Half of those meetings are business MBAs asking “Why isn’t more getting done on this project?”
The other half are about useful things, like what to do next, how your interfaces will look like, and “if you need help, just tell me, I can escalate it”.
Oh, and how to prepare for the meeting on staging the discussion for the rollout of the plan for the new strategic initiative (first iteration)
I’m not exaggerating by that much, tbh.
As opposed to non-business MNBAs of course
Major in Not Business Administration? :D
Also:
MNBA may refer to:
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2-Methyl-6-nitrobenzoic anhydride, a condensing agent used in chemistry laboratories
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Mongolian National Basketball Association
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Isn’t that just the NBA? And what are those guys doing in business meetings?
Dunking on other projects.
Embarrassed after the WNBA had a killer season
No, this is incompetent management.
Senior engineers write enabling code/scaffolding, and review code, and mentor juniors. They also write feature code.
Lead engineers code and lead dev teams.
Principal engineers code, and talk about tech in meetings.
Senior Principal engineers, and distinguished technologists/fellows talk about tech, and maybe sometimes code.
Good managers go to meetings and shield the engineers from the stream of exec corporate bs. Infrequently they may rope any of the engineers in this chain in to explain the decisions that the engineers make along the way.
Bad managers bring engineers in to these meetings frequently.
Terrible managers make the engineering decisions and push those to the engineers.
I came here to say the same.
People in the technical career track spend most of their time making software, one way or another (there comes a point were you’re doing more preparation to code than actual coding).
As soon as you jump into the management career track it’s mostly meetings to report the team’s progress to upper management, even if you’re supposedly “technically oriented”.
Absolutelly, as you become a more senior tech things become more and more about figuring out what needs to be done at higher and higher levels (i.e. systems design, software development process design) which results in needing to interact with more and more stakeholders (your whole team, other teams, end users, management) hence more meetings, but you still get to do lots of coding or at least code-adjacent stuff (i.e. design).
TIL my company has only bad managers.
There is a reason I keep refusing to take the “Lead” position. I know what I’m good at.
Now I don’t know, but I been told
It’s hard to run with the weight of gold
Other hand I have heard it said
It’s just as hard with the weight of lead…
bruh, your company has money for all those layers in your lasagna?
I’ve worked for startups too; everyone does everything all at the same time! Let the chaos reign! But it is fun in its own way.
I work for a large company now after the startup I worked for was acquired. Hierarchy, bureaucracy, layers, we’ve got it all. For worse and for better though, it allows me to focus and specialize on what I’m awesome at and furgeddaboddit (ahem! delegate) the stuff that I suck at to those who excel at those tasks.
Good managers go to meetings and shield the engineers from the stream of exec corporate bs
Was lucky enough to work with one… once.
0900 till 0930 - 15 min standup meeting.
0930 till 1000 - focus time.
1000 till 1100 - Pre meeting for customer meeting at 1100.
1100 till 1200 - Customer meeting.
1230 till 1300 - Post Meeting catchup.
1300 till 1330 - focus time.
1330 till 1430 - JIRA board update meeting.
1430 till 1500 - priorities review meeting.
1500 till 1645 - focus time.
1645 till 1730 - EOD standup.“Are you don’t yet? Why aren’t you done yet? Help me update infinite plans that will be outdated in a week. Also, I just promised a bunch of stuff… all that stuff we already promised, I think you can do that faster.”
When I was a dev, I once had a PM with no technical skills that decided he would “learn to program to help catch us up”… He did not succeed.
Hey, at least he had the right idea. He saw that the delay was due to a lack of skilled workers and tried to fix that problem instead of just talking more about the project. That’s more awareness than most PMs have in my experience.
PMs act that way because people above them ask for updates regularly. Bad PMs don’t know how to push back. If you need things done faster, the answer is usually “we need more resources”.
“we need more resources” is bounded by the rate at which you can incorporate new teams members without absolutely destroying your productivity, or having a bunch of untrained fools running around breaking things (of course the later is standard at many places already, so I guess it doesn’t always matter).
The right answer is usually : “No”. Or at least “Prioritize”. Or “This is what we need to get it done” at which point they might start to get software takes time to make decently, and they don’t want software that doesn’t work decently in the first place.
“Sure! You just have to choose which of these other things you want deprioritized since we’re already going at full tilt”
If you need things done faster, the answer is usually “we need more resources”.
Like having 9 women to make a baby in a month?
