Sad, but I would occasionally use my "unlimited" PTO to take a week off and just get work done. Most of the pain started when we transitioned to a sprints from a lack of process. In theory, this was to make things faster (which actually most of the reasons we were so slow was unrelated to process). My week suddenly went from getting things done to:<p>- 60 minute meetings fighting over whether tickets were 3 or 5 story points<p>- turning our entire process into some kind of perverse waterfall method where stories involved days of prep work defining every step so that we could accurately estimate story points (I thought this was the opposite of agile?)<p>- offers to "help" from project managers and managers when things took longer than expected - this help took the form of additional meetings.<p>- absolute inflexibility over my noon standup. I could be in the deepest of zones and people would literally slack repeatedly until you showed up for that thing<p>Cue the "oh you were doing <X> wrong!!" people. Modern software practice sucks. Its fine for small bugs and very well defined tasks. Outside of that it is just interruptions, interruptions, interruptions.<p>I also ended up just quitting. New place is better, but still in many ways the same. At least here I don't have comparisons made to my old days of the pre-software-process productivity.
> For those who use Google calendar as I do, a recently introduced feature allows you to set up focus blocks with the option to decline conflicting events.<p>I'd recommend against announcing that the meeting is being declined because of a focus block. Someone will read that as "free time" and demand you meet anyway. Put 3-4 fake "meetings" on your calendar during the time you need, so it just looks like you're booked. If your company requires you keep your calendar public, call the meetings something gross like "vendor review" or "Finance and Engineering Integration: Overlapping Initiatives" and nobody will question it.
The senior architects and principle engineers at my company have started scheduling focus hours as well as office hours for people to drop in and ask questions.<p>They were getting stretched pretty thin by being invited to design meetings for multiple different teams, and the office hours have been a great way to combat that burden. People drop in, ask some design questions and leave. Since there are usually multiple people waiting to ask questions it keeps the discussion short and focused instead of filling up a 30-60 minute meeting just because that's what was scheduled. It also lets the architect decide to schedule a focused design session if it's needed instead of letting others fill their calendars.
“Deep Work” by Cal Newport (and the related “Time Block Planner” he published as well) goes into depth about why deep work focus time is so important for knowledge workers, and has some additional tips for how to make the most of your workday. Would highly recommend both books!<p><a href="https://www.calnewport.com/books/deep-work/" rel="nofollow">https://www.calnewport.com/books/deep-work/</a>
Everyone at my new job uses Clockwise, which will rearrange calendars across the org to maximize focus time for everyone (also address double-booking). This is my first time in 10 years since becoming an EM where I don't have to spend time managing my calendar every day to get focus time. The jump to my productivity is huge. Can't recommend focus time (and Clockwise!) enough. If I could buy stock in them, I would.
I used to work at a place that had so many meetings. They reserved a couple afternoons a week for "focus time." Unfortunately, that didn't work. People just started scheduling meeting during those times. Eventually, I got so disgusted with the constant interruptions that I found another job.
I quit my job instead. If the schedule is randomly or unpredictably fragmented by meetings, being expected to also write high quality code is quite simply inhumane. It’s not you that should find tricks to save you from a burnout. It very much looks and sounds and it surely is a mess of a management.
The only reason we can't book 4 hours of time a day is because our employers run "lean" and completely neglect to scale out personnel along with projects.<p>I know people who would absolutely be replaced by 3 people if they quit.<p>My advice? Advocate for yourself, because your boss and their boss doesn't actually have any clue how much work it is in the trenches.<p>Management is almost never aware of all that much about what you're doing, and a lot of capacity issues like this eventually bubble up and catch them by complete surprise simply because individual contributors have just been silently dealing with the frog-boiling.<p>This all means you should:<p>1. Come up with specific and measurable justification in terms of hours/dollars for why you need more employees as the company and therefore your workload grows<p>2. "Offer" to push back excess work and give your management choices while doing so: "Project A will take us X hours over capacity for next quarter, should I prioritize Project A or Project B? We can only deliver # projects in the next quarter at our current staffing level."<p>Blocking off time on your calendar doesn't really solve the problem because it's something that a lot of people, especially customer-facing ones, simply <i>can't</i> do without doing everything I described above.
Some people constantly want more meetings because it's de facto money with zero effort. As someone who wants to do stuff one can feel a clear lack of meaning in all of it. It's like you are stuck in a web of trivialities.<p>it's not overwork but work (and even just presence) without a sense of purpose and some progress toward a goal which leads to depression.
I seem to remember reading about one or two companies that had a focus time or a no meeting time part of the day or week for the whole company - or at least the departments where it made the most sense (engineering, but not sales perhaps).<p>I can really see the advantages of having focus time synchronised across your colleagues. If we all did focus times across different parts of the day, you would _never_ be able to schedule a meeting. (Hmmm, that may actually be a good thing...)
Despite many well-intentioned attempts, it feels like the whole process of software development, from people management to software architecture, has barely improved in the past 20 years or so.<p>It sounds like this guy should probably have a pure management role, where they're reviewing code but not expected to write very much themselves. Having a role with both responsibilities seems bound to lead to frustration.
Daily standup was helpful when covid first hit to be a means to help keep our team together. But since then it’s sort of morphed into a check-in just for the sake of checking in. Very little value. And folks don’t feel the need to address real issues because it wasn’t brought up in that daily standup. I think there should be more intention to keep folks focused and heads down when they need to be and schedule one-off meetings that serve a purpose.
I used to work somewhere with three standups every day. I'd lose and hour and a half every morning for updates that often didn't involve me or could have been async.