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Comment by cm2012 | Hacker News Reader

cm2012

I love some of Amazon's executive policies. From what I've read, everyone has to write a multi-page paper before executive meetings, and everyone has to read it, so the meeting goes smoothly with everyone understanding the issues. I hate how no one reads anything in most organizations.

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Not sure about execs, but this happens in engineering meetings (regarding new features being implemented or other semi-major changes). Whoever is initiating the meeting writes up a paper describing the terminology, the nature of the change and why it's needed, how it will be implemented etc. The entire dev team (+ maybe other dev teams within the group), management (the initiator's boss + 1 level above, maybe other dev team managers too) start the meeting with hard printouts of the paper, armed with red pens. The meeting "starts" with ~15 mins or so of silence for everyone to review the paper in the room from start to finish. Then the paper is reviewed end to end and torn up on the way. Often there are multiple of these meetings (i.e. first one went badly or if things change along the way of building/implementing it and questions come up)

That sounds like a low-fi, synchronous, in-person version of reviewing a Google Doc (with comments, suggestions, etc).

Alternatively, the people who are scheduled for the meeting are guaranteed to spend 15 reviewing the subject and having their questions answered in a timely fashion. All of the stakeholders are likely in the room so a decision can actually be made.

It forces real-time immediate interaction and discussion rather than dealing with people that have varying levels of understanding and who may or may not have bothered to actually read the whole thing. And it forces all of the comments and suggestions to be hashed out in 30-60 minutes, rather than over weeks as people only check the doc maybe once a day if you are lucky so every back and forth takes forever, especially when a lot of it is dealing with the aforementioned sources of understanding.

A single hour-long in-person meeting can forgo a month of back-and-forth online.

I’ve generally found that forcing people to dedicate time to read and discuss a design is more fruitful than a google doc

Sounds better than the alternative, which I'm all too familiar with.

"Did everyone get a chance to read the doc I added to the calendar entry last night? No? Ok, I'll just review the main points. So for starters, let's go talk about why we're here...."

It happens with Jeff, which is why it happens with the execs, which is why it happens with the eng teams.

It doesn't happen at many other companies, even ones stocked to the gills with Amazon refugees.

Yegge has another famous blog post about presenting to Jeff.

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