Meetings – A culture of excess that hurts our productivity and morale | Hacker News Reader

Meetings – A culture of excess that hurts our productivity and morale

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27 pointsjustinucd19 comments

Calling a meeting is almost always the worst way to accomplish something.

IMO it should only be done when you need to make an announcement or poll feedback from a group of people you don't usually interact with or who are busy.

If you have a question for a specific person, don't call a meeting; just use the easiest channel to contact that person and publish the answer.

If you need help with something business critical, don't call a meeting; do enough research to formulate an intelligent question and ask that question.

If you need to learn about something but it's not urgent, or even if it is urgent but not for anyone else, find the best person to learn from and ask them for a 1 on 1 at their most convenient time.

What if you have a question for a group of people? When domain experts are in the same room and debating the merits of a decision the results are almost always immensely valuable.

"What if you have a question for a group of people? When domain experts are in the same room and debating the merits of a decision the results are almost always immensely valuable."

I have seen this kind of debate almost only at spontaneous meetings. In scheduled meetings I almost never see a good discussion.

Sending out a group E-mail to start a debate seems preferable to me.

In my experience they tend to be best when an email discussion has come to no clear consensus. Or when I know a change will be controversial.

This is a case where it's important to know your department and how they communicate. Some people, like myself, will almost never respond to those big email chains. In fact, if I don't see my name being called out at a quick glance, I probably won't even read enough content to know a conversation/debate is going on. As a leader myself, I try to be cognizant of this and reach out to employees in the way that they're most comfortable communicating for important decisions. Sometimes that's email, sometimes that's IM, sometimes that's a phone call or face to face communication. It's almost never a meeting though.

If that's the norm at your organization then it works out. However in general wherever I've worked if you can't be bothered to say something people won't seek your advice unless you are the known expert in the specific subject.

However getting to that level of prestige takes a lot of time and effort - Usually by being helpful on those long email chains.

It's hard to imagine a scenario in business where this is the case.

I think in most cases the "question for a group of people" is a sign you really don't know who is responsible for making a decision, or perhaps that person is you and you just don't realize it yet.

To me anyway, calling a lot of meetings is a sign of desperation in a business setting, especially if that person is a manager. The person is so lost that they feel they need to be in the room for every important conversation.

What about as a way to make sure the different teams know what everyone else is doing?

Your post just made me shudder. There's nothing I can say or do to stop my PM from calling those exact meetings. I've gone so far as to say, "I'm already working with [dept rep 1] and [dept rep 2], they're both being extremely responsive and actively working on solving this problem with me. There's no need to take action." The immediate response is to call a meeting, bring in extra business people, and call it a "working session" that ultimately slows progress and increases confusion because now the tech people have to continually translate what we're doing into non-tech speech.

I don't usually have to go to these meetings, but I find it very convenient to have at least one person on the team who can let people know when they are reinventing a wheel that was already implemented by another team.

In my experience this doesn't work really well because although it solves the problem for the people in the meeting, most organizations don't have a culture of documentation to actually write down what was talked about in the meeting.

As you grow, it's almost inevitable someone who would find that information useful won't be there because of a multitude of reasons (sick, traveling, stuck in another meeting).

Why can't they work that out themselves? Are you such a critical link between them that you have to be driving every interaction? If that's the case, why can't you provide the information they need yourself, rather than playing matchmaker?

That is great way how to ensure that everyone except your small circle of friends will be out of loop - not contributing ideas, not knowing about important decisions and with little possibility to influence anything. Then you will complain about them being passive and telling you about problems too late to act.

Manage meetings and keep them short. Don't manage the project by secret my-buddies-only meetups.

I don't see why it has to break down in terms of circle of friends. To me it's just a matter of courtesy. If someone has a question about something I'm working on, I'd rather them just come to me directly rather than addressing a group of people who may or may not have good information about that thing. So I try to extend the courtesy to others.

What's that saying? You almost always have to get approval from your manager to spend $500 on a tool, but call a meeting with 20 people and no one bats an eye.

I think partially this has to do with the lack of overtime pay in a lot of companies. There is no direct cost in wasting people's times. When I started my career in Germany we had a strict 35 hour week. There were almost no large meetings and we spent most of the work week actually working. Despite this the company was very successful and efficient.

I’m now a contractor charging by the hour in a company I used to be an employee in (no OT). It’s amazing how few meetings I get invited to now compared to my previous employment. I just get left to get my stuff done and I’m kept up to date through my own efficient means of finding stuff out (i.e asking the correct people). I would say I’m at least 3x more productive now and no worse off.

Some elements that can help are:

- an agenda

- sending an e-mail with the meeting goals or slides in advance

- a moderator that keeps the meeting on topic

- marking non-essential people as optional

- minutes, or recording the meeting

I avoid meetings if I can but if there is no agenda I flat out refuse or volunteer to prepare the agenda myself. I will not step foot in the room without one.

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