The Meetings Are the Work

Over the last holiday break, I covered for my boss, the VP of Engineering. During that time I covered his full scope, around 40+ engineers, six different squads building everything from a DAO to Core Infra to hardware integrations. As I sat down to write out all the things that I had done, I realized that I had forgotten the thing my squads delivered, our consumer USD Vault Platform. If you’ve stepped into more scope and can’t remember what you did, this post is for you. You can look back at your calendar, see all those meetings and think to yourself “I didn’t do anything”. And that’s the problem. It has taken me many years to understand that those meetings, that is the work. During the paternity leave I covered multiple squads where I didn’t know the language (Go, Rust, Java). I couldn’t actively contribute to the codebase, nor should I. My value was coordinating what was happening. My job was to keep information flowing between the squads, between senior leadership, and with…