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Comment by peterbonney | Hacker News Reader

Sort of an obvious point, but the opportunity cost analysis here has basically nothing to do with whether the meeting attendees are developers - it applies to anyone who has other things they could be doing with their time and has a cost from context switching.

On a separate point, missing from this is the potential opportunity cost arising from NOT having a meeting. It’s a harsh reality, but sometimes the reason you’re sitting in that “pointless” meeting is that there’s a small chance you’ll need to be called upon, and if you aren’t present there is a person or people whose time is even MORE expensive than yours who will suffer a cost that more than offsets the cost of 2 or 5 or 10 developers sitting there twiddling their thumbs.

(That’s not often the case, mind you, but it does happen.)

Anyway, “High Output Management” by Andy Grove does a great job articulating the math of meetings and how to maximize their value.

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Adding High Output Management to my to-read list, thanks!

> It’s a harsh reality, but sometimes the reason you’re sitting in that “pointless” meeting is that there’s a small chance you’ll need to be called upon, and if you aren’t present there is a person or people whose time is even MORE expensive than yours who will suffer a cost that more than offsets the cost of 2 or 5 or 10 developers sitting there twiddling their thumbs.

Why are we in this horrific situation where a person's knowledge can only be leveraged if they are "called on" in 30 seconds of an hour-long meeting?

My God, Slack me if you must.

Some work is inherently synchronous. On those, if you are needed for 30 seconds but it takes 30 minutes for you to get there, the people doing it will have to stop until you come.

All work is not this way (even though some managers pretend it is), and very likely the majority of your work isn't like it (assuming you are a software developer). But some work is like it, and pretending it isn't as about as expensive as gathering people doing asynchronous work into meetings.

(The "what should we do" decisions normally require more synchronous work than "how should we do it", some professions do spend most of their time in the former.)

Or people could be slightly more imaginative and flexible. I could be "on call" while a meeting is going on without having to attend if 99% of it doesn't concern me.

Obviously some work is synchronous, but it's not an excuse for the norm today, where time wasting is the default.

Most managers are lazy and bad at their jobs, and there is no accountability for that. So they prefer to waste lots and lots of other people's time in exchange for slightly more convenience for themselves.

What you say about most managers is true.

And yet, still the situation I described can arise for perfectly valid and rational reasons. Like if the context required for your 30 seconds of input is difficult to convey quickly - if you’re available on Slack but it takes you 15 minutes to get through all the questions everyone else has already addressed in your absence, then as long as there are 3 people you’re keeping waiting whose time is equal or greater in value to yours it isn’t at all inefficient for you to have been sitting there doing nothing but listening for an hour to get to that point.

Plus, the simple act of receiving information in a meeting is often valuable in itself, even if you as (one) recipient (of possibly many) don’t immediately perceive that value. Again I’ll plug High Output Management, which explains why far better than I can.

I agree with all that, but still object to a thoughtless blanket norm of meeting attendance imposed by lazy managers rather than thoughtful consideration of the situation.

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