Every Friday at Innova we have a meeting. This is a traditional, sit-down style meeting, where for a few hours we all re-sync with each other about projects, and show off anything cool that we’ve found in the past week. (The picture is of Keith Avery, our resident Python-guru, talking about how cool “INSTEAD OF” triggers in SQL Server 2000 are.)

Apparently, this is shocking to some. Earlier this month the community was abuzz about “Stand-Up Meetings,” where meetings are held standing up in order to shorten the time spent on non-essential agenda items. The original article (here) said that their company achieved great success by wheeling all of their chairs out of their conference room! How bad of an idea is this?

First, meetings are held so that the company can communicate. If you create artificial barriers to effective communication, you shouldn’t be surprised when the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, so to speak. If we mandated that the Friday meeting was standing-only, we’d miss out on a lot of casual communication, which are the best and usually most informative parts of the meeting.

Second, programmers (at least here) already hold their own “Stand-Up” meetings! I’ll go and bug Eddie about a layout design decision for some PDFs we’re generating. We’ll stand around and discuss things, and in a half-hour I’ll have all the information I need. These are informal — I don’t have anyone arbitrarily telling me I can’t sit down and I have a very loose agenda.

Finally, I love our Friday meetings. Traditionally us code-jockeys are supposed to hate meetings (because anything that takes us away from our terminals are a bad thing), but I find it’s a good way to relax on a Friday afternoon, learn some things that maybe I was too busy during the week to understand properly, and discuss the homoerotic subtexts of Top Gun.