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Comment by crispyporkbites | Hacker News Reader

It’s not the same- why try to replicate an inefficient process anyway. Most meetings are a colossal waste of time.

I agree that many meetings of 4+ people can probably be done more efficiently via email or wiki or whatever, but I've found 2-3 person meetings far more effective than any other means for information transfer and decision making.

Can you come to my meetings and tell my CTO how to make decisions faster?

Propose a "memo culture". That was how we managed larger meetings at Netflix (and I'm pretty sure we stole it from Amazon).

Before the meeting, everyone who has a stake in what's being discussed contributes to a memo outlining their thoughts on it. Then everyone reads it ahead of the meeting.

The meeting is then just to hash out what's in the doc and agree on which already proposed solution will be adopted.

I'd caution against memo culture, actually. I only have a sample size of 2, but in two organizations I've been in that tried to adopt something similar, this is what happened:

In the first org, there was a lot of pressure that any such memos had to be highly researched and data driven (also borrowed from Amazon, I imagine). In reality what this meant is that drafting a memo even for the smallest decisions or ideas became a large laborious effort, which nobody wanted to do and/or didn't have time to do it. The result was that everyone procrastinated on decision making, if they even participated in it in the first place, and I knew a fair share of colleagues who didn't even bother to pitch their ideas because of hating the memo system.

In the second org, it was the opposite problem: in an attempt to make memos "painless", there was much less pressure on making the memos "high quality". The result: every "memo" was a hastily scrawled together draft of random notes that didn't make much sense, and we had to spend most time in meetings going over the "memo" to decipher it and have the author explain it anyway.

How does one propose and win a culture change of one isn't in charge?

If you hold a meeting, suggest using a memo? Or just ask your manager if they'd consider it? There are many ways to affect change within an organization.

No one is in charge forever, lead by example and if you’re doing things right eventually people will follow. You are as much a part of the culture as the current “boss”

In my experience, it also depends a lot on the type of information being transferred. There's a lot of information that is much off being expressed in a chat program, where the person can take the time to formulate the best way to express the idea. If the same thing was being discussed in a meeting, it would take the time of everyone there while the person went back and forth coming up with the right wording.

Meetings where everyone is essential and required, for both input and task assignment are important.

Meetings where people are there just to listen in, or for FYI purposes are utterly useless.

I'll add to that one very important component: meetings where everyone comes prepared. Even when people are essential and/or required, if they don't want to be there then it lowers the bar for the entire meeting. Inefficiency (and laziness) can be contagious. But when everyone arrives with military precision, pen in hand and phone in pocket, you'd be amazed at difference.

Also, the fewer attendees the better, in my experience. 3-5 is a good size. 1-2 "higher ups" and 1-3 with "boots on the ground". More than that and it risks devolving into chit-chat and speculation instead of bullet-pointed queries and actions.

Department wide meetings? Yeah I agree.

2-4 person meetings are great because everyone has a chance to interact and ask questions.

I haven't seen any downsides to having these smaller meetings via zoom though. Sure if someone has kids running around that would be less than ideal, but that's not so much a WFH problem as it is a pandemic problem which will eventually go away.

Big thing I miss with in person meetings is the ability to start sketching on the board. Sure you have virtual whiteboards and stuff but it’s not the same. The bandwidth of idea transmission is just lower online.

I feel like whiteboard cukture died years ago when the "open office" was invented.

That doesn't match my observations over the last few years where every company I worked at was open office. Usually there are either nooks, rooms or just hallways away from the desks with big whiteboards.

Last year I tried a recent digital whiteboard (basically a fast 55" touch screen), and it felt really good. If those things had real-time syncing - connected to meeting software, of course - and were affordable enough, I could see them really taking off.

Can you not just use it with Zoom's whiteboard feature? A quick search online showed a few touch displays in the range of 1500 - 2500 for mid 30" to mid 50" in size. Although not sure how responsive they are.

The display I used (Samsung Flip) is a standalone product with its own OS. I'm not sure a regular OS connected to the display would work so well.

From what I've noticed, the overall pace of zoom is meetings is slower. When in-person, the one talking can pick up subtle indications that other's get the point or that someone else wants to talk. Over zoom I've seen more tendency for people to go on unnecessarily.

I've also personally noticed an interesting subtle difference: in-person there seems to be a tendency to contribute if someone is present in the meeting and hasn't said anything. With zoom the general tendency seems to be the opposite (the longer someone is on mute, the more likely they are to stay on mute).

Anyone else notice things like this?

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