cool devopscafe andrew clay shafer quote

[svdw...@gmail.com]

DevOps Cafe Episode 37 - at time 58:15 -

"a meeting is a write lock"... if your org can trust it's workers, it can
be eventually consistent... otherwise it will spend all it's time in
endless meetings trying to be consistent instead of getting any work done.

i guess we kindof all feel this already, just fun to see the nosql
analogy.

-scott

[Spike Morelli]

Hi Scott,

I'm not quite sure if Andrew was just joking, but I feel compelled to respond because that's the kind of message we're only going to be worse off by following.

The way I read it, and maybe you or Andrew if he's on this list can correct me if I'm wrong, it's the same as saying that if a sysadmin can trust enough his tools eventually the uptime will be 100%.

On top of that there's a fundamental misconception that meetings are about lack of trust and a desire of control. Yes it may be that way for some, but in a lot of cases it's just about getting on the same page so that we can go about our work more efficiently.

Also a lot of meetings are endless, in the last 3 companies I worked for we mostly only had 15 mins sync-ups every day (I don't feel any need to call them standup) and one larger meetings when needed to discuss larger projects (and those in general only involved 2 or 3 people, not entire teams).

And with that I'm not trying to defend meetings, for example where I work we just started experimenting with dropping the daily sync-up in favor of more pairing in rotation and autogenerated reports. Point being, the goal isn't the meeting itself, that'd be silly of course, but rather having everybody on the same page and making sure that we don't get troubled by bad surprises. Sometimes to achieve that the best tool in a toolbox is a meeting. Demonizing them as often happens in engineering circles is not useful to anybody imo.

cheers,

Spike

Spike

--

http://www.spikelab.org/

http://twitter.com/spikelab

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[svdw...@gmail.com]

yes being on the same page is important. earlier in the episode andrew
also mentioned that one of the worst things you can do is spend your time
working on the wrong thing, and that seems more likely to occur if you're
out of sync. face time and lunch time is probably essential as well... is
that not meeting?

so there may be some drama and hyperbole in that quote... i didn't mean to
demonize or oversimplify correlations or costs, i just meant it was a
clever topical analogy with a kernel of truth.

the level of meetings you describe at your companies already sounds a
little more on the eventual side than the consistency guaranty side, and
it's interesting that you mentioned even pruning that back somewhat.

the quote and my sharing of it also reflects a recent waffling of my
own... i spend a lot of time trying to keep a finger on things going on at
my large-ish and briskly paced company and team, and i'm experimenting
with going a little more heads down on my projects.

-scott

[John Allspaw]

Two quotes come to mind: 

"If you think meetings are expensive, try *not* having meetings."

and

"When I'm interested, it's a conversation in a group. When I'm annoyed or bored, it's a meeting."

As with all organizational constructs, meetings are sometime awesome and sometimes crappy. It just simply depends. :)

-j

--
John Allspaw

[Jaime Gago]

On Dec 21, 2012, at 12:26 PM, John Allspaw wrote:

> "If you think meetings are expensive, try *not* having meetings."

Hear Hear ! I've experienced with both extremes (i.e. >60% time in meetings, <1% time spent communicating with the "team") and it certainly feels more dysfunctional not to talk to anybody than to over communicate.
At least with over communication your remaining % is _most likely_ to be spent on the right thing while with no communication even when you're doing things right it's quite tricky to know if you're working on the right thing, and we know what assumptions make out of u and me...

I also like to add the generally accepted fact that live meetings have the highest bandwidth, and the related quote that comes to my mind is "The Network is the Computer"


J.

[Spike Morelli]

On Dec 21, 2012, at 12:01 PM, Jaime Gago wrote:

Hear Hear ! I've experienced with both extremes (i.e. >60% time in meetings, <1% time spent communicating with the "team") and it certainly feels more dysfunctional not to talk to anybody than to over communicate.

