Questions to Ask About Every Meeting
Meeting efficiency, our next live session, and a community spotlight
You might think that meetings are a necessary evil of the corporate world, but they don’t have to be! Here are 3 questions to optimize meeting efficiency and productivity:
Is this meeting necessary? Can you reduce the frequency to every other week, or cancel a meeting series altogether? If you’re not contributing at least once or twice in the meeting, I’d question if it’s a good use of your time.
What will happen as a result of the meeting? Most people go into meetings with notes or slides about the topic, but what’s the output? Decide the outcome of the meeting and broadcast that to all participants – ideally it’s more action-oriented than “Get status updates” or “Align on progress.”
How are you tracking decisions? Meetings are about identifying owners and making decisions. This needs to be written down and tracked in a place accessible to all meeting attendees. This also helps a lot with performance review!
The most expensive (and impactful) meeting is the 1:1 – two people in a high-bandwidth conversation focused on feedback and growth. My YouTube video about this has done fairly well – 97.5 days of watch time so far! Alex had the thumbnail idea to include Uncle Iroh, who I am just now learning about, apparently he’s a sage with a penchant for tea? Our last live event was on exactly this topic, and you can find the session recap in the Tech Career Growth mobile apps (Android and iOS).
Our next event is tomorrow, March 26, 10am PT, about how to do amazing code reviews. This is a topic fundamental to every software engineer, since we spend a lot of our time writing code that will be reviewed, or reviewing code ourselves. We’ll be on Zoom and also live streaming on my YouTube. Details in the LinkedIn event.
Community spotlight
The best part of our community is, unsurprisingly, the people. We recently chatted with Weily Lang, a long-time member of TCG. She recently left her engineering role at Asana in San Francisco.
How did you get started in software engineering?
I earnestly started in software engineering in May 2020 when I came across a sponsored social media post recruiting applicants for the CUNY LaGuardia Community College TechHire program. TechHire enabled me to complete General Assembly's Software Engineering Immersive. After General Assembly, I was one of 20 Breakthrough Fellowship recipients at The Marcy Lab School who, like me, came from marginalized backgrounds and were having trouble landing our first full-time roles despite having prior programming education.
How was your experience at Asana?
The absolute best part of my AsanaUP apprenticeship was the huge community I got to meet and learn from, including my fellow apprentices. Everyone embodied the culture of nurturing a growth mindset, especially towards my growth as an apprentice. My top challenge was definitely in developing my confidence as an IC amongst such talented people.
How did you discover Tech Career Growth?
I discovered Tech Career Growth when my friend and bootcamp colleague, Jendri Morocho, recommended I attend the "How To Manage Your Time Optimally In Tech" session. This community has been such a great resource for me to quickly learn about how other companies operate and to learn vetted tips from more experienced engineers on how to streamline my technical & soft skill development.
Thanks Weily for being part of TCG and all your contributions. If you want to share your story in the next, feel free to reply to this email.
Hope to see you tomorrow,
P.S. This email is a brand new format. We’d love any feedback – more or less content, community, links, or something else?