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Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

Before you comment about how idiotic this idea is, the end of the article says:

> The company said there will be a “two-week cooling off period” before anyone can reconvene a canceled meeting.

The company isn't saying no recurring meetings. It is saying, "hey, we have too many meetings, let's do a reset and think carefully about which ones we really need... and by the way, it's okay to decline a meeting that you don't think you'll gain value from.

I personally think that an occasional reset to figure out which meetings are actually necessary is a good idea. Also, sometimes there are personal/political reasons for joining meetings that you aren't going to get much out of. Having the top management say "try to cut down on unnecessary meetings" is a good way to give individual employees cover.

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> The company said there will be a “two-week cooling off period” before anyone can reconvene a canceled meeting.

That sounds even worse. Talk about infantilizing your employees. "No, you don't know your job well enough to know that you need to do X, even if you think you do, we're not going to let you..."

It's also for sure going to be worked around. If team X is in crunch mode to release project Y next week and you're like, you can't do your daily standup for another two weeks gang - they're going to do the standup, it's just not going to have a calendar event and people's workflows will be interrupted, some people will be late because they're in the habit of getting notifications, etc.

At an organization this large I imagine somewhere there is always a team X with a project Y.

> Talk about infantilizing your employees.

I've worked with some middle managers that I would classify as infants.

I recently discovered that the most successful slide decks that I've pitched to upper management are eerily similar in style and verbiage to my kids' cardboard books. The higher up I go in an org chart, the lower down I seem to go in grade level. More pictures, bold primary colors, little text, etc. It's likely just some strange coincidence of my evolving style in .ppt, of course

I've been told by folks at a Big 3 management consulting firm that everything for the c-suite has to be in Powerpoint—no matter how inappropriate that is for the material—and written like it's for a child, or they flat-out won't read it. Yes, read it. The decks mostly aren't intended to ever be presented, just read.

Dall-E and thenounproject.com have been such a boon for me.

Simple, colorful graphics really add that little bit of spice to the presentation.

GPT-3 and the grade-reading-report feature in word also help hone in on the right style.

I wonder if execs think that running companies is so easy because they get such a dumbed-down report about the company all the time. They know it's all at such a limited reading level, but think that their underlings are actually that stupid.

Sounds pretty nice, good excuse to slack off for 2 weeks. "Sorry, didn't make much progress because I needed to discuss X with Y"

This is also a good way to do nothing for two weeks because teams can no longer efficiently coordinate. It's an incredibly childish approach to reducing unnecessary meetings, and I'm highly skeptical that it has any benefits at all other than making Toby feel special.

If a team requires a synchronous meeting to coordinate that feels like an opportunity to replace the meeting with something else that is more efficient.

I don’t know these circumstances but I completely agree with the premise of not allowing indefinitely recurring meetings. Perhaps it’s better to simply limit them to say 10 occurrences before they must be reconsidered, participants reevaluated and so on.

It is completely normal, acceptable, even desirable for a team of people working on a project to meet regularly to coordinate their efforts. That is how groups of people have worked together since time immemorial. It is unreasonable and dogmatic to expect that every team will naturally reach peak efficiency by working fully asynchronously.

If people don't have 2 weeks of stuff they can do without a video call, those people are at best being kept on incredibly short leashes. At a certain density of meetings you aren't "coordinating your efforts," there are no efforts, all you're doing is having meetings. There has to be a space between where the efforts being coordinated actually take place.

This kind of heavy-handed approach feels like the kind of thing I'd do if I read HN religiously and took everything as gospel. There are few things more reviled in these realms than meetings and MBAs.

This feels like the tech news equivalent of eavesdropping on the couple sitting at the next table at a restaurant, and then concluding that because they're having an argument, their marriage must be in trouble.

As you pointed out, it's not as strange as the headline makes it out to be. "Big organization finds effective communication difficult; tries something new" ... big deal?

