they might start to get software takes time to make decently, and they don't want software that doesn't work decently in the first place.
"Sure! You just have to choose which of these other things you want deprioritized since we're already going at full tilt"
Calling people “resources” and the mindset that delivery teams are just a number that you can spend money to increase is a mark of poor project and personnel management, as well.
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...
It isn't particularly hard to call this out. Just say "I haven't done anything since Friday." And leave it at that.
Be comfortable with silence.
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.
I hate to defend the EoD standup, but some people forget everything overnight. The only way to know what they did is to ask before the rest.
Yes, they truly are amazing. Yes, everyone should not be punished.
Mostly, it it to keep people from going home early. As such is indefensible.
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.
The really funny bit is that the Standup comes from Agile, which is a software development process class exactly about being able to cope with frequent changing requirements, and the Standup is definitelly not the point when new requirements are introduced.
Don't worry mate, it is a joke. But judging by the other comments it is closer to reality than a joke for some.
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.
And the ones where you have to discuss what's coming up in the next meeting. Meetings about meetings. We call them metameetings.
Hey, you are actually double booked for the nth meeting for annual “Goals” that’s coming up!
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.
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Good managers go to meetings and shield the engineers from the stream of exec corporate bs
Was lucky enough to work with one... once.
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Now I don't know, but I been told
It's hard to run with the weight of gold
Other hand I have heard it said
It's just as hard with the weight of lead…
your company has money for no one above mid-level engineers to be actually building the product?
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.
Have you considered writing your own projects that you have to hide from your employers, and be careful with whom you discuss, so as to avoid the legal complications of the company owning your work?
Agreed. Use your experience to shape the direction your teammates are moving in. Be an architect, and let them handle your light work.
It depends VERY much about the content and invitees of the meetings.
If you're there to give your expert engineering feedback, awesome. If you're there to receive the information you need in order to provide expert engineering feedback, awesome.
So often, I find, meetings are too broad and end up oversubscribed. Engineers are in a 2 hour meeting with 10 minutes of relevance.
There are serious differences in meeting culture, with vast implications oh the amount of efficacy you can juice from the attendees.
Ehhhh, depends on how your titles work, and I would argue that's at least a little odd. Most senior engineers I know are ~50/50 code/oversight, at worst. Once you get to Principal or Staff, though, you're lucky if you write 50 loc/week.
Senior rarely translates to something like architect anymore, it's at least a level or two up from there.
The beauty of titles like this is that they're absolutely meaningless.
You can't compare them between companies, sometimes even departments, you can't compare them between different industries, and you can't compare them between countries.
I'm a senior, and my job is currently to sit in meetings most of the day to convince BAs, architects and other team's leads not to make stupid decisions. The rest of my time I'm communicating the results back to my colleagues and writing escalation mails, because Steve again tried to re-introduce his god awful ideas that we shot down five times before and I'm hereby voicing my concerns in a business-like tone, but actually would want to exterminate him and his entire offspring.
My old project, however, was completely different and I actually spent 70% of my time actually writing code and 20% code-related meetings.
Sounds like you're doing the job of a PM to me, but I guess that's just confirming your point that titles aren't comparable
Not really, it's really largely a technical discussion, but we have a distributed monolith (the architect calls it micro service...) so each change of an interface will percolate through the entire system.
I've worked in a few places, all with senior engineers, including myself as a senior engineer, all of which the senior engineers spent most of their time actually engineering. If I went somewhere as a senior and was told I was going to be in meetings all day, I would quit because that's management, not engineering.
No it isn't - a senior engineer should be a technical track professional that's excellent at their job - it's likely there will be a fair amount of mentorship but that can take many forms including PR reviews and pair programming.
A technical lead, architect, or a front line manager is the one that should be eating meetings four to six hours a day. And absolutely nobody should be in eight hours of meetings a day - even bullshit C level folks should be doing work outside of meetings. Eight hours of meetings means that you're just regurgitating the output of other meetings.
I'd clarify that having occasional eight hour meeting days isn't bad, there might be occasional collaboration jam sessions that everyone prepares for... but if your 8-5-52 is solid meetings then nothing productive is happening.
Fully agree. Not every high paying job has to end up with management duties. That's the Peter Principle.
Where I work, Senior Engineer is an IC role. They attend the same meetings as other engineers. Its the Staff+ Engineers and managers that attend more meetings (in ascending order)
Engineer should still be an IC position and not have that many meetings. It should be a project or team lead that does the majority of meetings.
Tech Leads and Staff+ Engineers are still IC roles. If you're not managing people, then you're not in a manager role.
I mean I’m a senior engineer and I mostly handle escalations and high priority client issues, but my work is mostly break/fix
This is largely semantic, and highly subjective, but to me "Engineer" implies more design, architecture, and planning (ie, meetings).
A Senior "Developer" would imply more day-to-day coding to me. Not that companies care what I think, of course.
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Of course there's no point in trying to rationalize this 'cos these people use meetings to try justify their usefulness to the company (HR does the same with random activities), so you end up drawing red lines with invisible ink...
I work in the government and I honestly don't know when anyone does any real work. It's meeting after meeting overlapping other meetings. All week.
How does stuff get done, seriously?
I wanted to write code with more authority and higher wage, not sit in endless meetings and explain to somebody why it's 8 story points instead of 5 🙄
Talk to your manager, they're really fucking failing to support you. When I was a senior data architect I had about two hours of meetings a day.
I work on the City side of the development world. We're always getting screamed at for taking 3 weeks to review a plan set by the same developers who want to meet with me every minute of every fucking day.
I've got 40 projects in my review queue and all of them are demanding a weekly meeting. When am I supposed to do the fucking reviews?
When you talk to your management and show them how overworked you are and ask for a helper. But don't just say how much, show them in business lingo so they actually understand.
Fill out your calendar with the meetings and show management how you have no time for meaningful work because of meetings.
I'm on the Municipal side. City Council ain't gonna raise taxes to hire more people.
I'll get burned out and leave soon enough. The longest-serving person in the development department has been here just over a year, and we pay nearly double what other cities in the area do.
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I worked in places like this and I'm not going back unless consulting prices go back up again... The pain is real.
Just find a place that hasn't solidified their IT structure and processes enough for people to have time to invent BS overhead.
THE STANDARD PRACTICE IS WHATEVER I SAY IT IS JANICE! how are business critical things no one knew existed breaking
I just got a Jr dev job about 3 weeks ago and I haven't written a single line of code. It's all been meetings and other shit. I'm kind of ok with that. Lol
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I think this is something a lot of people posting here don't get. You can be a programmer, make apps or games in your spare time, set your own goals and be your own boss, and that's great. Suddenly you get a "normal" job programming and you have you deal with customer requirements, business nonsense, and working as part of a team; that's being a software engineer. One isn't superior to the other, they are just different beasts.
Absolutely. There is very little programming involved in a normal job most of the year. I actually knew that before getting in. I have friends on the same team that have been there before me and they explained things beforehand. I have so many meetings and business stuff daily. We also reach out to users to help them fix issues on their machines, too.
not my experience at all across 3 separate companies. Ime senior engineers are the highest level that still spends most of the day heads down most days, and that's why I'm gonna stick it out at this level as long as I can.
This is not the first time I’ve seen memes like this, and it makes me so glad I’m not involved in programming or software development. I would straight up die.
If you can find a comfy mid level role or a "real" senior role that is mostly code it's a very rewarding career. But yeah I'd lose it with day long meetings