alt Hacker NewsMeetings are forcing functions
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I've gone in the opposite direction: on projects I've led, I decided to have no recurring meetings at all, very much going against the flow of the broader organization. Instead, I would set up a time when we had something specific to talk about. I wrote a short but hopefully clear description of what we needed to cover on each event that I scheduled.
I found this worked really well in practice. We actually talked more as a team compared to the ones using a fixed process with recurring meetings or "ceremonies", but the discussions were consistently useful. There was a lot more time spent figuring things out together and developing a strong shared mental model for what we were doing—some non-trivial but not quite research-level machine learning work—and no energy wasted on glorified status updates that only one person on the team cared about, or "syncs" that became increasingly less useful week-over-week.
Most other teams I've been on had this seemingly contradictory dynamic where we had too many meetings but also did not talk nearly enough. It's amazing how a bunch of recurring meetings can take up a bunch of time and attention, but somehow not leave enough space to dive deeply into non-trivial technical or strategic questions, or meaningfully talk about "meta" team topics.
A real risk is that a recurring meeting can pull out the oxygen in the room to talk about a given topic. It's too easy to put off talking about something important until the next scheduled meeting—by which time you have less context and less time—and then, if the recurring meeting isn't long enough to go deeper, the discussion gets put off even further. A team I worked on recently had a quarterly "retro", never had enough time to cover anywhere near every "retro" topic we actually needed, but also didn't consistently talk about that kind of topic outside the retro. We'd just wait until the next one rolled around. (Worse yet, this still put this team ahead of a number of other teams I've seen...) In contrast, the best teams I worked with never had explicit retros because we just talked about things that needed talking about as part of our day-to-day.
"It’s easy for long-term strategic, high-impact work to sink to the bottom of everyone’s todo list."
"[...] But one where the tasks to accomplish the project are not anyone’s full-time job."
Sounds like the organization's leadership are incapable of balancing short term and long term goals, and it's falling to people who are paid less to "step up" and try to swim against the current for the good of the company.
or
Whatever the author is talking about is some engineering pipe dream disconnected from actual business value, and someone is dragging a bunch of other people semi-willingly along trying to execute on it without a mandate/funding from leadership.
Impossible to say which from the outside. But I've known several instances of both cases.
Nah. A forcing function creates pressure toward an outcome...a standing meeting just creates pressure toward the meeting. Those aren't the same thing.
The moment you put a recurring block on the calendar, the implicit contract shifts from "we make progress on this work" to "we show up on Tues at 2". The meeting becomes the deliverable. And it always stays long after the original need has passed because nobody wants to be the one who kills it.
What you want is to call a meeting when you need one. When there's a decision to make, a blocker to clear, or a plan to align on... get the right people together and do that thing. A meeting you call as needed stays honest, or at least has a higher chance of staying honest. A standing meeting just becomes calendar furniture and most of the people in it know it.
As a developer I have absolutely no qualms with the weekly meetings and since we're fully remote, it's actually nice to be in touch with my team mates, even if they talk about the part they're doing right now for a while.
What I had issues with in the past is forced daily meeting (on top of other meetings) that just created stress and fatigue for me. Starting my day with a standup was literally the worst way to start it ever.
IMO this is such a manager-brained take. If your long-term strategic goals aren't being advanced, you have to figure out why. Talk to your team and figure out what the deal is. Talk to other teams too, while you're at it. You might accidentally solve a problem.
The number of managers who've successfully convinced themselves that knowing things and making decisions aren't part of their job, and just fill their days with arm-twisting and event-planning, is literally unbelievable to me. I've never met a founder with the attitude "yes I'll just put the stakeholders in an alignment meeting and my company will build itself," but somehow half the of the rest of leadership thinks that's a job.
Working solo right now. The bit this misses is that meetings are forcing functions for OTHER people, not just yourself, which is half the reason they exist.
When you're alone you can cosplay urgency for weeks without actually shipping. A weekly check-in with literally anyone external is the only real deadline that bites.
