Comment by FeepingCreature | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FeepingCreature | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

FeepingCreature

I haven't timed it, an hour may be off. Call it two for safety. We generally orientate meetings vaguely around mid-day. Having a flextime schedule helps, because some people only show up an hour before lunch so you can't plan meetings for the morning anyways.

That explains a lot of things though. It sounds like most of your meetings are terrible. Actually, if most of people's meetings in this thread are terrible experiences, that seems like it would explain their sentiments. In other words, meetings are mostly time loss, which you're of course trying to minimize.

(It really helps that we have a culture of "I don't think I can contribute to this meeting, I'm gonna head out.")

Almost all of my in-person meetings are technical debates - or group debugging sessions, where progress depends on randomly noticing something. In both cases, they scale well with number of members up to a point of four or so, where adding another participant generates more ideas than it costs time.

>they scale well with number of members up to a point of four or so, where adding another participant generates more ideas than it costs time.

That's the main thing I come across. Most meetings are well over four people. And personally, I already don't deal well with more than 3 people as most people work on a vastly different wavelength than myself.

Now consider all the "Agile" meetings are already 5+ people and often contain management types and people who are both higher on the chain of command and have no technical background either hogging the attention. Suddenly, most meetings I see become either a hybrid announcement + roll call, a "meeting" with ulterior motives (e.g. managers trying to measure "participation" as a way to grade employees) or a very rushed design-by-committee approach to solving something.

Yeah we very rarely have that sort of management meeting, which is good cause they're useless.

Meeting sizing is a good point. It feels like adding additional people is often done aggressively but thoughtlessly, so maybe the solution is to have a company-wide rule to counter-balance that tendency.

If voice/video meetings could have no more than 4 participants unless (insert somewhat burdensome exception process), all participants would presumably consider more carefully who should be added.

A more flexible rule that also might help a little would be to require a separate justification for the use of time to be filed for every single invitee.

It's just like of the signup process on your landing page. Make things you want to happen as effortless as possible -> make things you want to happen less more effortful.

In an evil afterthought: If people still keep inviting to many others to meetings, make the filing of the justifications only possible using a special intranet page, and make your least capable intern code that page. That should sort it out. }:->

I dislike when management decides to join a technical meeting randomly and then spends the whole time being confused and trying to get folks to explain something to them. It’s happened at every place I’ve worked so far. For the record I’m not saying they’re unintelligent, it’s just that explaining something like how a kernel module actually works to someone who doesn’t know what a kernel is tends to put a damper on the meeting if it takes 30+ minutes.

A previous boss was like this. Couldn’t avail himself for any of the status updates when I tried to-dutifully-keep him informed on project status, but would then show up to my team planning meetings, be confused, or get upset when he found out we were either not where he expect us to be in terms of progress, or that a minor decision was made among the group that he wasn’t roped in on (but doesn’t require senior management approval or consent)

Meanwhile in my “Sent” (aka “CYA”) folder…you can guess where this is going.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com