Some meetings are for:
-
Project Planning
-
Roadmaps
-
Brainstorming
-
Project-Milestone-Task breakdowns
-
Issue-Triage work
-
Budgetary allocations
-
Priority item tracking
There are many many important meetings to have and to get done. The worst meeting you can have is a status-update call where you mark off items on a checklist. This can be done by automation and status-tracker boards.
No the worst meeting is when the entire team — CEO, CTO, sales, engineering — spend all of Friday (every Friday) divvying up the tabs in a big excel spreadsheet, going and re-going through workflow checklists.
I knew they had no automated tests when I joined. I was promised, when I joined, that I’d be allowed to spend at least 25% of my time building an automated test suite for our app.
But we never had time to allow me to do that. So instead of spending 25% of my time developing an automated suite, which would steadily reduce the following until it was zero, we spent 20% of the entire company’s time doing human rspec tests.
One time the CTO asked me “Why wasn’t this caught in testing?” and I said “Because we don’t do any testing”
Damn sounds too familiar 👀
Also, I agreed to only take 2/3 of my salary until a funding round came in. The promise was as soon as that hit, I’d go to 100% of our agreed salary.
Funding was eventually secured (thanks in no small part to me) and they tried to say “we’ll see” on the salary increase, so I just quit.
Huh. In theory, at least. In IT I’ve really only seen the status/blamestorm sessions. If I suggest that meetings aren’t a good use of time, it’s from that bias.
-