We do standups twice a week. At worst they run a half hour for my team of about 10 people. Usually we’re done in 15-20 minutes. Please tell me it’s just an absolutely made up joke that you have an hour and 15 minutes of stand up meetings every day. I would shoot myself.
I had a job that had > 1hr standups for our two man project because we met with QA, BA, and management and they wanted everything changed every day so we had to explain why we couldn’t do anything with constantly changing requirements every morning.
How long did you last there? I would have quit before the first meeting was over.
6 months lol, it was my first job in swen and other than that it was easy.
Sitting in a meeting right now…
This is such a an accurate comment.
Does a lot happen between an EOD standup, and the morning standup? Pick a lane lol
Well yea, plenty happens between 1700 and 0900. That is why the 15 min standup takes 30 min.
You get focus time?
Also, what the hell is the point in an EOD standup if you’re gonna have another one in zero working minutes?
That concept is lost on so many people and I don’t understand why. One of the last teams I was on had two weekly meetings. One was 9:00 AM Monday morning and the other was 4:00 PM on Fridays. They were both running through all of our projects and always seemed surprised that the Monday update was the same as the previous Friday update.
It is to their advantage to
beact surprised, therefore they are “surprised”, see? This was your “opportunity” to show how dedicated you are the company, having worked all weekend long…It isn’t particularly hard to call this out. Just say “I haven’t done anything since Friday.” And leave it at that.
Be comfortable with silence.
I have a blocker for Friday afternoon meetings.
You get focus time?
They need to give you some time to answer emails from management 🙄
“Focus time” is the name of the meeting.
Because even if you’re not working, you’ll probably think about problems overnight
So what’s the point of the EOD one?
I honestly see zero benefit in it unless it’s a 24h operation with a shift handover.
I hate to defend the EoD standup, but some people forget everything overnight. The only way to know what they did is to ask before the rest.
Yes, they truly are amazing. Yes, everyone should not be punished.
Mostly, it it to keep people from going home early. As such is indefensible.
“I cannot attend EOD daily today, I have to get the kids from school early.”
Yes, that’s generally the job of a senior engineer.
Agreed. Use your experience to shape the direction your teammates are moving in. Be an architect, and let them handle your light work.
It depends VERY much about the content and invitees of the meetings.
If you’re there to give your expert engineering feedback, awesome. If you’re there to receive the information you need in order to provide expert engineering feedback, awesome.
So often, I find, meetings are too broad and end up oversubscribed. Engineers are in a 2 hour meeting with 10 minutes of relevance.
There are serious differences in meeting culture, with vast implications oh the amount of efficacy you can juice from the attendees.
Ehhhh, depends on how your titles work, and I would argue that’s at least a little odd. Most senior engineers I know are ~50/50 code/oversight, at worst. Once you get to Principal or Staff, though, you’re lucky if you write 50 loc/week.
Senior rarely translates to something like architect anymore, it’s at least a level or two up from there.
The beauty of titles like this is that they’re absolutely meaningless.
You can’t compare them between companies, sometimes even departments, you can’t compare them between different industries, and you can’t compare them between countries.
I’m a senior, and my job is currently to sit in meetings most of the day to convince BAs, architects and other team’s leads not to make stupid decisions. The rest of my time I’m communicating the results back to my colleagues and writing escalation mails, because Steve again tried to re-introduce his god awful ideas that we shot down five times before and I’m hereby voicing my concerns in a business-like tone, but actually would want to exterminate him and his entire offspring.
My old project, however, was completely different and I actually spent 70% of my time actually writing code and 20% code-related meetings.
Sounds like you’re doing the job of a PM to me, but I guess that’s just confirming your point that titles aren’t comparable
Not really, it’s really largely a technical discussion, but we have a distributed monolith (the architect calls it micro service…) so each change of an interface will percolate through the entire system.
Do you have excess creative energy?
Pour it into discussion that achieves nothing of value.
Have you considered writing your own projects that you have to hide from your employers, and be careful with whom you discuss, so as to avoid the legal complications of the company owning your work?
The job is defending people who get work done from people who don’t get work done.
Ex test lead, this 100%.
My job was to organise the work between the workers, keep the business away from my subordinates, and only waste their time when they had the complete information being asked for the specific reason.
And if I wasn’t doing one of the things above, my job was to pick up the horrible things that no one else wanted/I had experience and domain knowledge in (eg : accessibility testing)
LOL. So true.
This is the perfect description.
