Joel Spolsky on Meetings
Joel Spolsky on Meetings
Wisdom at Work: 1
Don't try to write poetry in a committee meeting
What kills me is the teams who get into the bad habit of holding meetings every time they need to figure out how something is going to work.
Did you ever try to write poetry in a committee meeting? It’s like a bunch of fat construction guys trying to write an opera while sitting on the couch watching Baywatch. The more fat construction guys you add to the couch, the less likely you are to get opera out of it.
-- Joel Spolsky, January 21, 2007
Joel Spolsky is a software developer in New York City. Since 2000 he's been writing Joel on Software, a blog about software development, management, business, and the Internet. I don't visit every day, but whenever I return I find articles that keep me reading.
In January I read his review of Dreaming in Code, a book by Scott Rosenberg. Subtitled "Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software," the subject of the review is the story of Mitch Kapor's Chandler project, an open source replacement for MS Outlook.
Some reviews compared Rosenberg's book to Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, which I read and enjoyed immensely when it first came out 25 years ago. So I made a note to read more about Chandler, but I have not had time yet. (And I already have enough books still awaiting their turns to be read!)
But the one other thing that really caught my eye in Joel's review was his comment about meetings, reproduced here.
I thought his imagery was priceless, and whether or not I ever read the book, it made Joel's review worth reading. I know I've sat through quite a few meetings that were every bit as unproductive as Joel's description suggests.
Joel points out that ... the only thing harder than trying to design software is trying to design software as a team. Actually, this is also true of many other creative activities, like painting or writing. I'm no artist, but I've certainly experienced the futility of people trying to write by committee. Just as with Joel's construction workers, adding yet more people who can't write does not improve the end result.
Team meetings are great for sharing experiences, discussing ideas, and brainstorming. But the ideas generated by the team are simply the fuel that fires up the creative mind; after that comes the slow and careful work of crafting a final product. In my experience, that work is best done alone.
This post is the first in an occasional series about wisdom at work.
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wisdom at work,
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Joel Spolsky,
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Tracy Kidder
Chris Loosley
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