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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

> The reality is that everybody brought their laptops to the meeting and many are passively if not actively working.

Working on your laptop while you're in a meeting is one of the most rude behaviors possible.

If you have something more important than the meeting, decline the invite. If you're too busy, decline the invite. If you're not going to be utilized for enough of the meeting for it to be useful to you, decline the invite.

Don't be that asshole in the back responding to emails or working on some unrelated project and not listening to what's going on.

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Don't worry, we can add this guy into the equation too.

The assclown in the meeting on his laptop is generally operating at between 0 and 50% efficiency; about 25% on Google Chat and 25% in the meeting asking questions that have already been answered. Let's be generous and say 50%, but its probably less.

Now, that's 1.5 hours lost in the meeting plus preparation, but the meeting needs twice as much time to get the same done so that's 2.5 hours now times 8 people per meeting.

It's probably exponential though, since laptop people have to talk to other laptop people in the meeting at only 0.5 efficiency. So its probably more like 0.5 to the power of the number of people on their laptops.

You are right but if you are in a meeting where only 5 minutes are relevant for you, you can either spend the rest sleeping or at least doing some work.

Yes, the problem is one of poor management where the system starts working against itself.

Or not going to the meeting at all, or leaving after you're done.

That's not always socially acceptable.

Working on your laptop while you're in a meeting is one of the most rude behaviors possible.

Many varieties of rudeness are culture-specific.

No matter how popular it is to say that all meetings should only include people who will need to be 100% engaged the whole time, should only ever be attended entirely at each participant's discretion, etc, things do not always work out this way.

If I'm attending a big status meeting where I go second and only need to listen to the first and sixth updates or when my name is mentioned, guess what happens for the rest of the time?

You listen to 3-5. Not only because it's rude not to, but because you might actually learn something. Whether technical, or about the business, or just reaffirming your distaste for the person giving update #4.

Either you're naive, or pretending. Enjoy hanging on every word in every meeting like it's your first job.

The mediocre work you can do on a laptop in a meeting is not going to get you a promotion over anyone else. It's just common courtesy to listen to someone when they're talking.

But please, continue thinking that people are naive for not being rude.

This great advice - especially for new engineers. An outlook invite doesn't trump more important tasks. If you need to be working at that time, decline the invite and send a note back saying you can't make it due to other responsibilities. It's better to miss the meeting than to be at the meeting and look like you don't care about the conversation.

Or maybe don't spam the invite to several unrelated people

Or maybe don't waste people's times with useless meetings or with an unfocused meeting

Or maybe don't make the meeting take longer when discussing things that could be decided quickly by fewer people or I dunno, just wasteful meeting behaviours like repeating the same thing several times...

My personal favorite is the GoToMeeting planned days in advance where the invite goes out to 15 people and the only "work" that gets done is two of the attendees say "I will e-mail you the details" to each other, followed by 30 seconds of awkward silence and the end of the call.

The architects and BAs in our office are expected to bring their laptops and get a little work done during meetings. And it makes sense, since they're often in meetings for at least 5 hours out of the day.

The developers don't have laptops, so we just lose development time when we're in meetings. Although we generally get just enough work assigned to us that we can still work only 40 hours a week, so I'm not really complaining.

That doesn't make any sense at all. If they're doing work in the meeting, then they probably didn't need to be there. If they do need to be there, then they should be concentrating on the meeting. Otherwise the number of meetings needs to be cut down.

I've been to a decent number of the meetings here to know what it's like. You might only be really needed to answer one or two questions, or for one item on the agenda. You can mostly ignore the meeting and can work on other things.

For example, I was stuck in a two hour support call meeting the other day, and I really only had to be passively listening to it and speak maybe four or five times briefly. I was designing puzzles in my notebook the rest of the time. They don't give devs laptops, so I couldn't get real work done.

But hey, I've been in plenty of classes back in the day when I didn't have to pay close attention and only had pen and paper to keep me entertained (I drew, wrote stories and poems, designed games and databases, etc), so it doesn't bother me too much.

There's a reason why there's a full team of BA's and they can't write up work fast enough to keep the devs busy, and I think this is part of the reason. But there isn't enough of a push to change things, and it seems like most people would rather communicate in person here instead of via email when possible.

Any set up where someone is in meetings 5 hours a day every day is a set up where there are huge functional problems where a complete up-down blowup and reorg is needed.

You just supported the typical anti-pattern of management where someone new gets hired and proceeds to re-orgs everyone after a couple months of meetings to superficially understand how an organization works. This thereby usually causes many, many more meetings all in the name of trying to reduce the meetings.

The programmer equivalent attitude is "this code is horrible, it's due for a total re-write." Re-factors and re-orgs are the same things, but there's few regression tests for business besides "oh crap, we lost a bunch of money all of a sudden" which is a lot closer to coding directly in production.

That's... an insightful comparison. I like it a lot.

Sounds like a plain job-creation measure for these guys.

I'm not sure what you mean by that, but they've definitely lost a few people because they got sick of how many meetings happened here. But they also have people that have been here for well over five years doing that role, so I guess most people are okay with it. I don't think I would, so I'm not gunning to get promoted here.

Then don't say I'm "required" when I've got all of 5 seconds of valuable input. Just fucking shoot me a slack message and ask a question.

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