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Comment by rfnslyr | Hacker News Reader

Meetings: where minutes are taken and hours are wasted.

> "Meetings: where minutes are taken and hours are wasted"

Only if you run bad meetings. Don't call one without an agenda. Stick to that agenda (have a chair). Arrive and leave on time. Send minutes (even notes) within the hour after the meeting.

Meetings take discipline on the part of the attendees and it's just a structured communication method. It's not fair to blame the tool because most people are too lazy to use it well.

It's not just bad meetings, it's meetings that shouldn't exist in the first place.

Meeting can be useful, but I've worked at companies where meetings are (reasonably) well-run (minutes, chairs, time-capped, etc), but ultimately unnecessary in the first place. People leave with action items but feel as if the whole exercise could have been accomplished in half the time with only half the people in the room.

Or a quick email from one person to another.

In my trailing days at Amazon we had a project that was falling behind due to unforeseen team attrition. The more it fell behind the more meetings were called - one by each stakeholder - to discuss why the project was behind and what can be done to solve it. Ultimately this just meant more engineers in a room explaining things to a lineup of PMs rather than writing some damned code. A few months of this and I decided it was time for me to attrition out.

Before worrying about whether or not your meeting has an agenda, a chair, and set times, figure out if you need the meeting at all.

> It's not fair to blame the tool because most people are too lazy to use it well.

Which tool? The tool who called the meeting? Har-har... I'm here all week.

But seriously, I think you make a good point. There's an equally good counterpoint, which is that most people can't do this well. Would training help? Or are some people congenitally boring and disorganized (the two are related, I think)?

I think better training would help. In a lot of ways, I think meetings are an attempt to make up for bad communication. If team size has grown to the point where team members aren't able/willing to communicate with each other outside of having a formal meeting, that's when meetings almost have to be called, to make sure everyone in the room is on the same page.

I wish the MBAs would figure out a way to minimize formal "meetings" by encouraging better informal communication. Not all situations need meetings, maybe things are better solved by a simple "walk over to Jill's desk and hash it out there". Just my opinion though, I don't have formal training in management!

Depends on the meetings.

And if you are wasting time in meetings, then you are wasting time in meetings.

I agree with that. Sometimes a meeting is the only way to get the right people talking about the problem or issue.

Doesn't that indicate a huge organizational dysfunction, if you cannot get an answer through (say) email?

I'm surprised you would consider e-mail an effective tool to have a discussion with multiple people. In the past I've found emails for non-trivial things to be more slow and frustrating than useful.

Or one's boss is wasting one's time in meetings.

Not in a very large corporate environment. I have had so many meetings where I didn't say a word, didn't even know anyone there. Manager I talked to like once a month sent me meeting requests and I went. It was pointless. They weren't optional either.

I've never worked in a very large corporate environment.

> meeting requests

Did you ever reject the request? I'm honestly curious to know what would happen?

Did you ever speak up to your manager about this? His manager?

I guess the real question is, what did you do to fix this?

I reject every time I think the meeting is not a good use of my time. I always give a reason why I'm rejecting and sometimes that will be challenged but more often and not I don't attend the meeting and people don't get to upset.

A lot of the time people who are booking meetings will request attendance from anyone and everyone who may have a remote link to the agenda, they don't put any thought into whether the meeting will actually be useful to everyone they invite. Another problem is that people, usually project managers, will book meetings at the drop of a hat when a quick two minute chat at someone's desk would suffice - a lot of middle-managers have nothing to do other than attend meetings and they suck everyone else in with them.

I'd rather be as much as a ghost as possible in the environment lest I get more shit-work to do. Nothing, I set a world record in Temple Run from all the training I've received at these meetings.

Haha. Well, thanks for the honest answer. Having never been in that environment, I can't say what I'd do. =)

Hehe, I used to work at a place where it seemed like the only purpose of a meeting was to schedule another meeting at the end.

I've been in meetings where we schedule meetings to talk about the time it will take to come up with the plan to allocate developer time to coming up with a plan of how to tackle a problem.

I found it hilarious because (thankfully) that part of the meeting was nothing to do with me.

I'm now a contractor. I do the tech stuff and I do it well, and nobody involves me in meetings because I'm not part of the company and I don't have to care!

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