I'm reading a bit into his words, yes. Here's the part of interest:
"""You don’t have this problem with chat transcripts. Forcing people to reduce their otherwise rambling thoughts into concrete sentences helps focus discussion, too.
We’ll have meetings at GitHub, but I can count the number of full “meetings” we’ve had in the last year and a half on one hand."""
The former bit implying that the focus of sentences helps, the latter bit implying to keep the membership of the meeting to only those required.
Again: siloing is far more toxic than meetings in my experience. It's far too easy for a dev to wander down a path that has no value when operating in a silo. Agile tells us that we need to exist in a state of constant communication and feedback. This necessitates meeting with people in some fashion.
Apologies, but my brain turns off when the word 'Agile' is used in a sentence in such a way that it could be comfortably replaced by the name of a deity.
Anyways. Maybe semantics.. My points were just that meetings are basically awful, and that there's a distinction between communication and meetings... Meetings aren't the only form of communication.
They haven't really eliminated meetings, they have changed the way meetings are conducted. Thanks to the technology, you can step out of a meeting at any time to have lunch or, you know, work without missing out on anything. As a result, meetings never need to end.
I have worked under a similar model for almost a decade now. It comes with so many benefits over a traditional meeting that I am uncertain why any software development company would do it any other way.
"""You don’t have this problem with chat transcripts. Forcing people to reduce their otherwise rambling thoughts into concrete sentences helps focus discussion, too.
We’ll have meetings at GitHub, but I can count the number of full “meetings” we’ve had in the last year and a half on one hand."""
The former bit implying that the focus of sentences helps, the latter bit implying to keep the membership of the meeting to only those required.
Again: siloing is far more toxic than meetings in my experience. It's far too easy for a dev to wander down a path that has no value when operating in a silo. Agile tells us that we need to exist in a state of constant communication and feedback. This necessitates meeting with people in some fashion.