There are different kinds of meetings in IT companies. Some make sense, and others don’t; some are interesting, and others boring. Specifically, we can categorize meetings into two different types, as far as developers are concerned:

The short meeting. In this type of meeting, the developer isn’t present at all until a technical question pops up. This results in someone running to the developer’s desk asking the developer to please attend the meeting for a minute. When the developer enters the room, the question posed from someone in the puzzled meeting crowd will be along the lines of “Is it possible to export Excel files to XML, and then print the XML?”

Now, the answer to this question is always “Yes, that’s technically possible.” Ask a cook if it’s possible to boil 10 fish heads for a week and them stack them up vertically on a plate, and you’ll get the same answer. When the developer turns around to leave the meeting room he’ll be thinking “Yes, it’s possible, but no sane soul on earth would ever wanna do that” but that’s really besides the point.

The long meeting. Now, with long meetings for which the developer is asked to be present at all times, we can further subdivide into two groups: 1. Non-developers listen and talk. This one might end up being a constructive meeting. Surviving it is a breeze.

2. Non-developers talk, but never listen. This one is a bit more tough. From a developer perspective it’s useless to try to say something in those meetings, but that’s not necessarily bad. There are two cases here; a) the non-developers tell you something interesting, and b) the non-developers tell you something old, boring and redundant.