Why do developers hate meetings so much?
I don't think I'm the only developer who has looked at their calendar with concern after seeing a meeting scheduled right in the middle of a work period.
A 30-minute meeting may seem harmless, but when it interrupts a period during which I'm focused on a complex problem, its real cost can be much higher.
So, why do developers seem to hate meetings so much? Well, I won't speak for everyone, but personally, I hate them.
Because a meeting interrupts our concentration
Programming generally requires staying focused for a certain amount of time. When I'm working on a problem, I keep a lot of information in my head: how the code works, important variables, the assumptions I've made, the tests I need to run, and the different approaches I'm exploring.
Then a meeting comes along. I leave my editor, join the call, discuss something completely different for 30 minutes, and then go back to my code.
And then there's a small problem: where was I again?
I have to read the code again, figure out what I was doing, and mentally reconstruct the problem. So the meeting didn't necessarily cost me 30 minutes. It may have cost me much more.
The famous "It'll only take 5 minutes"
I'm particularly suspicious of this sentence:
> "Can we have a quick 5-minute call?"
In my experience, those five minutes have a nasty tendency to become fifteen, then thirty. And sometimes, the person who simply wanted to "ask a quick question" ends up explaining the context for ten minutes before we finally get to the actual problem.
I'm exaggerating a little, obviously. Some short meetings are genuinely useful. But when a question can be solved with a few lines of messages, a call isn't necessarily needed.
Anyway, as soon as we're interrupted, we can lose our train of thought. š
A meeting can be useful
I'm not against meetings. There are subjects where a live discussion is clearly more efficient than a long written conversation.
For example, when an important decision needs to be made between several people, when discussing an architecture, or when solving a problem that requires a lot of explanation, a meeting can save time.
So the problem isn't really the meeting. It's the meeting that has no real purpose.
Some meetings could simply be a message
This is probably one of the most common problems. Someone schedules a meeting to ask:
> "How is the development of this feature going?"
A message would probably have been enough. Unfortunately, some people still prefer to use a call.
A week later, I can find the conversation again and see why we made a particular decision. With a meeting, I sometimes have to rely on my memory, notes, or meeting minutes.
Meetings without an agenda are particularly dangerous
I like knowing why I'm attending a meeting. Not necessarily having a 15-page document, but at least knowing the subject, and possibly doing some preparation beforehand so we don't waste time during the meeting.
If I receive an invitation called:
> "Project update"
I don't necessarily know what is expected of me. Is it an information meeting? Do I need to make a decision? Should I prepare something?
A very simple agenda can already solve a large part of the problem!
The problem with meetings that are too long
A one-hour meeting isn't necessarily better than a 30-minute meeting. Quite the opposite. The longer a meeting is, the easier it is to drift into secondary topics.
We start with a specific problem, then someone asks a question, which leads to another question, which takes us to a completely different subject...
And suddenly, we're 45 minutes into the meeting discussing a problem that wasn't planned at all.
This has obviously happened to me before. And I think many developers know the situation.
Meetings can also be expensive
A one-hour meeting with one person costs one hour. A one-hour meeting with ten people costs ten hours of work. That's an important difference.
Also, the more people there are, the less the meeting moves forward, at least that's how I feel about it.
I've already had a meeting to discuss a bug with a client where there were 15 people. And as the discussion went on, more people were invited, bringing the total to 18...
What a waste of time for most of the people involved...
Developers need long periods of concentration
This is probably the main reason why meetings can be particularly painful for developers. Some tasks require thinking for a long time without interruption.
Reading a large piece of code, understanding an architecture, investigating a complex bug, or designing a solution isn't always easy when working in 20-minute chunks.
If my day is split up like this:
09:00 - 09:30 Ā Meeting
09:30 - 10:15 Ā Development
10:15 - 10:30 Ā Sales call for a demo
10:30 - 11:45 Ā Development
11:45 - 12:05 Ā A project manager asks me a question
12:05 - 13:00 Ā DevelopmentI may have spent several hours "working". But I may never have had two consecutive hours to really concentrate. That's very different.
And when you're feeling a little sick, even with just a cold, being interrupted becomes even harder to deal with.
Multitasking isn't our friend
Another particularly difficult situation is being in a meeting while being expected to keep working. We're connected to the video call, but our editor is open next to it. We're vaguely listening to the discussion while trying to finish a function.
The result: we're not really focused on either the meeting or the code.
And when someone asks:
> "What do you think?"
We have to quickly figure out what was just said. I often have to ask them to repeat it...
This isn't usually a very good use of time.
Meetings can create a false sense of productivity
It's easy to have a day full of meetings and feel like you've worked a lot. The calendar is full. We've talked to lots of people. We've discussed many subjects.
But how many problems were actually solved?
How many features were developed?
How many decisions were made?
A day with eight hours of meetings can be extremely tiring while ultimately producing very few concrete results.
Developers often like solving problems on their own
There's also a matter of professional personality.
When I'm given a problem, my first instinct is often to try to understand it and find a solution. I can search through the code, read the documentation, test different hypotheses, and eventually ask for help if I get stuck.
I don't necessarily need a meeting for each of these steps.
And I think many developers work this way. That obviously doesn't mean we want to work alone all the time.
We need to communicate. But communicating doesn't necessarily mean organizing a meeting.
Should we get rid of all meetings?
Obviously not. A team needs to communicate, and some meetings are genuinely useful for making a decision or solving a complex problem.
But before organizing one, we can ask a simple question: "Do we really need to meet?"
A good meeting should have a clear objective, include only the necessary people, start and end on time, and, if possible, lead to a decision.
If a message, a document, or a few comments in a ticket can achieve the same result, it's probably better to avoid the meeting.
And above all, don't organize one simply because there's an empty slot in the calendar.
Conclusion
I don't think developers actually hate meetings. At least for me, what I really hate is being interrupted when I'm focused on a problem.
A good meeting can be useful. A bad one can simply waste our time and make us forget where we were.
Alright, enough talking: back to our keyboards! š
