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Comment by p1esk | Hacker News Reader

You need to be able to stop bad meetings

This is a really bad advice, especially in this context. Don't annoy or confront your coworkers. Tell your manager if you feel like stopping some meetings. It's strictly their job, and they will be happy to step in and do that. Besides, any meeting of 20 people should have a manager present.

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It really depends on the company. At every company I've worked at, either the company was too small to be able to invite that many people (it would basically be an all-hands) or the management was the ones planning these meetings.

In my experience, the way to handle this is usually a quick Slack conversation with the meeting organizer starting with "hey, I saw you invited all of team X to the meeting - do they all need to be there or just Y". The response is almost always "I don't know anyone on that team so I just invited them all", and by initiating the conversation you are offering to help.

That's the point. Doing this effectively means interrupting the meeting without annoying coworkers. Everyone stuck in an unproductive meeting wants to do the rest of the items on their list. But no one feels that they have the authority to act as a circuit breaker.

Valid point, but I wouldn’t be so prescriptive. It’s also about understanding other variables — the culture of your workplace, the particular meeting/situation — and calibrating your approach accordingly. Of course, easier said than done.

The point of being a leader is you don't need to go through your manager when someone's wasting your team's time.

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