[superchroma]

Well, you should clearly communicate your career desires to your manager, for starters. If you don't want a leadership position and you're being groomed for it, say so. As for meetings, they're for your manager's benefit, so they have visibility on what you're working on and can identify blockages in a timely fashion. More broadly, I would suggest finding a smaller company or start-up that doesn't have a lot of formalized processes and will allow you to run with something.

That said, I've got bad news for you: most people like working alone. Everyone wants to "own" the thing they're working on and not depend on others. It's not special, and it's really a baseline expectation of a programmer. What companies want is team players who are often fun, light and friendly, actively work to build trust with a team through socialization, promote good practices and patterns and don't begrudge the fact that a portion of their day is to be spent in meetings, reviewing others' code and generally communicating. These behaviors increase in value in a larger organization with heavy processes in place to compensate for scale and variable talent.

[perilunar]

> most people like working alone

I don't agree. Extroverts love working with other people, and love having meetings and 'catching up'. I suspect most engineers, scientists, and programmers lean towards introversion, so we like working alone, but it's not true of most people.

[tomcat27]

I just can't think well on interesting problems while someone's talking to someone behind, someone at my face at the cubicle trying to hit a conversation. Hence, WFH.

Don't like team because finding good team 10xs everything but bad team 1/10xs everything.

It's way more likely the team is a misfit in real world unless of course there are no hiring constraints due to elitism.

[tomcat27]

> What companies want is team players who are often fun, light and friendly, actively work to build trust with a team through socialization, promote good practices and patterns and don't begrudge the fact that a portion of their day is to be spent in meetings, reviewing others' code and generally communicating.

It seems ok for a company to seek these from their engineers. I think, I want these too. I just don't like forced standups and sync up meetings. If someone did something cool and want to pull me aside to show? I'm all in. If someone wants help on something, I'll be there..

but it's just that the way things are managed is just dull.

let's do a standup meeting for 15mins where people explain - what they did yesterday - what they will do today - what are impediments

I propose an idea and the TL arbitrarily pulls off a blog post reference to shut down by saying "there's no business value".

umm. effing nonsense.

[dam_broke_it]

Small companies are the WORST for meetings about meetings about meetings....