I would find it pretty surprising if the CEO of my company unilaterally canceled my meetings. Hell, I'd find it surprising if my boss did it.

I'm not aware of other companies that fiddle with the Outlook admin calendar settings to improve productivity.

>> Having the top management say "try to cut down on unnecessary meetings"...

... sounds a lot like "make sure you're taking your vacation; we want employees to be recharged and energetic!", aka a feel-good CYA. My pointless, time-wasting, huge audience meetings are all owned by the top-half of management.

The vast majority of meetings are scheduled by people "higher on the chain" than you - the number of "peer" meetings I have scheduled is ... zero.

And everyone knows that refusing a meeting invite from a boss or boss-peer (or boss's boss) is career limiting.

You should try calling a meeting.

What! Nonsense, I insist we have a company wide meeting on this.

I don't know why you're being downvoted. There's an inverse correlation between the usefulness of a meeting and how senior the most senior person there is.

> "hey, we have too many meetings, let's do a reset and think carefully about which ones we really need...

it's automatically assumed/implied that this is an attempt of cost saving / reshift in priority. They'd rather have staff focusing on delivering products (code/completed projects) that will increase revenue.

I wonder what they are struggling to ship (or if you can make the assumption that, the only time you'd cut meetings is when you want to prioritize shipping and the fact that you need to cut meetings means you're struggling to ship based on XYZ standards/opinions (CEO thinks things could get done/out the door faster/quicker?))

I wonder what's on their internal roadmap that's exciting + going to "sizably" make a difference/grow the company/that they are "itching to ship".

https://www.shopify.com/products

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopify

In a similar vein, I think all managers should be periodically idled for a week or two (maybe rolling blackout style). If it turns out the value created by their group remains the same (or even goes up!), then the manager has apparently done a great job of rearing their employees to be self sufficient and the manager can be retired/recycled.

Shopify is a highly dysfunctional company when it comes to management. What you are hoping for in your comment is the command control style model where you have very highly independent teams that own their area and can move without outside interference (though note that this childish no meetings thing would still negatively affect the ability for even small efficient teams to coordinate well).

However, from what I can tell shopify has the opposite of a command and control culture. They believe "everyone is an owner" which is another way of saying that no one is an owner. The result is that dozens of people need to approve every little change because there is no clear ownership structure and you can't just tell an adjacent team's manager to buzz off. In addition to getting sign off from adjacent teams, you need approval from your manager, their manager, the manager after that, all the way up the chain often to Toby himself.

Everyone is afraid of being shit on from the level above that they all need to review. This behaviour is explicitly encouraged. In the end you get a bureaucratic and political nightmare where everything is designed and developed according to the loudest consensus opinion.

Making things even worse, making data-based decisions is explicitly discouraged, I guess because it makes things more difficult for the loud opinions of main product drivers.

This is perfect if we optimize for short-term value gains. Less so if we're looking for something long-term.

Also, I remember a similar anecdote about an executive who gave his assistant two weeks off, took their responsibilities himself, and concluded he didn't need their services anymore.

That won’t work. Nothing remains static. A new leader will emerge or will need to be appointed for the team to remain effective over time.

> Having the top management say "try to cut down on unnecessary meetings" is a good way to give individual employees cover.

It is a good way. Shopify should have considered doing that, and let managers make the call, instead of summarily killing all meetings remotely and leaving managers to reschedule everything from scratch.

Because of status quo bias, "do I need to create a 1 hour sync meeting for this" is a very different question than "should I cancel the 1 hour sync meeting for this". I'm generally on a very low meeting team, and I still have 2.5 hours a week of meetings that I don't expect would be recreated if some calendar glitch deleted them.

Have you tried suggesting to cancel them?

It worked for one meeting. For the others, everyone I talked to had a vague sense that someone else might be getting value out of the meeting. I don't mean to criticize, I've had that vague sense too, and I bet I'm wrong about some of the meetings I do think are useful.

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