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Comment by decafninja | Hacker News Reader

Useless meetings.

The worst is where some middle manager or project manager or business analyst calls in 20 different people into an hour long meeting. 5 people might actually get some meaningful benefit from the meeting, let alone actually utter a single word.

You try to skip it, but then said organizer pings you asking why you aren't present.

The same meeting is scheduled daily, because reasons. Never mind that there has been no meaningful progress or update to the project during the last 24 hours.

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You may want to consider having a conversation with the middle manager about how this meeting is ineffective and needs to be split into separate, more targeted meetings with smaller groups of individuals where delegates from each meeting eventually sync with one another to discuss findings. You say it is "scheduled daily because reasons" but do you know what those reasons are? Have you tried to understand the goals of the meeting from the organizer and suggest more efficient ways to get to that goal if you find the current mechanism wasteful?

If either you or they do not both have 1) The understanding of why this is necessary 2) How to go about it successfully

Congratulations! You are now the lucky owner of two problems. You (or perhaps your manager) have your work cut out for you. For what it's worth, I was having a conversation with another engineer on my team this week, and we both thought a lot about how actually tricky and yet high value this labor is. The truth is, probably nobody likes that the meeting has become so large and unwieldy. Everybody can probably sense that something is not working properly.

But nobody knows what to do. Or maybe, they're scared to take initiative. Will you be the person that steps in and tries to turn things around? I promise, it's usually easier than it looks!

Try asking for an agenda, then if they give you one, you will know one of two things: I can contribute to this discussion, or I can't contribute to this discussion. If they don't give you an agenda, then they don't know what they're going to talk about either ...

This is an excellent advice - it will force the discussion without looking adversarial. One may also ask for expected deliverable, such as a decision, or a list of questions to be circulated afterwards, etc.

It is generally a useful practice to ask about the expected artifact to be produced from any activity - it anchors the expectations and provides focus (narrows the scope).

If you’re really brave, or really desperate, have a chat with the organizer the day before and ask them which problems are looming over them and see how you can contribute to a solution - the meeting may dissipate by itself and you will gain an ally.

Yep, and it's worse when someone I don't even report to demands regular status updates. Rising-up in that firm meant demonstrating leadership by getting people to report to you, even if in an unofficial capacity.

Or there was the company where we had four (!) hours of meetings per day: two in the morning and two in the afternoon. All we ever discussed is what we didn't get done during lunch time.

After I left all that, my one question when interviewing with a hiring manager became: "How often do you have meetings?" A lot of people got very flustered with that one.

This happens a lot in my company. When things fall behind, first you tell your direct manager what’s going on. Then you tell the same thing in a meeting two levels up. Then somebody really high comes and wants a meeting too. But he doesn’t really understand the project so you have to spend a ton of time explaining what this is really about. And this goes on and on. Everybody wants to have their own meeting.

It always amazes me that we have this whole reporting structure and tracking tools like Jira but somehow the critical information doesn’t really flow up. In theory they all would look at Jira and some status reports and then be up to date without wasting the time of the people who are doing the work.

Jira seems really poor out of the box for project tracking. Getting a quick high level view of where a project stands is difficult and requires dedication by project/product teams to maintain, which no one seems to do. I wish there was a better way to do work-breakdown structures, though I think some agile evangelists might say that's too "waterfall".

The straight jacket of a project management software is not always helpful, but your manager must be able to effectively collect, analyze, and communicate status in both directions. In fact that’s the only mandatory part of the job.

Your situation is highly dysfunctional. If you are not quitting just yet consider taking charge - collate the status of your project (you and people you coordinate with) into a tidy status update that your manager can take to their manager. It’s a difficult skill, but you will earn undying gratitude. And god help you if you can add a meaningful chart (as opposed to a bullshit chart) to your stays update - you will instantly become the savior of the team.

Fun story. I have once received a promotion based on a single ducking spreadsheet of this sort. I was so mad about all my other “hardcore“ engineering work not meaning diddly squat by comparison, I asked if they can take the promotion back (they refused). I came to terms with it eventually - I started walking up the management chain asking what happened and eventually I was told that hiring someone to write solid code is a question of throwing money into the hiring pipeline, but hiring someone to provide meaningful insight or direction is mostly a matter of luck.

> How often do you have meetings?

This deserves to be added to the Joel Test!

I have a friend who used to start every meeting with writing down how much the meeting will cost the company (pp person/hour, etc.) on a whiteboard.

They worked for a university's budget controller, so large meetings were regular, but, fortunately infrequent!

I feel like I have two currencies at work, one being time and the other being mental fatigue. Average time wasting (snacking, reading, going for a walk) only consumes time, but coding and meetings both cause mental fatigue. It’s worse for my productivity than if I spent an hour laying outside.

Do you have any tips for what to do when you're beginning to lose your autonomy to out of touch PMs?

Look for a new job.

Are you sure you don’t want to quit?

There isn’t a simple answer to your predicament, but this can be managed. Take a look at my other comments in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23205684

A variation of this is my pet peeve.

Meetings with no real agenda. The conversation will ramble, nobody is taking control, nothing gets decided and the meeting takes 4 times as long as it should.

And then we repeat it again next week, because nothing got decided.

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