[RajT88]

> Insist on asynchronous communication.

Not disagreeing, but you've also got to be mindful of scenarios where there is something which needs to be hashed out and neither party fully owns the thing.

If you don't nip it in the bud by getting those people together on a call or in the room together, you can end up with a lot of unnecessary back and forth.

Getting people in the room together is particularly effective for such cases.

[acdha]

Yeah, I like the idea of making meetings have some nominal cost - a lot of organizations won’t even blink at letting anyone schedule meetings which cost thousands of dollars per hour but will need three levels of sign-off for a $50 purchase. It feels like there could be a middle ground where you basically get reminded of the cost to the organization.

I’ve seen some people who will fill the week up with Groundhog’s Day-style repeat meetings, and even the basic expectation that they have an agenda, goals, and need to summarize what was decided afterwards increases the cost to them personally enough to make better use of everyone’s time.

[RajT88]

> three levels of sign-off for a $50 purchase.

Christ almighty it's so hard to get one-off software purchases approved, no matter how trivial. And so easy to get approved for hiring more people at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

The corporate world is crazy town sometimes.

[acdha]

Conferences can be interesting, too. I know people who got screwed over trying to get $100 for an unrecognized local open source conference while the PMs were all going to Aruba for Agile training because that had a certification so it was obviously a legit educational experience.

[diracs_stache]

Yep, a lot of places allow for 80hrs/2wks of "training". Crazy how popular those Agile/SAFE/AWS/Azure/etc. conferences are in a destination location, meanwhile engineers asking to have time prorated for some graduate coursework is unfathomable.

[theideaofcoffee]

If it takes corralling people into a meeting and interrupting their day to 'hash out' some aspect of a project, then it's a management failure where the importance of this particular thing wasn't communicated or emphasized before and how the individuals' inputs matter. If everyone understands how this project, regardless of the parties' full ownership or not, or whatever contributes to success because there was clear communication to that fact then people might be more inclined to resolve the issue sooner, even if comms are async.

I see it like this: people are going back and forth over email and waffling then it's probably not that important, why should it be any different in person aside from the fact they're performing for management.

[RajT88]

> then it's a management failure where the importance of this particular thing wasn't communicated or emphasized before and how the individuals' inputs matter.

Yes. And you can't fix those as an IC, so you just have to work around them. This is like complaining about the direction of the company and advising to fix the root cause of whatever corporate drama - not wrong, just not helpful or practical advice.

> why should it be any different in person aside from the fact they're performing for management.

There's many reasons why in-person is more effective:

- Fewer distractions

- More emotional investment in the discussion (the same dynamic where people are more polite in person, but less so on internet forums)

- More "skin in the game" by making more of an effort to show up

[theideaofcoffee]

> Yes. And you can't fix those as an IC, so you just have to work around them.

Sure you can and no you don't have to, you can say so publically, which may give others the courage to do the same, at which point 'management' may see one of two things: there's a critical mass of people that disagree with how we are doing things and move to correct course, or the rabble-rousers are fired. I have personally taken the personal risk to raise issues like that, and have suffered the wrath of thin-skinned managers which placed me into the latter camp, so I'm not suggesting things to just suggest them.

The more I experience insanity like this the more I see that collective action in this manner is the only way developers and other non-managerial folk hope to regain some control and some semblance of normality.

> Fewer distractions

You sure? I sure can definitely zone out and I may do out of spite if we're convened for a meeting that could have been an email chain.

> More emotional investment in the discussion

Because it's now become a performance.

> More "skin in the game"

Again, because it's become a performance for the sake of performance, especially if 'senior leadership' are now involved.

[RajT88]

> Because it's now become a performance.

Being accountable is arguably a performance.

Job performance.

> You sure?

Yes.

[vundercind]

Under-appreciated factor here: a hell of a lot of people—even in the corporate world, even (somehow!) college graduates—are shockingly bad at reading comprehension (which is simply being bad at reading) and at writing clearly (or, simply bad at writing).

I suspect the population for whom this holds isn’t much smaller than the famously-a-majority “bad at math” set, and the difference in visibility of the issue is because the “bad at literacy” folks don’t volunteer their status as readily as the bad-at-math folks.

[eschneider]

Absolutely this. The key to making those meetings effective is starting with an agenda and leaving with either a decision or action items that will lead to a decision.