Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

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At the cost of quantity, but agreed.

(There have been some really interesting displays of this, like Robot 9k avoiding chat spam, or Kingdom of Loathing's 3-question "test" for joining global chat.)

Print fiction stories are higher average quality than web-published or fan-fiction, because they costs money to produce. Nobody prints and binds 500 words of unfinished, unedited rambling, but they certainly put it on AO3. But it turns out there's a lot of stuff that's interesting and valuable, yet too niche or awkwardly sized to justify printing.

So I guess there are two questions. First, does the barrier to entry improve the overall quality of the thing, or just weed out the weakest examples? Charging anyone who calls a meeting $10 would avoid some stupid meetings, but requiring an agenda can also improve worthwhile meetings. Second, are the marginal examples worth having? For a short story in a database, sure. For a five person meeting? Definitely not.

> Nobody prints and binds 500 words of unfinished, unedited rambling

A lot of people do. They just don’t reach you (vs internet distribution).

might charging a ‘call to meeting’ fee based on the attendees salary/hourly rate be an alternative?

I would be very concerned about that killing productivity by making it so that nobody is willing to schedule them at all.

Not sure how many people would want to pay to do their own jobs.

I'm not certain it is a good idea to to that but let me try to come up with a more constructive way to do it:

Of course people shouldn't pay to do their work, so this must be taken from their allocated budget. If they don't have a budget they cannot invite anyone without the permission of someone who has a budget and think the meeting is a good idea.

in contracting this is not uncommon. one employer I worked for bid on a contract that was later revised down by 75 percent. meetings were curtailed to save money precisely because of the cost to the customer. budget sensitivity is a valuable tool to fight time wastagement.

Allocating and drawing down a meeting budget pool might assist with this.

As a positive incentive, a countering "attending" pool, also budgetable. Meetings with strong appeal would be compensated from that.

Not sure what to do with the Imaginary Meeting Points at the end of the year, though possibly use it as the basis of some sort of merit award or bonus.

And I thought a few extra vipers was bad! I can't even imagine the level of ensuing bullshit...

Properly designing incentive systems in a realm of pervasive externalities and nonobvious costs and benefits is difficult.

I'm not saying the market/cost approach is necessarily the best or appropriate. But it's an interesting thought experiment to work through it.

Sometimes imposing arbitrary requirements (e.g., "have an agenda") is a cheaper way of effecting the same ends. Though Goodhart's Law is another pitfall.

NB: "vipers"?

At a bare minimum, teams that plan via "story points" or other time units ought to count meetings in those scores. When they don't, you start getting teams that either "get nothing done" or have to work nights and weekends because planning meetings are displacing all their intended work.

For actually tracking Meeting Points, one option might be to make them a project metric? As in: "We predict our project will consume 21 Meeting Points, if we go over 25 that's a failure to be analyzed afterwards like overruning schedule or budget, if we're under 15 we're probably budgeting wrong".

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