Ask HN: Everybody knows meetings suck, why is everybody ignoring it | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Everybody knows meetings suck, why is everybody ignoring it

7 pointsseehausandi8 comments

Most meetings suck. Nearly any company I worked for had a terrible meeting culture with tons of working hours burned. Its so obvious, why is still nobody taking action - like hiring a consultant, or changing anything?

View on HN

Well, the cost is presently invisible. Even if they were good, the meetings would mostly still happen regardless, and there's no punishment to leading a bad meeting, and if you're doing most of the talking, you won't have time to be bored anyway. Often it seems presenters/organizers are oblivious in this way to the fact that their meetings suck. I guess it's the same reason presenters don't stop to ponder why their demonstrations and powerpoint slideshows suck and aren't anything like apple keynotes, and go straight on to just cram a bunch of tiny text on there and read straight off the slide like an idiot, or show excel spreadsheets, or console outputs in lieu of really presenting. I think many people don't spend a lot of time trying to do metacognition and trying empathetic thought to see how things may be received, or thinking about what people actually want to see.

Meetings are bad, all should just admit that. They are the lamest things that tries to substitute all formal/non-formal on-site meetings (please read it coffee/tea/snacks breaks).

Online meetings just sucks.

Why?

They waste time. If they happen in the first part of the day, they just dry-out those before-1pm-doers (I include myself here). If they happen in the 2nd part of the day, half will be just tired or waiting for it to be finished.

Countless times no solutions are made during a single meeting, you require 2-3-4 meetings, it can be a full week before something is nailed.

Now, I might be a bit too old but for many-many-many years before "zoom is the new king" thingies, most of us managed to do amazing thing by simply using async comms (emails, docs, chats).

I wish we can turn back to those days simply because it worked well, the additional stress/pressure current meetings are throwing to many of us will result in higher burn-outs rates.

I don't think meetings suck. Meetings are high bandwidth communication that can obliterate confusion and create team consensus. Long running meetings can create positive feedback loops.

Meetings aren't agents. A meeting is bad when the people in the meeting are bad.

Please don't disagree by giving anecdata about your bad meetings.

If you want to take action, stop showing up to meetings. Or turn off your camera and phone it in, literally and figuratively.

- like hiring a consultant, or changing anything?

But which consultant to hire?

I know --- let's have a meeting to discuss it.

:-D

Because it would be a discussion with management, and management most of the times is the one making those meetings horrible. At the same time, most managers don't do anything apart from schedule meetings.

A bit like asking the pyromaniac to stop causing fires.

There is a plethora amount of tools, none of them helps!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com