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Comment by caturopath | Hacker News Reader

I made it through most of my career thus far, including pretty senior positions, where probably most of my days didn't have a formal meeting. It's been so strange to move to a big tech company where I could spend 30 hours per week in meetings if I was not pushing back.

Any they're all 30 minutes. What the heck do you expect to accomplish in 30 minutes? You spend 20% of the time waiting for someone to show up.

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You don't have to spend 20% of your time waiting for somebody to show up! That's an organization culture issue.

For the daily team coordination meeting I run, we had a problem with that. So after one especially egregious delay, I asked how people felt about that. They didn't like it, of course. I then said I wanted a consistent start time, but was open as to when it was. At the hour? 1 minute after? 5 minutes after?

To my surprise, they picked 1 minute after. And everybody has stuck to it. A couple months in we'll occasionally have somebody turn up late, but the meeting starts without them, so they know not to do it again. It's great!

We also build an agenda on the fly, keeping the pace brisk. Usually we finish a few minutes early, and sometimes the meeting will be a zippy 10-15 minutes. It's possible to have good, useful meetings!

Funnily enough, my zippy meetings are the ones where an agenda, or at least a boundary, is set out in advance. Oftentimes we allocate more time than is needed to discuss, so we call it off the moment we're done instead of filling the time.

Part of this is because I'm also fine with interrupting and telling people to take something async if a group meeting is becoming a hyper-specific 1:1.

Soon enough, meetings remain direct and rabbit-hole free. Unless the entire purpose of the meeting was to collectively burrow into it.

All it takes is a little discipline, and clear expectations.

Being able to call out people to take their stuff out of the meeting is extremely important.

Needless to say when I just recently did that with the two program managers in a fortune 500 I got punished.

It leaves you wondering why these big corps have program and project managers when they:

- consistently don't have an agenda

- completely ignore scope

- don't even try to define scope

- keep talking about being productive

- keep getting promoted for creating powerbi dashboards of other people's work

I'd suggest you read about managerialism, our reigning business paradigm. Spender and Locke's "Confronting Managerialism" really opened my eyes. If you think of management's purpose as making the business better, there's a lot that doesn't make sense. But it gets clearer if you think of it as caste dedicated to both individual and class power and enrichment, who also try to keep the business on the rails enough that there's something to have power over and extract money from.

Not that all managers are bad or anything; plenty of them are people just trying to get things done. It's a structural problem.

I double checked my post and I never said 'called out'.

I don't know how you went about it in this case but, I've never called out.

All I've ever said is, hey...do we need to do this now?

Doubt OP meant anything different than: "interrupting and telling people to take something async"

I think we agree. For me, the daily team coordination meeting has a clear initial agenda: go through each work-in-process item and quickly discuss it.

But that tends to spin off longer discussions, and there are often short things people want to raise with the team. So after we've gone through our kanban board, we'll have an optional period called "post". Long items go into Zoom chat as "Post: thing to discuss" and we give a few minutes to each.

I totally agree with blocking rabbit holes. Things that interrupt the fast run-through of the board get booted to post. Items there that are longer than a few minutes get booted to async or a topic-specific meeting, generally a smaller group than the team meeting.

One other trick I recommend: rotate leadership of the meeting once people have the hang of it. I ran mine myself for the first couple months. Then I ran it every other week, with somebody new swapping in. The weeks when people are responsible for keeping the meeting on track make them much better participants when they're not in charge.

Video calls have also made this a lot easier.

Before everyone kind of expected ~3 minutes of lateness to be the norm, dependent on elevator and stairway congestion. And god forbid one person is traveling from another meeting in another building a bit of a walk away.

Tons of meetings are just fine with being 30 minutes. And even if we schedule something longer we should expect to give people time back if we don’t need the whole thing.

Way too many 39 minute things get scheduled for 60. While there logistics issues at physical events with multiple tracks I feel most conference talks should be 30 minutes too.

I'm a team lead and most days I'll have 1 maybe 2 meetings at most, but having 0 isn't unusual. Is that weird? I do talk to people on teams all the time though. I know what everyone is doing and how they are doing, just without having a voice/video call. We just text most of the time - I can be in 10+ ongoing conversations at the same time.

It’s culture thing. Personally, I prefer in-person or video meetings because it’s an event and people are usually focused on task. One on one calls are great too.

Text is good or bad. It’s an attention thief, and you never know what you are getting. Also, I find that platforms like Teams are great for the present, but awful for history and context.

In my experience 90% of meetings with more than 3 people are irrelevant to my work. Here's a couple examples:

"Standups" that are really PM status calls that constantly go down rabbit holes. My update is 30s or less, but the meetings are always 30 minutes long and usually run over.

"Code reviews" that are really run/monopolized by one person. The entire team is required to attend even if you have no code, but in practice no one other than the runner is allowed to provide feedback.

How are your standups taking that long? We have over a dozen people on our daily standup and it's 5-6 minutes long.

I've noticed a similar pattern at $JOB - we started doing a daily "WFH status call" in early April last year. There was nothing like it previously, just a weekly report on important bugs, support items, etc. that we worked on. And the occasional (less than weekly) meeting which would include the PM and dev team.

The calls started out shorter but over time they've become a hybrid of:

- "Here's the outlay for today." The shortest are just this which only happens when things are going smoothly and everyone's tackling things of moderate difficulty.

- "Here's something that's been giving me trouble" which prompts a few minutes discussion. Usually someone has a idea to pitch in which gets the person unstuck, but it can bleed into...

- "I wanted to bring up this thing I noticed" which pulls us into a bigger half-hour discussion with some possible followups scheduled with the more senior members.

So at the extremes, any given instance of this meeting could last from 10 minutes to 45 minutes.

We usually refer to this as a "stand-up" but I could see how someone from a more regimented team would understand it to be something with a more tightly defined purpose.

Seconding the other comment on not waiting for people. As soon as the clock changes to the start time we are beginning the meeting, and we're not catching anyone up if they're late. They can figure it out.

Obviously this gets a little slack if you're a super senior position (nobody's telling the company President they're not circling back on something already discussed) but for the most part meetings are much more efficient if you're absolutely ruthless with the clock. It's literally the only thing that nobody can control.

On the flipside you have to be equally ruthless about not going over time. At 5 min before the scheduled meeting end time we start cutting off discussions that have become circular and start determining if we need to have a follow-up or clarification meeting for something. My biggest rule for this is that it can't be the exact same group, you'll just end up having the same meeting again. These follow-up meetings are most effective if it's a subset of the original group trying to clarify some specific point.

30 minute meetings can be useful if you stick to these rules.

Why do you need more than 30 mins? The major problem with meetings is that they’re mostly useless. Just talking for the sake of talking.

Write up everything first for education and background, distribute that, then have a short meeting when there’s something actionable to do.

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