Tried public commits as the substitute. "Shipping X by Friday" tweets, working in public, that whole genre. Doesn't work for me. You end up optimising for the post not the ship. Worse outcome than no deadline at all.
Disagree to a degree.
These types of meetings only work if the person who organized it has organizational power over the other participants. In my experience, these types of meetings always get deferred or cancelled if all participants are of the same level or worse, the organizer has less organizational power than the participants.
A progress meeting by a junior PM with a bunch of senior+ engineer is _guaranteed_ to get cancelled or gutted very quickly.
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In the vein of other comments though: agree. The necessity of these types of meetings is an organizational stink and the problem lies with priorities and amount of work to be done.
If something really needs to be done, time and resources will be found for it.
I've been fascinated by the dynamic of large scale OSS projects operating without management vs. industrial scale software development since I was working on my PhD around 2000. Basically, something like the Linux kernel involves thousands of contributors and yet ships reliable as clockwork every 8-10 weeks. Their management structure is basically a simple hierarchy of lead engineers gate keeping their source trees with the ultimate authority in the form of Linus Torvalds who merges changes only if they meet his criteria. Anything that receives the thumbs up goes in. And thumbs down means the contributors get to work on their patch some more.
There are no planning meetings, no stand up meetings, no product management, etc. There is a yearly conference; but that seems to be mainly a social event. Meetings don't really factor into the process. There simply are none. They've completely removed meetings. Many other OSS projects likewise have no meeting structures.
Meetings are synchronization bottlenecks. Everybody stops what they are doing to wait for a meeting where some kind of decision process takes place. Anything blocked on that decision has to wait until then. And then work progresses. The more meetings you have, the more bottlenecks you create. The larger your team, the less practical this gets. OSS projects are huge and cannot afford to drop everything they are doing to have a meeting. Meetings are way too expensive at scale.
What the OSS world does is resolve decisions asynchronously so they don't end up blocking anything important. Individual contributors and stakeholders might have side meetings of course but having meetings is not part of the overall development process. They do their thing and then changes get submitted.
The interesting thing is that most large scale OSS development is dominated by corporate contributors. Most full time contributors are employed and their employers have a big stake in these projects. But it seems they skip all the meetings when doing OSS. And then they switch back to having lots of them for all internal development.
The results don't lie. Many OSS projects have been around for decades, maintain a high pace of development, and seem to do a good job of staying on top of technical debt and quality issues. Without having meetings.
Meetings are one type of forcing function. Anything with concrete, time-bound deliverables is a forcing function, too. In a well-managed organization with trained & competent staff, it should not require meetings to ensure progress.
I had to check the date because this sounded so much like 1996 advice.
While meetings have their place, they're not how you convince people to work on your project. Meetings are purely a reporting and sharing method and don't work as a shame-based incentive to get work done.
After a while, people simply don't care about you or your project because they have other projects that their manager values more, and they have no problem telling you so, even during the meeting.
Engineers: All a meeting does is distract from work.
Every leader ever: if we could do the right work, we could have less meetings.
I agree with the sentiment. And also understand the rage you’ll get.
Sync meetings can help some people feel pressure but it's an extremely inefficient mechanism.
You're waiting a whole week for an update or to push people.
I'm a huge proponent of "async over sync" and "sync as soon as necessary". Don't wait to the next meeting in 3 days to escalate.
People whose calendar looks like meetings only and are always willing and able to throw complexity to others won't feel the pain of not having a meeting budget [1] but other roles will want to avoid eating up all their time on this type of admin.
I encourage people to explore how extremely simple Agent Skills workflows can already do a lot of the admin legwork than an executive assistant would and free their time from admin bureocracy and red tape, as much as possible. If there's no programmatic endpoint or MCP, use something like playwright. A little goes a long way.
If a meeting doesn't have a focused agenda and expected outcome, it's usually a waste of time for most participants. Standing meetings are the worst offenders, unless you're in a crisis situation. If you're using meetings to get status updates, my condolences.
