In response to PG's YC article on meetings I have this to say.
Hiding in your office or cubicle staring at the monitor for 12 hours a day does not get projects finished. There are integration issues that have to be ironed out between developers. Successfully pushing data down entire software or hardware pipelines usually requires coordination and face to face interaction. Meetings have their place in the project development cycle. Integration of discrete software modules rarely happens without meetings. Particularly if the project is large and building something complex such as a graphics chip pipeline (yes that is software - RTL) or a data processing pipeline spread across two computer centers running down loaders, map reduce data processing jobs, and indexers.Good luck trying to get the engineers to talk to each other about integration without a regular meeting more than once a week (this is based on my experience at Intel and Sun). Of course there are other companies in the Valley that are less organized, where the people work harder and get less done under more pressure because they do not talk to each other (that would be a waste of time in the eyes of management). They tend not to have coordination meetings. And when they do have meetings the managers mostly do the talking. And good luck to the manager who thinks he can build a team with a common set of values without have meetings that go over the mission that the team is on. Meetings that review PERT charts on a weekly basis for the duration of the project are a waste of time. Meetings to review status are a waste of time. Meetings to discover issues are a waste of time. Engineers will tell you in private what the issues are. Intel used to have open communication when Grove was running the show. But that company and time was an exception. There is something to be said for aligning everyone behind one single short term milestone, meeting daily to ensure that the milestone is being met, meeting the milestone, and then letting the team take over the project management for the rest of the project.
Hiding in your office or cubicle staring at the monitor for 12 hours a day does not get projects finished. There are integration issues that have to be ironed out between developers. Successfully pushing data down entire software or hardware pipelines usually requires coordination and face to face interaction. Meetings have their place in the project development cycle. Integration of discrete software modules rarely happens without meetings. Particularly if the project is large and building something complex such as a graphics chip pipeline (yes that is software - RTL) or a data processing pipeline spread across two computer centers running down loaders, map reduce data processing jobs, and indexers.Good luck trying to get the engineers to talk to each other about integration without a regular meeting more than once a week (this is based on my experience at Intel and Sun). Of course there are other companies in the Valley that are less organized, where the people work harder and get less done under more pressure because they do not talk to each other (that would be a waste of time in the eyes of management). They tend not to have coordination meetings. And when they do have meetings the managers mostly do the talking. And good luck to the manager who thinks he can build a team with a common set of values without have meetings that go over the mission that the team is on. Meetings that review PERT charts on a weekly basis for the duration of the project are a waste of time. Meetings to review status are a waste of time. Meetings to discover issues are a waste of time. Engineers will tell you in private what the issues are. Intel used to have open communication when Grove was running the show. But that company and time was an exception. There is something to be said for aligning everyone behind one single short term milestone, meeting daily to ensure that the milestone is being met, meeting the milestone, and then letting the team take over the project management for the rest of the project.
