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Comment by nine_zeros | Hacker News Reader

When your output is "attending meetings", it's a lot more fun to be in office.

When your output is actual produced things, open space offices and meetings are an impediment.

I agree with a caveat: to actually produce things, sometimes meetings are not an impediment, they're vital. They're the quickest way to come to a consensus and share exceptions during design quickly

This is true, and I'd add that the more fluid and dynamic those meetings are, the better. To me, it seems like video meetings are anything but. Lots of people either interrupting each other or trying too hard not to. Obnoxious repetition. Whiteboarding is a sad joke.

Something I like to point out to people who will listen (not upper management) is that communication is not a good - it's a necessary evil. It has to be done to remove obstacles, but it should be minimized where possible.

This is completely counter to a lot of corporate cultures, but it's true; every wasted meeting, every unread email, etc, is a time wasting suck created to further the goal of "communication", without realizing that isn't a worthwhile goal.

If a meeting doesn't product an actionable set of items at the end of it, then it was a waste of time.

For example, what's a better use of everyone's time: a scrum meeting where everyone sits there and sits like 5 year olds waiting to have their turn at talking about what they want to do today and what they did yesterday, or a slack channel where everyone types the same thing they would have said anyway and then meets if there's something that needs to be discussed?

Absolutely. A group meeting weekly, a manager meeting with direct reports weekly, and peers convening ad-hoc meetings / pairing as the situation calls for it... during early phases of a project, actually showing up to a real whiteboard can be nice, but I tend to walk away from such sessions with several days of work. Folks interfacing with external groups naturally pick up a couple more meetings per week, but more than an average of one meeting a day, I have trouble getting quality work done. My preferred schedule has one day stuffed with meetings, and the rest of the week open for work and ad-hoc sessions. Going to the office on that day is fine.

Meetings are not to be abolished. But they are not the end unto itself. It is merely a means to an end. A small piece of the larger pie of "work".

In real life, management shows that their time is packed with meetings while pushing actual production down to reports (who must attend all the meetings + do all the production).

There are very few managers who defend their report's time as precious.

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