Speedrun to annoy the hell out of your developers. If the purpose of your meetings is to “create pressure to make progress” then I’ll just stop attending. It’s not a middle school, stop patronizing adults. If someone is dragging their feet, then let their manager handle it, they just might have too much on their plate without additional useless meeting.
I had lunch with a project manager a couple weeks ago, and we chatted about meetings. She was pretty adamant: Without meetings, nothing gets done.
I'm willing to cut her some slack, since I tried her job for a while and hated it.
The problem is long-running projects. Projects are too large in scope. They lasts for months to a year with nothing being delivered. Meetings don’t fix that.
To get the mathematical analogy back off track, some meeting series are "off-resonance" and result in lower amplitude. I'd have titled this "Weekly Meetings are Motivational".
Whenever I hear people talk about meetings and / or (internal / arbitrary) deadlines as a scheduling / productivity tool, I can't shake the thought these people have probably never even heard of concepts like scheduling optimization, bottleneck / queing theory, or async event-loop pipelines.
Deadlines don't make things more efficient by definition, unless it's a case of "within-task" inefficiency (i.e. "laziness"). But while this is almost always assumed to be the case by managers, it almost never is the case on the ground. And then you get into this hare-brained vicious cycle of "oh we're falling behind despite the deadlines (read "context-switching interruptions with non-trivial overhead enforcing suboptimal task selection"), we should probably add more!" [facepalm]
Almost every meeting could be an email
I’m so much more of a quick huddle/sync up rather than a meeting with 10 people who each speak (in the best case) 10% of the time. Having standing meetings for war and feasting (war being sprint planning, feasting being retro/demo) is essential. Standup/status meetings are largely a bane if they last more than 10m
What other forcing functions is everyone using? (externally-imposed like meetings, or self-imposed)
I don't use forcing functions enough, which may imply missed opportunities to trade slightly higher-stress and increased busywork for greater productivity.
Meetings can be highly effective in getting things done if a clear and reasonable objective is set.
No way, this is terrible! There are so many great work tracking tools to use or more efficient ways to communicate that accomplish the same thing. Without making a bunch of people take time out of their day so you can ask them if they remembered to do part of their job. Good management creates systems so this kind of thing isn’t needed.
sometimes. often they are therapy sessions and theater.
Meetings are too easy to game. I worked with a bunch of new managers from LEGACY_CORP and learned the extremes of how to BS.
As an example, if you think there might be any sort of pushback, just never stop talking. Once a manager talked for 35 straight minutes to answer a question on an unpopular decision. By the end there were no follow-ups because everyone was too confused and checked out to care.
Lost me at the start:
"A recurring meeting serves as a powerful forcing function for long-running projects."
No it doesn't. It serves as a burden ball that gets kicked around on the calendar field once the value of the series has been tapped out but no one wants to cancel it.
This is what sprint planning is all about. It's ostensibly to accept the work. But my God how everyone's hidden assumptions come to the surface.
Put forcing function in the title, it will force them to click it.
I work at a (ahem) war contractor and at least 50% of my calendar in any week is filled with meetings. As the week progresses, the incidental meetings that people throw at me the day before fill up at least another 25%. I am the chief architect for two major projects, but it does leave me wondering when I'm supposed to be doing any architecting.
Oh, and half the company leadership expects me to also stand up a professional "agile software development capability" in the rest of my time while the other half parrots a sentiment from before we grew from 500 to 3000 people that "we aren't a software development company." Well, neither is a bank, but banks employ armies of software developers and they don't tend to underfund them. When exactly I'm supposed to perform my supervisor functions and annual trainings is left as an exercise to the unpaid overtimers.
Sigh I need a new job. I never wanted to be a defense contractor in the first place.
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There’s a lot of meeting hate here and as a developer, I used to feel the same.
But after bootstrapping a SaaS company and at times struggling through cross-team execution, I’ve come around. A short weekly standing meeting, like the one described in the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution, is actually a powerful tool.
Without it, maintenance, admin, and firefighting will expand to fill the entire week. The meeting forces space for focus, clear commitments, and basic accountability.
It’s not obvious early in your career, but once you’ve got some scars, it starts to make a lot more sense.