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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Meetings are how humans share state. Most people’s writing skills are not up to replacing the back and forth synchronization that happens in meetings. And big meetings have value in avoiding games of management telephone.

Canceling all recurring meetings may work for awhile, but I imagine it won’t be long before there’s a permanent action item for every meeting to schedule the next one. And it also won’t be long before senior management is made exempt.

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Maybe others have different experiences, but I've never found state sharing sync meetings to be very good at accomplishing their intended goal. There's inevitably too much that goes on between meetings for the meeting to cover everything, and even if it could, decisions and communication have to happen outside of the regular meeting for things to actually get done in a timely manner. This tends to lead to such meetings being incomplete and/or redundant. In theory a regular sync meeting could be used for things that both benefit from real-time back and forth and are low enough urgency that they can wait for the next meeting, but that's hard to coordinate and one of the downsides of having a recurring meeting is that it encourages low effort agendas and pre-coordination.

Maybe this isn't so bad for a small number of meetings or in a very small organization, but the other problem with regular sync meetings is that they tend to proliferate, especially as you go higher up the management chain. If you don't just work exclusively with a single group of people all working on the same effort, your entirely calendar can fill up with sync meetings. It can even become comical in cases where the Venn diagram of who is working on what significantly overlaps and you end up seeing many of the same people over and over again with a slightly different audience and topic each time. No joke, I have seen this lead to the creation of another sync meeting with all the people from the other meetings, but then the other meetings also stay on the calendar because people also want that smaller group discussion. Very easy for it to get out of hand, so I tend to like the idea of a regular reset to cancel all those meetings and then add them back as needed.

> I tend to like the idea of a regular reset to cancel all those meetings and then add them back as needed.

I also approve of this kind of house-cleaning. Calendars, like any other storage device, get a lot of built-up cruft too. Mine have even had some absurdly long-interval meetings with people no longer with the company.

But I think that Shopify took it a bit too far by banning them all going forward as well.

Every meeting should have someone running it, covering the points that are outlined in the meeting notes, and guiding the conversation to make sure it's on point. At the end, they should be able to read what the meeting accomplished in under a minute.

Maybe other people share useful state in meetings somehow. To me they're annoying background noise I zone out for until some key word like my name triggers my attention. I must not be missing much because I'm recognized one of the top performers. If I'm ever in need of a career change I might consider Shopify.

I find it is very true that recurring meetings often have low-value content but nevertheless the discussion manages to fill up the time. Given that meetings with an actual agenda are not banned I could see this potentially being an improvement.

> Meetings are how humans share state.

We've just found better ways to share state, like emails and chat apps. They don't require synchronous attendance, they allow more space for thought and correction, and they are naturally part of a record that you can reference and copy.

These forms don't share emotional state as well as synchronous presence and so don't completely replace it. But the modern workplace has less use for sharing emotional state than other things.

I go back and forth on this. On the one hand, I detest excessive standup meetings and sprint retros. On the other hand, people do tend to pay a little bit better attention during them compared to "everyone post your status in slack at the end of the day".

The very next sentence addresses those other ways.

> Most people’s writing skills are not up to replacing the back and forth synchronization that happens in meetings.

They may be technically better - for some definition of better - but they're going to be poor replacements in reality.

You must be working in a magical place where all contributors express themselves clearly in writing and read long emails.

The threat of a meeting helps me make sure I get my shit done beforehand. Sounds childish but it works for me. 10 minute standups first thing in the morning ensure that I get to work on time. A couple jobs ago the company said they wanted people to literally stand at the standups to encourage a quicker status share. Everyone did for a couple days, then eventually I was the only one standing and then the fired me.

> I imagine it won’t be long before there’s a permanent action item for every meeting to schedule the next one

Would still be a repeating meeting. The way it is entered into the calendar software does not change that.

Yes, that's the point. Recurring meetings are important, and folks will work around the stated policy with its technical implementation.

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