10 minute "What did you do yesterday, what are you doing today, and do you have any roadblocks?" meeting first thing in the morning = good<p>2 hour "We need to figure out how to monetize our shelf space and maximize user engagement" meeting right after lunch = bad<p>Developers hold productive micro-meetings all throughout the day via IM or Campfire.
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.
pg wrote what may well be the definitive work on this subject:<p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html</a>
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.
PG described the worst thing about meetings in the makerschedule essay. Two other meeting evils:<p>- Meetings that expand to fill the time scheduled for them<p>- Meetings with more people than required to solve the problem at hand