[onion2k]

There's a very simple fix if you believe you have too many meetings - decline them.

If you don't think you're needed in a meeting, say so. Give a reason like "I have nothing to add to that discussion." or "There's no agenda so I don't know if I'm needed." or simply "I'm busy, I think my time would be better spent on story 123." Make the people who invite you start to consider if you're really needed[1].

Also, create your own "meetings" by putting blocks of focused coding time in your calendar where you're unavailable to other people.

Part of your job as a dev is to organise your time well. You can't just delegate that to other people. If you're saying yes to every invite, and then you sit and don't have anything to add, then you haven't done your job properly.

[1] They might stop inviting you, and then you'll have less input on things and less visibility to management (which mean you were needed in the meetings after all). Make sure you're happy with that before you try this strategy.

[watwut]

I cant refuse to go to planning meetings, standups and retrospective. Those are core of agile and already take massive massive amount of time. Some of their parts are useful, but they also contain hours of nothingness.

The other meetings are small in number and comparatively more useful per minute.

[onion2k]

I cant refuse to go to planning meetings, standups and retrospective.

Yes you can. Just send a note saying why you won't be there and what you'd have said if you had been. Agile ceremony meetings are practically the definition of meetings that could be emails.

[watwut]

Sight. I cant refuse agile ceremony while working employment in that company. I can leave the job for non-agile one or make myself fired. However, the combination of "being in one of those majorities of companies that believes in agile" and "not being in these meetings" is not available.

If your point is "then put up your resignation", then yes it is available. I am not a serf. That is not however what the "I cant do it" sentence in English refers to.

[onion2k]

However, the combination of "being in one of those majorities of companies that believes in agile" and "not being in these meetings" is not available.

I hear this from lots of developers. I also hear that none of them have ever raised the problem with their management, or attempted to suggest that they could submit notes instead when they have a lot of other work on, or anything that would reduce the number of meetings they need to attend. Practically all developers just coast along believing that because that's how things are it's impossible to change anything. This is despite the fact that agile includes a retro meeting specifically for raising these things. However, FWIW I wasn't actually suggesting missing all those meetings. Just some of them, when you have other priorities.

I've worked on teams where I've been invited to multiple daily standups and I'd have lost a couple of hours a day if I'd not been willing to push back. In every case I've been listened to and been able to communicate what I've been doing and whether I need any help in other ways instead (usually just by editing the standup notes myself).

Here's a suggestion. One of the key things about agile is that you have to 'process your processes'. If something isn't working for the team then you should iterate on it. At your next retrospective raise the problem - say "We should stop spending N hours a week on standups because it's stopping me finding clear blocks of time to focus on delivery. We should find a way to reduce the number of meetings I have. How about we have them on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and email our standup updates to the PM on Tuesday and Thursday." If the team agrees that would save you 40% of your standups..

[BlargMcLarg]

>I also hear that none of them have ever raised the problem with their management

I have. TL;DR: My managers effectively gaslighted me. "You don't understand agile" despite them being incapable of reciting the agile manifesto and not even knowing what does/doesn't belong to Scrum. "Oh but there has to be some communication", despite my argument clearly not being "there should be no communication". "You're not a team player", despite working together just fine outside those windows. It was an experience which effectively achieved nothing while wasting my time and emotional investment.

That's not to mention the obvious: a lot of managers have ulterior motives to keep the status quo.

>Practically all developers just coast along believing that because that's how things are it's impossible to change anything.

For the most part, that echoes my experience with a lot of companies. The majority don't want change. The majority don't have the power to change things alone. A lot of people don't know any better, and are afraid of the unknown. They have a positive experience with "Agile/SCRUM" because it's marginally better than what they had, even though they can't pinpoint exactly what attributes to their improved situation, leading to pointing the entire package as a big plus.

This really shouldn't come as a surprise either. You can introduce retrospectives and whatever; most companies are still top-down hierarchies at heart. The majority of people learn from a young age not to rile things up, and the IT crowd is definitely not known for being rebellious towards those in power. The entire thing points towards waiting for some people in power to try something different, or for individuals to try their own luck at entrepreneurship.

NB: I don't fault people for liking this or wanting this. The bigger problem is how quickly the far majority of companies force feed the entire development team this way of working, leaving almost no place for the people who don't want to work this way. If you don't like it, good luck finding something that isn't highly Agile/SCRUM/meeting-oriented or at risk of becoming that in the near future. It's the same thing with remote work, asynchronous work, non-standard work hours, you name it. It's the incessant need for a one-size-fits-all approach which to this day is questionable at best.

[tonyedgecombe]

It would be interesting to try it, if you had another job lined up.

[UweSchmidt]

That can require some standing within the organization and mental fortitude. Absence can be interpreted as a failing, important information can be droppend throughout long meetings, people expect you to be around to answer questions that come up.

[makeitdouble]

Your point sounds to me like: "It's your fault if you're miserable. It's up to you to confront your peers and fight your organization to protect your sanity "

It might be true in many settings, but I'd see that as a toxic and hostile environment we shouldn't be accepting as normal. Some people will sure enjoy Fight Club kind of places, I still wouldn't assume they are "a very simple fix" to shitty companies.

Quitting for a better workplace looks to me like a better course of action if the opportunity presents itself.

[onion2k]

Your point sounds to me like: "It's your fault if you're miserable. It's up to you to confront your peers and fight your organization to protect your sanity"

No one automatically just knows when people are unhappy with a process if they don't talk about it. There are lots of people who think agile ceremonies are a good thing, and they think they work, and in a lot of cases they do work. People don't question that if they don't need to. Consequently, if you're unhappy with it, you need to say something.

"Quit for a better workplace" doesn't work for minor things because every workplace will have something that you don't like. You'll never be able to find the perfect role. You have to find somewhere that's mostly good, and then change it to be better. If you can't then you should move on.

[makeitdouble]

There’s to me a decent gap between discussing processes, voicing opinions, and straight declining meetings and making yourself unavailable.

If you’re in need for tricks and tough love to get away from meeting hell, it’s already beyond “talking about it”, and beyond minor annoyances IMO. And sure it must happen because other people believe it’s a good, or at least a necessary thing. Working with people that value your time isn’t as exotic or rare as we make it sound, and it often will be enforced through the whole org to avoid having each one fight on their own.