In my experience it's not that developers hate meetings, but they hate meetings that don't produce anything. You'll developers working out a spec on a white board for hours on end — they do that because they love to do that. On the other hand bring them to a meeting about project management and they feel that you're cutting into code writing time.
That's an interesting insight. In my experience, very few meetings produce anything. If a company wants to keep its developers happy but needs to have a few of them in meetings (e.g., to answer questions, comment on process), what to do???
The net results of many meetings could be summed up in E-mail threads or things like wiki documents. So often the first step is to prefer those mechanisms. (Bonus points if people in the organization can be trained to be brief, so that threads and documents are focused.)
The net contributions of many people in a one hour meeting could often be summed up in 30 seconds, and it's even worse when those people had no relation to anything else that was discussed (and therefore had no other reason to be there). So step 2 is to realize that either the meeting was meant for fewer people, or should have allowed attendees to speak for 30 seconds and then leave.
The very worst possible meeting is one that is at preset intervals, for preset lengths, with no agenda (e.g. weekly one-hour meetings with 20 people), that starts late with phone and projector problems. That is essentially telling your employees that you don't care about their time.
I had a meeting this week, scheduled a day in advance and reserved a conference room, that lasted 5 minutes and resulted in me informing the other participant the issue at hand needed to be handled by a completely different department. This could have been done over IM a day earlier. My mistake was assuming that since it was scheduled, it was something that definitely required face to face interaction.
Thankfully, I took the brunt of this nonsense and my team didn't get interrupted.
I'm a UX manager at a software company, and I am definitely NOT a fan of meetings (most people think that managers like meetings). My team is comprised of writers, designers, and developers... all valuable employees whose time I respect, and they all say the same thing about meetings... that they're an interruption to their productivity and creative "flow". I try to shield them from as many meetings as possible and they often thank me for it.
I think everybody hates meetings that are not focused. From my own experience, the worse meetings are when it's not relevant to my projects, workload or interests.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 35.0 ms ] threadOf course the bigger question is, why are you having meetings that produce nothing?
The net contributions of many people in a one hour meeting could often be summed up in 30 seconds, and it's even worse when those people had no relation to anything else that was discussed (and therefore had no other reason to be there). So step 2 is to realize that either the meeting was meant for fewer people, or should have allowed attendees to speak for 30 seconds and then leave.
The very worst possible meeting is one that is at preset intervals, for preset lengths, with no agenda (e.g. weekly one-hour meetings with 20 people), that starts late with phone and projector problems. That is essentially telling your employees that you don't care about their time.
Thankfully, I took the brunt of this nonsense and my team didn't get interrupted.
http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
2 hour "We need to figure out how to monetize our shelf space and maximize user engagement" meeting right after lunch = bad
Developers hold productive micro-meetings all throughout the day via IM or Campfire.
- Meetings that expand to fill the time scheduled for them
- Meetings with more people than required to solve the problem at hand