[ungreased0675]

There are some who believe that meetings are work. If those people are in charge of an organization, there will be tension with people who have real tasks and deliverables.

My preferred approach is not to modify the meetings to make them more efficient, but to go on an extremist crusade against all meetings. Insist on asynchronous communication. Create dashboards with whatever metrics are discussed at status update meetings. Have people write memos explaining new proposals. Some meetings will survive the crusade, and that’s ok. All meetings aren’t actually bad, but that should be the default.

[efitz]

There are some who believe that meetings never accomplish anything. If those people are in positions of power in an organization, there will be tension with people who use meetings effectively to coordinate, communicate and drive decision making with all stakeholders present.

[whoknowsidont]

>There are some who believe that meetings never accomplish anything.

No there aren't. If you are consistently getting push backs on meetings within your org it's not that the teams or IC's believe that meetings are useless (what a silly thing to say) it's a sign that they don't have faith in the organization structure to concretely do anything with the information or provide valuable input.

If you try to setup a meeting and get push back you should _immediately_ ask yourself why the other person feels that way about the people involved or even yourself.

[Aurornis]

> No there aren't.

Reading other comments in this thread will reveal a lot of them. :)

I've worked remote and across time zones for a while. I've encountered a few too many engineers who think any form of meeting or even communication is an unnecessary burden. They just want a queue of perfectly defined tickets to pull from and nobody to bother them until it's done at whatever pace they feel like working that week.

Strangely, being in a low-meeting company seems to make it worse, because meetings are so few and far between that some people get unreasonably upset when their week goes from 1 meeting to 2 meetings because we dared double their meeting load this week.

[robocat]

> unreasonably upset

I suspect some people have a conditioned pathological response to meetings - µPTSD.

Watch a bit of the GitLab Meeting Similator video and who could retain their sanity if they must participate: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rOqgRiNMVqg Watch the lady in the bottom panel struggle to look appropriately interested (or am I just projecting?).

[ungreased0675]

The tension is the desired outcome. I know meetings are useful and necessary, but if I start with the extreme position of “all meetings are worthless productivity leeches” it changes the conversation from justifying changing meetings to meetings having to justify their existence. Meetings should have to fight for their lives, not the other way around.

[gustavus]

I've seen this argument often but I'd guess 50-75% of the meetings in my organization could've been handled in an email. Often times the only reason we have a meeting in the first place instead of an email is because of the politics around things, which to me is a sign of inefficiency in the 1st place.

[ASalazarMX]

I've seen that different teams have different priorities, and while emails do help avoid many meetings, there's nothing like an in-person meeting to coordinate efforts.

Also, the more your meeting goes beyong half an hour, the less fruitful it becomes. Half-hour meetings are the most productive, one-hour meetings are understandable, multi-hour meetings are dreadful.

[michaelcampbell]

> There are some who believe that meetings never accomplish anything.

No more than those that believe every last one is 100% useful.

[RajT88]

> Insist on asynchronous communication.

Not disagreeing, but you've also got to be mindful of scenarios where there is something which needs to be hashed out and neither party fully owns the thing.

If you don't nip it in the bud by getting those people together on a call or in the room together, you can end up with a lot of unnecessary back and forth.

Getting people in the room together is particularly effective for such cases.

[acdha]

Yeah, I like the idea of making meetings have some nominal cost - a lot of organizations won’t even blink at letting anyone schedule meetings which cost thousands of dollars per hour but will need three levels of sign-off for a $50 purchase. It feels like there could be a middle ground where you basically get reminded of the cost to the organization.

I’ve seen some people who will fill the week up with Groundhog’s Day-style repeat meetings, and even the basic expectation that they have an agenda, goals, and need to summarize what was decided afterwards increases the cost to them personally enough to make better use of everyone’s time.

[RajT88]

> three levels of sign-off for a $50 purchase.

Christ almighty it's so hard to get one-off software purchases approved, no matter how trivial. And so easy to get approved for hiring more people at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

The corporate world is crazy town sometimes.

[acdha]

Conferences can be interesting, too. I know people who got screwed over trying to get $100 for an unrecognized local open source conference while the PMs were all going to Aruba for Agile training because that had a certification so it was obviously a legit educational experience.

[diracs_stache]

Yep, a lot of places allow for 80hrs/2wks of "training". Crazy how popular those Agile/SAFE/AWS/Azure/etc. conferences are in a destination location, meanwhile engineers asking to have time prorated for some graduate coursework is unfathomable.

[theideaofcoffee]

If it takes corralling people into a meeting and interrupting their day to 'hash out' some aspect of a project, then it's a management failure where the importance of this particular thing wasn't communicated or emphasized before and how the individuals' inputs matter. If everyone understands how this project, regardless of the parties' full ownership or not, or whatever contributes to success because there was clear communication to that fact then people might be more inclined to resolve the issue sooner, even if comms are async.

I see it like this: people are going back and forth over email and waffling then it's probably not that important, why should it be any different in person aside from the fact they're performing for management.

[RajT88]

> then it's a management failure where the importance of this particular thing wasn't communicated or emphasized before and how the individuals' inputs matter.

Yes. And you can't fix those as an IC, so you just have to work around them. This is like complaining about the direction of the company and advising to fix the root cause of whatever corporate drama - not wrong, just not helpful or practical advice.

> why should it be any different in person aside from the fact they're performing for management.

There's many reasons why in-person is more effective:

- Fewer distractions

- More emotional investment in the discussion (the same dynamic where people are more polite in person, but less so on internet forums)

- More "skin in the game" by making more of an effort to show up

[theideaofcoffee]

> Yes. And you can't fix those as an IC, so you just have to work around them.

