Sunday 22nd September 2024

Topics:

• Last week, I attended a workshop that had many people in attendance.
• Like most such workshops, there was a minority of people contributing, while the majority was passively listening, at least I hoped they were listening.
• In the first hour one of the attendees, an engineer, quietly and without fuss left the meeting and never came back.
• He clearing decided the meeting was not relevant to him, so he simply left.
• He done the right thing as he needed to get back to actual work, and as his manager it got me thinking about why this was a good thing.
• I think we need to normalise this behaviour.
• When people organise such meetings, they are tempted to pull in too many people, just to build out an audience.
• For the attendees, they feel obligated to attend, even if it's not relevant to them.
• So they turn up but remain passive: this is basically a waste of their time.
• Unless you are actively contributing to a meeting, you have no busy being there.
• Meetings should be full of drivers, not passengers.
• I have now told my entire team they have my permission to leave any meeting that is not relevant to them. Just leave if it's wasting your time.
• On the flip side, I will no longer accept those engineers complaining to me that they could not complete their work because they had to attend too many meetings: I am literally asking them to leave those meetings, and get back to work.
• As a leader, attending meetings is my work: this is how I gain insights and feedback, and give direction. I have to turn up.
• For anyone who is not a leader however, they need to be aggressively trying to reduce the amount of meetings they attend.
• Just get up, walk out, and tell anyone who tries to stop you that your manager said it's okay to leave, see you.
• What I am working on this week:
  • Moved greppr.org to a powerful physical server: 32 core i9, 64GB of DDRM5 RAM, 2x 2TB SSDs in a mirrored RAID 1 configuration.
  • The search and indexing performance has improved dramatically, check it out!

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techleaderpro-2024-week-38.mp3

File details: 8.3 MB MP3, 5 mins 46 secs duration.

Title music is "Hidden Beyond" by Aiyo, licensed via www.epidemicsound.com

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