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Comment by lukethomas | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like the meetings are compressed into the other two days of the week, which also sounds quite miserable.

I'd love to see an app that analyzes the internal meetings that happen inside a company and flags the repeat offenders. I've always found that a small percentage of people hold the most meetings. It also can be a bit awkward to reject their meeting invites constantly.

Leaders should remind people about the time-cost of meetings (here's a calculator to help: https://hbr.org/2016/01/estimate-the-cost-of-a-meeting-with-...). There are meetings that can be beneficial for alignment, but then there are the reoccurring ones where people just want to know what you're working on.

Anyways, I'm working on a tool to help cut down on the "what's going on" meetings: https://www.fridayfeedback.com

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The compression is surely miserable to start, but I hope people stick with it to see what happens next.

In Lean Manufacturing, a common process improvement technique is to tighten some constraint. E.g., if you normally have 10 boxes of parts in play, you drop it to 9 and see what happens. Probably something will happen, as they ended up at 10 for a reason. But then you consciously solve issues until 9 is as smooth as 10. The metaphor they use is ships in channels: if you lower the water level a bit, it will expose rocks, which you remove. Then you lower the water level a bit more.

My guess is that if these teams are doing weekly retros, they'll feel the pain of compression. People will then brainstorm ways to make the least useful meeting unnecessary. Or to make a longer meeting shorter, and therefore more efficient. First they'll start with the easy things, but eventually they may move on to rearranging workflows, cross-training, and maybe even swapping people among teams.

It's really weird to me that in office-work meetings take priority over direct value-generating work. Compare that with a factory floor or a restaurant, for example, where everybody gets that it's bad to randomly stop direct productivity. Hopefully having clear time constraints will help reverse that.

People exhausted by all day meetings aren’t in a good mental space to solve the problem (often the retro is at the end, after all, when everyone wants to just gtfo)

Hi, I’m a project manager. I’m the guy who is likely scheduling most of those meetings. Nice to meet you!

I think, by and large, we understand the cost of meetings, and don’t casually organize them without going through the alternatives. It’s not rocket science. My thought process is generally:

0. Before anything, come up with a written agenda and goals for the communication. Don’t move past this step until done.

1. Does this communication even need to happen? Maybe there is an internal document already I can point people to.

2. If not, Can this be done async over E-mail?

3. If not, can it be done over chat?

4. If not, can it be done in a series of 1:1s between me and each attendee?

5. If not, then a meeting has to happen. What’s the true minimal list of required attendees? Who is optional? I am loathe to waste the time of a productive individual contributor if I don’t have to. If I can invite his/her manager instead, I will. Sorry, that’s the Faustian bargain you make when becoming a manager!

6. What’s the shortest possible productive duration?

7. Is there a time slot that is miraculously free for everyone, respecting time zones and working hours for people?

8. If not, is there a time slot that works for most people?

If, again by some great miracle, there are multiple time slots that work, I favor ones that are adjacent to other meetings in their calendars, so as to not break up a productive no-meeting block.

Good job there with your checklist. Unfortunately, for every one of you who does the above checklist before pulling the "schedule meeting" trigger, there are 500 other project managers who's first reaction to everything is: "schedule a meeting".

Then there is the "I can get what I need in a 2hr meeting at the cost of 16hrs of other peoples time" ones.

I hate those ones.

If your programmers are taking laptops to meetings to write code while you are holding the meeting, you should consider a career in yak-farming not project management.

Also we need to schedule a meeting to find out why we are behind on our deliverables because of last weeks meeting taking most of the day putting everyone behind.

That one made me giggle.

Or as one of my friends at that place had as a wallpaper "The beatings will continue until morale improves".

There are lots of terrible meeting formats. There’s the “everyone talk about what they are not doing because they’re meeting to talk about it” aka Daily Standup. There’s the Bug Beatings, where 50 people gather to go through 200 open bugs, each one where 1 (different) person talks and the remaining 49 work on their laptops. There’s my least favorite: I call it “Executive Storytime” where multiple people put together a status update for a big-shot, and instead of big-shot reading it himself, we project it and read it to him. This is ok when the format is meant to be interactive but if it’s just a readout—yukk. Then there’s the Agendaless Sync, where the same people get together weekly because they always get together weekly and just talk about whatever. Ugggghh.

