[gfodor]

The truth is that if you’re a manager who has no other marketable skills, you can only hate pointless meetings so much since without them you’d probably be putting your resume in down at the local Starbucks. Clear an engineer’s calendar and you probably make a more productive engineer, clear a manager’s calendar and regardless of the consequences to everyone else one thing is sure: that person’s job function is no longer obvious.

If you’re in sanitation, you have a more nuanced relationship with trash than those who aren’t, even though everyone dislikes trash.

[Xylakant]

Good managers should abhor pointless meetings as much as anyone else - their task is to make useful meetings. Anything else is just a waste of time and wasting everyone’s time is not exactly the hallmark of a good manager. Now, there’s people that hate all meetings and regard them all as a waste of time and if you’re one of those, you’ll never acquire the skill to actually make meetings useful - this is a skill which needs training like any other skill does.

[gfodor]

If you work in an organization where such meetings are the norm, please share what led to such a magical place. I've heard Amazon is such a place but I'm very skeptical. My general presumption based upon years in the industry is that by far the majority of scheduled, large block meetings are not worth the opportunity cost of having them. Effective meetings don't come from an individual transforming normally ineffective ones into effective ones by some form of wizardry over everyone else in the room, they come from a culture where everyone makes them effective together through shared values. In a large enough organization, this seems basically intractable to maintain. IMO the only way to win is to not play and move most meetings to short, unscheduled ones with timeboxes in conjunction with asynchronous communication tools.

[Xylakant]

> My general presumption based upon years in the industry is that by far the majority of scheduled, large block meetings are not worth the opportunity cost of having them.

I entirely agree with you here - I disagree with the notion that "managers" (should) like those meetings any more than other folks. Most large block meetings are ineffective, the more effective ones have a strict agenda and someone moderating them with that agenda in mind. They can be useful for announcements or large-scale alignment, but most of them should be struck from the calendar with no replacement - and good managers recognize this and strive to do so.

> Effective meetings don't come from an individual transforming normally ineffective ones into effective ones by some form of wizardry over everyone else in the room, they come from a culture where everyone makes them effective together through shared values.

The person leading a meeting can make a substantial impact - being prepared, making an agenda and a plan, setting a clear goal for the meeting, deliberately limiting the number of people attending, requiring others to come prepared and enforcing that (possible adjourning the meeting if it turns out to be ineffective), time boxing. There's no magic place where all meetings are effective or feel effective for everyone, but there are places that try to improve and there are techniques that make improvement possible.

[gfodor]

Point taken - I think to drill into my point more is that very few meetings are objectively "pointless" - and managers are much more likely to see a meeting as having "value" than the engineers, in part because of the effect I mention where their jobs are defined by meetings, not in spite of meetings. (Sometimes this is not the case, eg a manager may see the latent value of literally just having two people in the same room together and talk to one another who would otherwise not, for political purposes, that the engineers cannot understand.)

To cut it in the other direction, your average testing engineer will have a much harder time agreeing with the idea that most of your test suite is useless and should be thrown out, even if it is useless, because to do so would be to admit that their entire job is less credible as a concept if it is true.

[Xylakant]

I disagree that a managers job is (or should be) defined by "meetings". A mangers job is to facilitate certain aspects of shared work, for example alignment on goals, ensuring availability of resources (financial, time, expertise, ...), recognizing and possibly removing obstacles. Meetings are one tool that can be put to use, but they are not an intrinsic goal. The same holds true for a good QA engineer - their goal is not writing a test suite. The same should hold true for a programmer - the code is not the goal. Removal of useless code is a good thing. However, there are people that fail in all of these professions - I've seen enough coders that write complex code for the love of complex code, DevOps folks self-managing kubernetes where a simple virtual machine would have been sufficient and managers hiring people just to increase the headcount of their department and increase their perceived standing.

[gfodor]

I don't think implying that QA engineers being biased in favor of having unnecessary automated tests is the same thing as saying that QA engineers have a goal of writing tests. It's just the nature of the beast. My point is jobs inherently favor artifacts or actions which (perhaps ceremoniously) justify their existence, and often resist attempts to remove such things since they've integrated those things as core to their job function (even if their motives and goals are in fact not to create those artifacts.)