Sure you can and no you don't have to, you can say so publically, which may give others the courage to do the same, at which point 'management' may see one of two things: there's a critical mass of people that disagree with how we are doing things and move to correct course, or the rabble-rousers are fired. I have personally taken the personal risk to raise issues like that, and have suffered the wrath of thin-skinned managers which placed me into the latter camp, so I'm not suggesting things to just suggest them.

The more I experience insanity like this the more I see that collective action in this manner is the only way developers and other non-managerial folk hope to regain some control and some semblance of normality.

> Fewer distractions

You sure? I sure can definitely zone out and I may do out of spite if we're convened for a meeting that could have been an email chain.

> More emotional investment in the discussion

Because it's now become a performance.

> More "skin in the game"

Again, because it's become a performance for the sake of performance, especially if 'senior leadership' are now involved.

[RajT88]

> Because it's now become a performance.

Being accountable is arguably a performance.

Job performance.

> You sure?

Yes.

[vundercind]

Under-appreciated factor here: a hell of a lot of people—even in the corporate world, even (somehow!) college graduates—are shockingly bad at reading comprehension (which is simply being bad at reading) and at writing clearly (or, simply bad at writing).

I suspect the population for whom this holds isn’t much smaller than the famously-a-majority “bad at math” set, and the difference in visibility of the issue is because the “bad at literacy” folks don’t volunteer their status as readily as the bad-at-math folks.

[eschneider]

Absolutely this. The key to making those meetings effective is starting with an agenda and leaving with either a decision or action items that will lead to a decision.

[88913527]

Leaders have a responsibility to ensure their teams deliver. When the teams agree to async communication --and the channels remain silent-- where is the accountability when there is no deliverable and no visibility into the scenario that led to no output? To be clear, this doesn't mean 100% sync. But a 10 minute daily sync can ensure the team is focused on producing something of business value. Maximal autonomy within some guardrails keeps the ICs and management at their best.

[marcinzm]

> Leaders have a responsibility to ensure their teams deliver. When the teams agree to async communication --and the channels remain silent-- where is the accountability when there is no deliverable and no visibility into the scenario that led to no output?

A good leader then talks to the team as the professional adults they are to understand why there isn't communication at the cadence that was agreed upon and discusses why such communication is important.

[theideaofcoffee]

If there's no deliverable and no visibility, that's a failure of management, either to define the deliverable to a more granular extent where an update could cover the progress, even if async, which would also fix not having visibility. A developer piping up async and saying 'no updates, still working' is still an update and gives visibility.

If they (managers) want to lord over the process and do work for work's sake, then they should write out requirements that say "thou shalt commit one line of code by X date". It just comes down to the individuals doing the 'management' being lazy if they're in this position expecting their 'reports' to drop everything and context switch to a meeting when they can't be arsed to do the managing.

[beezlebroxxxxxx]

> If there's no deliverable and no visibility, that's a failure of management, either to define the deliverable to a more granular extent where an update could cover the progress, even if async, which would also fix not having visibility. A developer piping up async and saying 'no updates, still working' is still an update and gives visibility.

That's really the bare minimum that a developer can say and still get away with when you have a lenient manager. HN tends to take the most adversarial take on managers possible, but it's not always necessary.

But, when you've worn both hats (manager and managed), sometimes employees simply don't want to do much work. Again, you can say "that's a management problem", but some people are bad actors and are very good at hiding it in "corporate speak". The internet is full of stories of coasting --- I can even attest to doing it many times and easily getting away with it. Getting someone in a room, or on camera, and actually running through their work can cut through a lot of bullshit and bullshitters. Some developers think "coding" takes precedence over the business -- but some of their "coding" time is completely useless to the business perspective. It seems crazy to insist that managers have no stake in trying to figure out if that's the case.

Sometimes you also need to have a meeting because in an async setting some people have no idea what they're doing. Even with clear goals and deliverables, stuff can easily fall through the cracks.

[theideaofcoffee]

I personally take an adversarial view on management because the large majority of the 'managers' I have had in the past were useless to the point of providing negative value, to both the technical and to the business side, so my views are colored by that fact. Not all of them of course, and they were the good ones. But most were just managers in name only.

A coasting employee may be a problem of the employee's making, but it is still a failure of management. If an employee isn't doing anything then you fire them. But it's still a failure of management because that wasn't fixed right away. And again, if someone doesn't know what they are doing (if that's truly the case why did you hire them, but that's another conversation), even async, a keen manager should be able to pick up on that and provide coaching, connections, or other resources--you know, actually 'manage' this person. Failing all that, then cut them loose. But it's still the manager's problem.

[marcinzm]

If they're coasting then you have a 1-on-1 conversation and if needed fire them. A manager who needs some type of public shamming ritual to do that isn't a good manager. There's a manager fallacy of focusing on minimizing the bad versus maximizing the good. In my experience, it's better to focus on making your best employees more effective versus trying to make your worst employees slightly less ineffective.

[ASalazarMX]

> There are some who believe that meetings are work.

Meetings are work. Not practical work, but management work, which is very valuable to coordinate and unify efforts.

I agree, though, that there are people who like meetings for meetings's sake, and those waste eveyone's time. In my experience, they're usually executives with little practical background. They use meetings primarily for politics/socialization, and have the power to summon as many meetings as they wish.

[ebiester]

It isn't that meetings are or aren't work: it's that asynchronous communication takes more time in total as well as more calendar time.

If I need a series of five if-then questions to put together a proposal, and each round trip takes half a day, then we have both already wasted a half hour over what would have taken ten minutes to resolve.