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Comment by ivanhoe | Hacker News Reader

If it's in at 9am, out at 5pm that's great... my experience was more like: you have to be in at 9am at the latest, but almost every day you get stuck until 7-8pm or more. And if you're late 15 minutes in the morning it's a huge deal, but staying 2-3 hours longer is just fine, even recommended if you wish to get good assessments. And they honestly couldn't understand why all senior engineers are leaving them after a year or so.

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But how do you plan to be productive if you miss the daily scrum?

Same experience here.

Document first (remote first) workflow.

I think I've /wanted/ it but have never experienced it because this is how I want all meetings to go:

  * Someone makes a list of the points to discuss and the initial background on them.

  * Everyone else contributes to clarifying the points and data, as well as possible reactions/conclusions.

  * At some point the data is summarized and whoever does make the decisions does so.

  * That feeds in to the next 'meeting'.

All of this, of course, happens without ACTUALLY having a meeting; it's just scheduling sync points to have contributes (if you are contributing) in before the deadlines.

My comment was actually sarcasm, but it's worth discussing. What you describe is one way that an ideal process can work, but actually make things worse when put into practice by people whose job it is to meetings. You want to batch them and optimize, but what I've seen managers do is take these principles and increase the amount of meetings. If there's time to spare because of less meetings, you might as well book a meeting to plan ahead.

Of course it's worth noting that in a "remote-first"—a term I love and a principle I can get behind—environment, these people wouldn't have anything to do.

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