Management Bullshit: The Meeting That Could Have Been an Email.

Or a standup. Or a Sentence. Or a comment on Teams. Or Just Nothing at All

Let’s talk about meetings. Or rather, let’s have a forty-minute meeting about whether we should talk about meetings, invite four people who don’t need to be there, reach no conclusion, and schedule a follow-up for next week – two days before go-live. That feels more authentic to the subject matter.

Because that’s the machine, isn’t it. The endless, grinding, soul-liquefying machine of Management Bullshit™, and meetings are its beating heart. Meetings that could have been an email. Meetings that could have been a brief standup. Meetings that could have been a single Slack message with a thumbs-up react. Instead: the room. Always the room.

The Maths Doesn’t Even Work

Here’s the part that actually breaks my brain. You have stripped this company down to two developers. Two. In a company of forty people. Forty. There are more people organising the meetings than there are people capable of doing the thing the meetings are about.

And with the title came the disease: the compulsion to over-complicate. A five-minute fix becomes a design discussion. A design discussion becomes a “we should probably loop in a few people.” And “a few people” becomes a calendar invite, a meeting room, and the slow death of my one wild and precious afternoon.

This is a man who looks at every task, no matter how small, and sees a codebase Picasso would weep over. Give him “print hello world” and here’s what happens. He writes it in JavaScript. Decides that was too easy. Rewrites it in Vue. Pulls in twenty npm packages he’ll use one function from. Commits the whole thing to GitHub with a branching strategy, obviously. Then uploads the lot – node_modules and all – to the production web space, a cool 1GB of dependencies for a program that outputs two words, at which point the entire company website falls over because the disk quota has been exceeded.

By a hello world script.

We don’t need fucking Picasso, we need Timmy Dipshit, aged 10, to just do the fucking work and move on to the next task!

I am not being dramatic when I say I could feel a specific vein in my temple begin its own standup meeting remembering that. And them compounding it by writing that.

Enter the Lead Developer

At some point, in their infinite wisdom, management took one of us and bestowed upon him the title of “Lead Developer.” Not because the role was needed. Not because the work demanded a hierarchy between two people who sit at the same desk. But because a title is cheaper than a pay rise and looks great on an org chart that already has more managers than staff.

And with the title came the disease: the compulsion to over-complicate. A five-minute fix becomes a design discussion. A design discussion becomes a “we should probably loop in a few people.” And “a few people” becomes a calendar invite, a meeting room, and the slow death of my one wild and precious afternoon.

What Actually Happens in the Room

So we go in. And there are four other people in there. Four people who do not write code, will not write code, and have no stake in the technical decision being made – but who do have opinions, and worse, the free time to voice them at length.

The five-minute conversation I could have had by swivelling my chair now takes an hour. It sprawls. It branches. Someone asks a question that’s already been answered. Someone else “just wants to understand the bigger picture.” Somebody says “let’s park that” about the only relevant point raised. And at the end – after all of it – nothing is resolved.

I once suggested, in the middle of one of these, that we should probably ask the cleaners for their opinion too – they might have a stake in this. I meant it as a joke. Given who else was in the room contributing, it was, on reflection, the most sensible thing said all meeting. The cleaners at least know when something’s a mess.

Nothing. Is. Resolved.

But something is achieved, and that something is this: another meeting. Scheduled for next week. Conveniently timed for two days before go-live, so that when it inevitably surfaces the exact problem the two of us could have sorted in five minutes a fortnight ago, there will be no time left to fix it properly. Which is fine, because that becomes my “area for growth” at the next performance review. Circle of life.

The Actual Cost

Nobody in management ever seems to run the numbers on this. Six people in a room for an hour isn’t an hour. It’s six hours of paid human time, plus the context-switch tax on either side, plus the low background hum of resentment that follows you back to your desk. Do that three times a week and you’ve vaporised the equivalent of an entire working day, every single week, to produce decisions that were already obvious to the two people who actually do the work.

We are not short on meetings. We are short on developers. These two facts are related, and I would explain how, but I can’t – I’ve got a meeting.

A Modest Proposal

Here’s my radical, disruptive, blue-sky, think-outside-the-box strategy, and you can have it for free:

Let the two people who sit next to each other talk to each other.

That’s it. That’s the whole framework. If a decision only affects the two developers, and the two developers are physically touching, perhaps – perhaps – they do not require a meeting room, a Lead Developer’s blessing, and an audience of four to reach a conclusion they’d have reached anyway in the time it takes the kettle to boil.

But that would mean trusting people to do their jobs. And you can’t put “trusted people to do their jobs” on a slide. You can put “held cross-functional alignment sync” on a slide.

So I’ll see you in the room. Again. Two days before go-live.

One Last Thing, And I Swear On My Life This Is True

I need you to know this actually happened. One year, one of the company’s core priorities – a genuine, stated, written-down objective for the year – was to cut down on the number of meetings, because they’d finally noticed all these meetings were disruptive.

I bet you can’t guess what happened.

Go on. Have a guess.

If you guessed that they held a meeting about cutting down the number of meetings, and then a subset of them splintered off into the smaller meeting room for a second meeting about the first meeting about cutting down the number of meetings – congratulations, you understand corporate life better than the people running the corporation.

I’m not even angry. That one’s just art.