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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

You don't need an app like this.

Just decline any meeting that doesn't have an agenda with a comment of "I don't think I'd bring any value to this meeting."

If the meeting does have an agenda but doesn't have any goal decline it with a comment like "I don't have a strong opinion about the goal here, so I'm happy to accept whatever the outcome is."

If there's an agenda and a goal then attend that one because you don't often get to see a mythical creature.

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Ok, and then the person whose meeting you declined doesn't come to your meetings when you need them to. Or you get side/back channeled. Or you risk a worse review because they think you're an asshole, or not a team player, or have poor social skills, or begin to dislike you and notice all your other faults, and that makes it into the review directly (they're part of it or provide direct feedback)or indirectly (they ask your manager wtf is your problem).

If you want to be an edgelord about accepting meetings it's not going to work in your favor for most people/companies.

If that's how your organization works, leave it.

Based on when this conversation happened I expect it is a cultural difference; people who think this is normal are Indian/European and I am American.

In my experience in American bigtech, an engineer who rejects all meetings that don’t meet their own personal set of rules for what constitutes a worthwhile meeting (or I’m sure more accurately, applies those rules whenever they don’t want to attend) would be viewed very negatively. We’re expected to collaborate a lot by default, and by American standards it’s also a very snowflakey (making all meeting invites have to conform to your special little rules for you to grace us with your attendance) and aggressive way to express distaste in something.

IME it would be much better to directly just ask the creator if your attendance is truly necessary or even just noshow. But perhaps etiquette is different in other parts of the world.

That doesn't work if you're feeling insecure about your job security, want to avoid looking like a slacker, don't want to offend your colleagues, etc.

And yeah, you can toughen up and decline anyway despite all that, but processes should be based on giving employees the right incentives, not hoping they toughen up. (See also, blameless post-mortems.)

This is really interesting to me because whenever I see anyone decline a meeting I assume it's because they have too much to do and don't have time to spare. If anything, declining meetings should make your job more secure because everyone will think you're swamped with work.

Well, it is a bit more complex. There are meetings which you don't think they are absolutely necessary, but if they take place, you want to attend. To have an invisible flag to signal that you rather would skip the meeting sounds like a good middle ground to cancel meetings no one feels strongly about but is afraid to cancel.

> I'm happy to accept whatever the outcome is.

And then... the meeting veers in to something else, a decision is made about something that affects you or... simply commits you to do work.

Insane, but it's happened to me more than a few times. Sometimes directly ("you do xyz") and sometimes indirectly. "Person X will do xyz" really means I now have to manage/oversee/review person X because they're very junior. Push back, and you're "not a team player".

Doesn't happen a lot, but has happened enough for me to be wary in new orgs until I get a few months in.

Hah, nice one.

So far, I've managed to get some mileage out of RSVP-ing as "tentative", with a comment that boils down to "how about you add some agenda to the meeting invite, because at this point I kind of don't know WTF is this about and why am I even on the invitee list?". I haven't thought of treating a goal of the meeting as distinct thing from the agenda. I'll try it next time, whenever it comes - for some reason, I seem to not get all that many meeting invites anymore ;).

This is obvious yet brilliant. I've been working for so long without realising that meetings are a process, not the end. I.e. they have to lead to something.

I have a particularly savage team member who does this all the time. It pisses some people off a lot, but she's an extremely high performer and other high performers love her – on balance I think it's not a bad practice.

Half the people reading this would be fired if they followed your suggestion

If declining a meeting is a sackable offence then you should do absolutely everything you can to get yourself fired from that role. Drop a production database to save yourself from a massively toxic workplace.

This kind of labor power imbalance is fairly commonplace across the US. You're really not going to find a place that'll let you decline meetings because you don't wanna go.

I think the parent’s tone/style would be risky for many to take, but I don’t think you could be faulted to ask something along the lines of “what’s the goal of the meeting, and is there an agenda and pre-read materials that will be distributed in well in advance of the meeting so that I can come prepared to contribute?”

Then decisions will be taken there that you don't agree with, but that you missed your chance to influence.

In my experience decisions are made mostly in emails and casual chats. Meetings are to communicate the bad news to everyone.

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