Hacker News Reader

Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

> I can't imagine another day of long Zoom meetings.

The pandemic really reinforced to me that so many of these are pointless, at least for many participants. I have played games with co-workers, gone to sleep, done freelance work, had lunch (away from my desk), and all manner of other things through pretty much every meeting over 1 hour that I have had this pandemic. Especially the ceremonies like retro (exercise in taking notes and throwing them away), sprint planning (creating a faux schedule and throwing it away as code is done when it is done), and even in many cases the daily standup. Ditto for departmental meetings.

We cargo culted a lot of processes to WFH and will cargo cult them back upon return to office. What WFH lets me do is opt out of them and just have the conversation happen in the background instead of me being stuck in a meeting room.

View on HN

I agree a lot with your comment. No amount of planning or estimates will ever change that a feature will be done when it's done.

My previous job had about a 4th of the total work week dedicated to meetings. As someone with ADHD, this was very difficult for me. What made matters worse is that they were sometimes spread out and I could lose an entire day of productivity and I was just unable to work when my meds ran out and there was a shortage in the entire country (Mexico).

I am now back to contracting and my client just lists out the requirements in a document and I code away and have been VERY productive. No meetings or calls since I have started working with them 3 weeks ago.

Especially when I am just seeing the feature request for the first time and it is an adjustment to some existing thing I did not code.

We had a project a few months back where we used tech nobody on the team had used before. Had a fancy Gantt chart of where the schedule would be. It was shot to hell by day 3 and we spent hours trying to figure it out and gave up as it was never accurate.

> a feature will be done when it's done.

PHB: "You're thinking like an engineer, not a manager."

Dilbert: "In that case, we'll fix the bugs before we find them."

> No amount of planning or estimates will ever change that a feature will be done when it's done.

I've been on teams where we got good enough at estimating that we were +/- a couple of hours each sprint on our burn down charts.

Long tenure, good knowledge of the code, and a healthy amount of time spent on reducing technical debt all combine to make accurate estimations possible.

Of course things can go awry in regards to partner team or 3rd party API integrations, those are always wild cards, but that is why you first do an exploratory task to figure out how hard integration will be (my current team calls these stories "spikes" in our workflow), which de-risks future estimates around the work.

And it also makes more sense. "Spend this week learning how to use this API and figuring out its warts, then come back and give an estimate next week on how much work it'll be to get it up and running for real."

A rather reasonable way to do things.

> Especially the ceremonies like retro (exercise in taking notes and throwing them away)

Retro is one of those meetings that I have found very useful, at multiple companies. When done right, everyone should be involved, and useful action items will be taken away to make work easier in the future. I've seen retros done terribly wrong, where nothing is accomplished or taken away. Those seem like a waste, but I think when done right, it is actually a valuable use of time.

Retro can be useful if there are small problems to fix. I find that it misses the big ones because nobody wants to fight entrenched ways of doing things. It also does not help if there is no real follow through, which is my biggest gripe about it.

It really gets tedious hearing the same problem every two weeks with action planned and nothing happening.

I started to draw in ms paint during meetings and got pretty good in it last year :)

Care to share your best couple of drawings? (:

It's not THAT good, just good compared to how I drew before :)

Here's a gnomish submarine I drew for D&D campaign I run. https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51263880414_ee12f5cc5d_o...

That's pretty neat, thank you!

This one, I just don't get at all. If you have nothing to contribute to a meeting, and nothing to gain from listening, why are you joining the meeting to begin with? Just decline like a grown-up and get some actual work done. It doesn't do anyone any good to have you there on mute with the volume turned down, getting actual work done in the background. Nobody is going to notice you're gone, and if they do, who cares? You think the boss is going to sit there during the yearly performance review and say "Hmm, we were going to give Joe a raise, but I noticed that he skipped a lot of meetings where he wasn't really needed in the first place. Clearly bad performance!"

> why are you joining the meeting to begin with?

