When you're working on a hard coding challenge, meetings can ruin your productivity.
You may have noticed this. If you have a meeting at 1pm and another at 3pm, the hour in between the meetings feels unproductive. One hour simply isn’t enough to get complex coding work done.
As a developer, a meeting costs you a lot.
On the other hand, our jobs never exist in isolation. We're building things for people & solving problems together with other teams.
In many cases, the most valuable thing you can do is have a meeting to make a hard decision or ensure you're building the right thing. A great meeting (those are rare) gets the team pointed in the same direction & increases the value everyone can create.
Like nearly everything in software development, having a meeting is a tradeoff. Whether the time & distraction are worth it is proportional to how much alignment & big decisions the meeting can generate.
The takeaway? Don't be firmly anti-meeting since a good meeting can be very valuable, but also keep a high bar for whether a meeting is worth the time & attention.