Hacker News Reader

Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree! I hate being stuck in a meeting and thinking, "If I could hit Google right now, we'd have this answered already."

Luckily, this company doesn't have many meetings, so it isn't a big deal.

View on HN

I sort-of agree that meetings are often a waste of time BUT if you have to google something _during_ the meeting, you haven't prepared sufficiently or the meeting organizer hasn't provided a clear agenda before the meeting.

Meetings can be valuable if people take them seriously (and if there aren't too many).

Lots of times, unforeseen questions come up at meetings, in fact, if they don't; that's a sign the meeting wasn't really productive at all. Google should be on a large screen in the conference room. Or Bing if you're into that. Most meetings I get invited to end up with "action item" which means really, people go back to your desks and Google, research, test, decide, etc. so we can have a followup meeting to decide what we could have decided together in the first meeting if we didn't shut ourselves into a conference room, away from the world on the pretense that the meeting will be 100% productive that way.

Lots of problems come up in meetings that you can't adequately prepare for.

Clear agendas don't solve the problem of a bad agenda.

Meetings can be valuable but not nearly as valuable as peer to peer communication in the office. Meetings are almost always a waste of time where I work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com