[avs733]

It can also be useful to, perhaps, engage in either a passive or active interrogation of what the value and purpose of a meeting is in the eyes of others.

I agree there are some useless meetings. I would, however, classify more meetings as unproductive but important. That represents a different problem and necesitates a different solution but seems to beguile engineers. Does an unproductive meeting need to be cancelled or fixed?

Finally, I have experienced meetings where one person who believes the meeting is useless and just runs it off the rails. The meetings can BECOME useless because of that person's behavior. Others may see it as valuable for alignment, clarification, ideation, many other reasons even if you don't. In my experience, the people who are willing to act on a belief a meeting is useless more frequently misunderstand what the goal of a particular meeting is, misunderstand the role of meetings in engineering/technical work, or just are generally premaddona assholes.

Declaring a meeting useless for everyone is rarely a productive solution. The idea that technical work is primarily and individualized activity is about as outdated as waterfall project management.

You can constructively engage in a conversation of 'what is the purpose of this meeting in the short and in the long term' without talking about the cost. If we reduce everything to that metric of observability then coders should be paid in lines of code written not thinking done.

[reificator]

> If we reduce everything to that metric of observability then coders should be paid in lines of code written not thinking done.

If this happens I'll do well. Just don't ask how I "write" the code that gets submitted.