>Being in meetings means you get to be in the room when decisions are made. Even if you aren't an active participant, you get to at least listen in.
Why do I care if I have no say in it? Why am I wasting an hour or two of my day listening in on this when they could have emailed me the meeting minutes and decisions so I can spend 5 minutes reading through them?
If I'm not actively participating i na meeting, if my views are not taken into account and respected, then it's a pointless meeting for me.
>Some engineers seem to want to work for long stretches uninterrupted, like monks copying sacred texts. That is not the way to succeed.
The reason we want to do this is precisely because we're *not* just copying sacred texts. But rather we're sitting there working with some mental models and concepts, figuring out the chain of API calls and how it all clicks together so that we can better work on the actual problems. Getting up to that point always takes some time. Even getting to the same headspace where I was the previous day when I left work, takes some time.
So if you come to my desk and interrupt me I'm going to have to start from zero again and this will take time. So if I have a meeting coming up in 30 minutes, there's a good chance I won't start anything big. And after the meeting I'm again going to just be going through stuff for 30-60 minutes before I get to the point where I was.
I hate being interrupted because my work is in large parts, inside my own head as opposed to just typing in code. And thinking is often easier when someone is not talking to you.
>For those topics, I love to communicate with some "written" form, such as in an email, posts etc. Because doing the "writing" part allow me to conduct some research and analyses on the topic (usually took 10 minutes), which will in turn increase the quality of my reply.
That and to me at least almost more important is the ability to refer back to history.
You have a little oral discussion with your co-workers about an issue, or maybe ask for some clarification on something etc. Then a few days later when you think you need that info again, it's gone.
Having a discussion in Slack, Mattermost, email, etc allows me to always refer back and see what we've been talking about. Which can be vital especially in those situations where we're talking about complex issues with complex answers. The fact that I can a week later go back and see the same clarification again, is definitely helpful
Why do I care if I have no say in it? Why am I wasting an hour or two of my day listening in on this when they could have emailed me the meeting minutes and decisions so I can spend 5 minutes reading through them?
If I'm not actively participating i na meeting, if my views are not taken into account and respected, then it's a pointless meeting for me.
>Some engineers seem to want to work for long stretches uninterrupted, like monks copying sacred texts. That is not the way to succeed.
The reason we want to do this is precisely because we're *not* just copying sacred texts. But rather we're sitting there working with some mental models and concepts, figuring out the chain of API calls and how it all clicks together so that we can better work on the actual problems. Getting up to that point always takes some time. Even getting to the same headspace where I was the previous day when I left work, takes some time.
So if you come to my desk and interrupt me I'm going to have to start from zero again and this will take time. So if I have a meeting coming up in 30 minutes, there's a good chance I won't start anything big. And after the meeting I'm again going to just be going through stuff for 30-60 minutes before I get to the point where I was.
I hate being interrupted because my work is in large parts, inside my own head as opposed to just typing in code. And thinking is often easier when someone is not talking to you.
https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...