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Comment by havetocharge | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure that this is a national issue, rather than a problem with whatever company you're dealing with?

It's dangerous to stereotype but from my experience US companies are much more prone to have meetings for every little thing than German ones. And then meetings to prepare for meetings. And meetings to process results from previous meetings. And hopefully sometimes you get time to work on something.

Funny. I have the opposite experience with US companies (extremely few meetings at US companies in my experience compared to Canada especially), but my experience with German software companies is all about meetings, meetings, meetings, bureaucracy, documents, meetings, very hard to get actual work done.

Maybe culture is a factor. But to me, it's almost as if everyone's experience is completely different from everyone else's and that companies operate differently. None of us have worked at enough companies in enough countries to accurately identify what is what.

It's all anecdotes and none of them matter. Some people are lazy and some people are not. Some people schedule too many meetings and some do not. That's all there is to it.

Interesting. I guess we can all speak from only from our own experience.

Company size seems positively correlated with amount of time taken by meetings.

My only experience with Germany (granted at a telecom company) was calls twice a day on the project I was working on. But it was on topic, made sure everyone was making progress and we had no blockers, and everyone involved seemed to be working on JUST my project for that entire week, so it actually worked. It was quite refreshing compared to my job in the US where I'm working on 100 things at once.

I've worked at several companies that had very different ways of doing things. One place I worked had many complaints on glassdoor.com about "micromanagement" yet I had the opposite experience because I got to work on a project or two for a week and make weekly progress reports, as opposed to another company where we had a meeting every morning and had to account for all our time working on many different things in 6 minute increments.

Everybody says they want to hire someone who can "multi-task" but it totally changes your outlook when you have experience enough to know deep down that it's not necessary and may well lead to lower productivity.

I assumed it was mostly culture within my company and industry, but then an article was posted about how there is a major loss in productivity across the nation so I thought I'd share a small example that I have witnessed and see if others notice the same.

edit: for what it's worth, I use to be Canadian focused in my role, and this was not an issue. Then I became more globally focused and it became instantly a problem, but consistently only in America. Not in Europe, not in Asia, Canada still mostly chill, but America wants to have a call to discuss.

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