[jvanderbot]

I'm not knocking your goal here, but it's not exactly unique. I'm fairly certain everyone would be fine with

> just enough money where I don’t care about money and enough control that meeting-spawners won’t get hired.

Implying you are wealthy and have oversight over most the company

[acuozzo]

Not OP, but as a person with a similar goal I can state with certainty that the goal itself is a proxy for wanting stability.

Specifically, the only thing I want is the ability to continue providing a 1960s-era American middle class lifestyle to myself, my wife, and my children.

I've been fortunate enough to be able to pull this off for the past decade, but the little voice in the back of my head that keeps me up at night keeps reminding me that relying exclusively on skill & time capital can easily put me in a position of being unable to do so if I get unlucky enough or if our society suddenly stops valuing my skills.

If it were just me, then I wouldn't be worried. I'm tough enough to withstand living as a tramp like Jack London did in his younger years on "The Road".

But it's not just me. I have four other mouths to feed with my skill & time capital and neither my wife nor myself have any family to rely on.

[withinboredom]

> Implying you are wealthy and have oversight over most the company

As an old man once told me: Wealth should not be mistaken for riches. Wealth is the ability to generate richness and experiences. You can be ridiculously wealthy but poor as a bum.

I have no desire to be rich and most of us here are probably fairly wealthy.

As for "oversight over most the company" I have no idea where you got that from. I just said (in so many words) "I'd like the ability to fire/remove/never hire meeting-spawners."

[jvanderbot]

If you control all of hiring, you have the power to shape the entire company in your image, is what I mean.

[withinboredom]

When did I say I wanted to control all of hiring?

[jvanderbot]

Oh man, here we go down pedantic path. It's so important to be right. I'll explain my logic since you asked, then we can happily part ways if you'd like.

> and enough control that meeting-spawners won’t get hired.

Ok, you want enough control to say that any meeting-inclined person cannot join the company. This means that every person who would join the company has to appear, to you personally, to be a non-meeting-inclined person, and that if you find them too-meeting-inclined, you can veto the hire no matter how many other people want to hire them. The logical conclusion is either that you personally review every hire, or that you adjust the hiring process to include an infallible "whithinboredom approves of this hire" check, which must be conducted by every interview cycle.

So, yeah, you now control the entire hiring (and presumably firing) decision process.

[withinboredom]

> Oh man, here we go down pedantic path

Welcome to HN?!

> Ok, you want enough control to say that any meeting-inclined person cannot join the company.

Ah, I see what you're seeing. I wasn't saying that, but I was. Between the lines, I was saying that I just want control to fire people who bring global productivity down. The reality is that this is a cultural issue (not having meetings except when actually necessary). Thus when someone is literally causing unnecessary meetings -- which to be clear, (un)necessary here is defined by the culture and peers, not by "me" though I'd be a large influence on that in the beginning -- they'd get reviewed as such by their peers.

I guess what I'm actually saying, is that I want the ability to have real and meaningful influence in a company's culture -- not just technically but socially as well. I like places that don't take themselves too seriously, where you have the space to solve hard problems if you need it but access to resources when you do. I usually see places I've worked where there were "meeting-spawners" (people who will soak up hundreds of man-hours in a single day to arrive at a conclusion that could have been solved more effectively in a single email) where you can't get the space to solve actual problems because you have days full of meetings about problems you can't get the space to solve that only need a few sentences of input from you.