I found that "feel" in the sentence to be very interesting… it feels to whom? Because I have yet to find one single engineer that "throws a meeting" with the explicit desire and intent to be on the same page. At the very best they ask questions when they are stuck or need validation, but not because a lack of communication feels dysfunctional. And that in fact seems to be the underlying issue here. Maybe I'm just being pessimistic without realizing, but it seems that in most engineering organizations the driver for communication is a reactive expression of a need of an individual rather than a desire of the individual to make sure the collective is fully functional. Of course we may argue that this is sufficient as we still have successful engineering orgs, but I keep wondering how much we're leaving on the plate that way, both personally and as groups.

[Andrew Clay Shafer]

 

I'm not quite sure if Andrew was just joking, but I feel compelled to respond because that's the kind of message we're only going to be worse off by following.

Not joking. It's not a message you choose to follow or not. It is a truism. A meeting is a write lock. Do what you will.

The way I read it, and maybe you or Andrew if he's on this list can correct me if I'm wrong, it's the same as saying that if a sysadmin can trust enough his tools eventually the uptime will be 100%.

I do not follow the logic or how this is related so maybe you can walk me through what you mean here.

 

On top of that there's a fundamental misconception that meetings are about lack of trust and a desire of control. Yes it may be that way for some, but in a lot of cases it's just about getting on the same page so that we can go about our work more efficiently.

Got it, you have a write lock so you can be more consistent.

Also a lot of meetings are endless, in the last 3 companies I worked for we mostly only had 15 mins sync-ups every day (I don't feel any need to call them standup) and one larger meetings when needed to discuss larger projects (and those in general only involved 2 or 3 people, not entire teams).

Sounds reasonable.

And with that I'm not trying to defend meetings, for example where I work we just started experimenting with dropping the daily sync-up in favor of more pairing in rotation and autogenerated reports. Point being, the goal isn't the meeting itself, that'd be silly of course, but rather having everybody on the same page and making sure that we don't get troubled by bad surprises. Sometimes to achieve that the best tool in a toolbox is a meeting. Demonizing them as often happens in engineering circles is not useful to anybody imo.

I'm not wanting to demonize meetings any more than I'm wanting to demonize write locks.

There are perfectly reasonable and necessary write locks depending on the context of what you are trying to accomplish.

I don't advocate 'no meetings', I advocate examining the trade offs being made.

It sounds like your experience has been with organizations maintaining a reasonable balance. I assure you there a plenty of organizations who are not.

[Spike Morelli]

Thanks for chiming in Andrew. I explained one point below since you asked about it, but I think we agree as you mention toward the end that it's depending on context and in general that it's depending on context.

On Jan 27, 2013, at 2:40 PM, Andrew Clay Shafer wrote:

 

I'm not quite sure if Andrew was just joking, but I feel compelled to respond because that's the kind of message we're only going to be worse off by following.

Not joking. It's not a message you choose to follow or not. It is a truism. A meeting is a write lock. Do what you will.

point taken.

The way I read it, and maybe you or Andrew if he's on this list can correct me if I'm wrong, it's the same as saying that if a sysadmin can trust enough his tools eventually the uptime will be 100%.

I do not follow the logic or how this is related so maybe you can walk me through what you mean here.

I was following from "if your org can trust its workers, it can be eventually consistent". I don't think it's about trust as much as it is about inherent issues that come with size. Of course that doesn't mean you can do away with trust, but even in a situation where a company does trust its employees there's room for things going amiss. It doesn't mean it's not possible, but it seems unlikely to be a good fit for the "technology". The risk is that you end up with a webapp using mongo because it's webscale and creating for itself a lot of problems that would have been very easy to deal with in mysql.

I'm not wanting to demonize meetings any more than I'm wanting to demonize write locks.

There are perfectly reasonable and necessary write locks depending on the context of what you are trying to accomplish.

I don't advocate 'no meetings', I advocate examining the trade offs being made.

It sounds like your experience has been with organizations maintaining a reasonable balance. I assure you there a plenty of organizations who are not.

I'm with you, my main objective even tho maybe I went overboard was exactly to state this, which was missing from the original thread.

I'm glad you took the time to respond and clarify this was your message all along.

thank you,