Why Developers Hate Meetings

Meetings that go nowhere

👋 Hello, this is Valentina with the free edition of the Optivem Journal. I help Engineering Leaders & Senior Software Developers apply TDD in Legacy Code.

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It’s not because developers hate talking.

Developers can talk for hours — just ask them about architecture.

The 6-person call where 2 people speak

Two people talk the entire time.

The rest are:

• on mute

• pretending to follow

• occasionally saying “yeah” at the wrong moment

The developer translation layer

• “we’ll figure it out” → this is now my problem

• “should be simple” → it absolutely isn’t

• “just a small change” → redesign incoming

• “we can iterate” → nothing is defined

You get asked for estimates on something that is vaguely described.

You give a number.

Everyone writes it down like it’s a fact.

Then later the same number becomes:

“why is this taking longer than expected?”

What developers actually need

Developers don’t need more meetings.

They don’t need longer discussions either.

Not 20 minutes of debate.

Not “we’ll figure it out later.”

Just enough concrete detail so the work isn’t being invented mid-implementation.

A few examples instead of abstract descriptions.

Most of the frustration comes from building something that wasn’t fully defined, and then being judged as if it was.

Vague requests → Concrete examples

This is exactly where acceptance testing and ATDD help.

They take requirements that sound like:

“It should handle refunds properly”

and turn them into concrete examples developers can implement.

Acceptance tests turn that into questions like:

• Given this input, what should happen?

• When this happens, what is the expected output?

• What should not happen?

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⚡Ready to see this in action?

I’m running a hands-on ATDD – Acceptance Testing Workshop on May 25–26 (4 hours).

Limited spots. Register now - 100 EUR off with code DISCOUNT_100