code reviews, standups, meetings and other ways to spend your work time

   Eveything else except for writing actual code...

   The biggest surprise for me when I had my first internship was how much time was spent doing everything else apart from writing actual code. When I moved on to a full time job, it only got worse. I can understand that a huge amount of time will be spent in requirements and design so that when you get to the actual code you know what you are doing and how.

   What I don't understand is the meetings madness. A prime example is code reviews. I held a code review this week and attended 3 or 4 more. The code review I held had two goals. 

   First, I wanted to get input regarding the code I wrote. I invited a really senior guy who has pretty much written the map reduce framework that I felt the least comfortable with using. His input was invaluable. He identified in a couple of minutes performance issues that I hadn't faced but could come down the road. 

   Secondly, I wanted to show to a junior hire what have I done and how. He is in the baby steps phase of writing map reduce code so he is not yet 101% into the map-combine-reduce mentality...

   From my point of view, the meeting was successful. I got my input and improved the performance and robustness of my code and the junior guy learned a ton from watching a 1 hour conversation and participating in it.

   Both guys had the actual code beforehand and pointers to the documentation of my code that explains what have I done, how and why.

   Then come all the other code reviews I attended this week. I attended both local code reviews and some with remote groups. In all of them, I had no code beforehand and no exact agenda. Agenda was sth like "code review for the gmail application" where gmail is of course millions of loc and we weren't going to review all this in an hour =) Really vague and not making much sense.

   In the meeting, we were going line to line over code without any kind of introduction for the big picture. The result was that all I got from these code reviews is a line by line low level understanding of the code and how to point out correct intendation ! This is not what I wanted to get out of it. 

   So why are code reviews so hard? What are the rules we need to establish for anyone who want to hold a code review meeting or even a meeting? Im not sure yet but hopefully one day I will....