These days I'm the only programmer at a none-tech company and it's glorious, I answer directly to the MD.

I set my own schedules, timelines, I prioritise bugs and maintenance and I handle buying anything we need as well having complete freedom in the technologies I choose to solve problems (currently moving to TypeScript for front end stuff for example) - his attitude is to hire good people across the business and then get out the way as much as possible.

The boss sets overall goals and we agree together on what is achievable in a given time period.

Honestly my job has made me remember what it was I loved about programming (solving real world problems that have a measurable impact).

Even the fact I inherited the worst codebase I've ever seen doesn't get me down because my boss knows how bad it is (it's why he got rid of the outsourced company and hired a programmer in house) and I get to work on a bunch of cool problems (production scheduling in a varied environment, global logistics (we import from China and India), some C# stuff (production control), Android (inventory control, scanners)).

I actually get to 5pm and want to keep working but the boss bollocks me if I stay late (even though he does most days).

I'd have to be offered a spectacular pay rise to even consider working for a 'tech' company again.

And the always wonderful - meeting that should have been an email.

https://imgur.com/gallery/9yF0Vyo

You sound like a great pm any thoughts to transferring your system into a package for other pm's?

These would be great questions to answer when creating an event invite. Would make a pretty useful chrome extension.

Sounds like a good thought process, but that's not how I feel it happens in my department. The thought process there is more like "hey, this sounds like it's relevant for 'the team'. Let me check the calendar for the first open slot!"

This is a great checklist! Do you have it posted in "blog post" format somewhere for posterity?

> and don’t casually organize them without going through the alternatives

I'm routinely asked to join after-hours deployment calls that last hours and which my contribution is minimal, "just in case". You may not be casually organizing them, but there are plenty out there who are.

Maybe it’s old but you need to read manager vs maker schedule: http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html It is the gold standard on why creative workers hate meetings. All those things you mentioned sound great, but you’re still destroying productivity if you’re scheduling meetings anywhere other than the immediate beginning or end of the day.

For makers, there are only 2 time slots: before lunch and after lunch.

I much prefer meetings to get compressed together as much as possible. If I'm going to get ripped out of my context for a meeting, I'd rather take that hit only once and carry it into as many meetings as possible.

> It sounds like the meetings are compressed into the other two days of the week, which also sounds quite miserable.

True, but it forces meetings to compete with meetings rather than development in the schedule.

This is actually a very acute and non-obvious observation. People might get tired during meetings, but this will mostly affect following meetings, rather than engineering. And it's easier to focus on an activity (and optimize it) if it lasts a day rather than an hour. This might end up improving the overall "meeting culture" in the company, teaching people to schedule breaks, be on time and so on.

For a while, I worked mostly remote, four days at home, one day in the office. I miss those days badly... I've never been more productive. Scheduling all the in-person meetings and status updates and planning work into the Monday in the office was the key. Embrace the suck, and the fact that no work will be done that day - you never get any real work done on a Monday anyway, and once you're into status meetings, it's all over anyway. But doing all of that planning and collaborating and getting the shit together on Monday meant the week was laid out, and Tuesday through Friday were freed up for big blocks of deep work. Bonus, not being physically in the office meant I was out of sight and out of mind, free to actually get some work done.

> It sounds like the meetings are compressed into the other two days of the week

That was my first thought, too. I was talking once to a guy who was hiring for a developer position that he couldn't get filled - he told me that he was sweetening the deal by ensuring the dev candidates that they wouldn't have to attend any meetings; he would attend all the meetings for them so they could focus on coding. I had a sneaking suspicion that they realized what he didn't realize... that they'd be on the hook not only for implementing everything that was discussed in these meetings but also interpreting them through him.

Just a heads up, fridayfeedback has some layout issues for me: https://i.imgur.com/DdevMCy.png

This is on Chrome 66.0.3359.139, Windows 10, fullscreen on a 1920x1080 screen. I get the same layout issue in Firefox.

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