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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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