At companies that misuse meetings, most meetings are not optional to attend. Of course you could say "Well just don't go", but some people don't like getting fired over things like this.

> Just decline like a grown-up and get some actual work done

What a condescending way to communicate.

There is also the old adage that showing up is half the battle. Even if the company isn't in the habit of misusing meetings, showing up to meetings is important for establishing relationships with different people and departments. It sucks, but people are still social creatures, and meeting and talking to people face to face can have a strong lasting impression then a well written email.

Yeah, I think the above comment's thinking is pretty unproductive. If you "just" skip all of the meetings you don't personally find value in, you're depriving everyone in those meetings any nuggets of value _you_ could add. You'll be quickly labeled a loner/difficult team member/etc. Nobody wins if you "just" skip all the things you don't want to do.

Also it's worth noting that the gripe wasn't about meetings, but about meetings that don't translate well to remote, which I think is a totally different class of problem than attendance and meeting misuse. If those meetings added value when they were in-person, totally skipping them is a big mistake. The "work" so to speak is adapting meetings that added value in person, to continue to add value while done remotely. This obviously isn't just "Use the exact same format, but have it via Zoom", but more thought needs to go into it I think.

Or just the general acceptance that for some people, some things will just never be good unless they're in person.

> Yeah, I think the above comment's thinking is pretty unproductive. If you "just" skip all of the meetings you don't personally find value in, you're depriving everyone in those meetings any nuggets of value _you_ could add.

I was specifically talking about the meetings OP was talking about: The ones that have no value-add and where you have no nuggets to add. You can sleep through them, or otherwise tune out and do other work in the background. Why are people even going to these? If there's really absolutely nothing you can gain or others can gain from you, just don't go. I didn't think this was a controversial view, but the votes say otherwise.

EDIT: Also, who is actually being fired for not being attendee #47 at a meeting that they are not contributing to? If you actually saw this happen, let us know the company to warn us all not to accept offers there, because that seems extraordinarily petty.

I downvoted more for the massive condescension than anything else.

edit

To answer your edit: Most (all?) companies would fire an employee that refuses to comply with required company activities (meetings as an excellent example). I don't really think it's petty for a company to not allow every individual employee to decide what required team meetings are right for that individual.

Right. You shouldn't "just" skip those meetings. You should skip those meetings.

As in, you should communicate with the organizer and give your reason for the meeting not being a good use of your time -- or rather, not a good use of the company's money that is paying for your time to be in the meeting rather than doing something else.

If the meeting really is overly broad, then the organizer probably won't really care; they invited everyone who they thought might need to be involved, and from their standpoint it's better to overinvite than underinvite. If you point out that you're extra, then you're taking the potential work to figure that out off of their hands.

In the best case, they'll reconsider the invite list and/or scope of the meeting. In the worst case, they'll fire you. In which case there's a decent chance that it was actually the best case, but you couldn't recognize it at the time.

But I suspect that it's a lot more common for the outcome to be "uh, ok, thanks for letting me know."

I would argue what you're describing isn't "skipping" a meeting, but communicating about process and changing required attendees to optional, which is very much not what was being prescribed above ("Just hit decline like a grown up").

What you're describing is fine, but also not what we're talking about.

Delivering completed work seems a clear form of communication to me. It has the added benefit of being hard to argue with.

Sure, but (as I posted in another comment), if you're delivering completed work at the price of others delivering completed work because they needed information from you, and the culturally-defined place for that information to have been exchanged was all the meetings you're skipping, that's still probably a huge net negative.

This is the type of thing my CEO says, and then shows up to meetings with a black screen, muted, and does not respond to any inquiries while things are going on (so nobody directs anything to him) - but if you dont show up to the meeting he will message you and ask where are you?

Because, for example, the things that make retros pointless and wasteful (write down stuff and never consider it again) can challenge fundamentally the follow through ability of the department/manager/team members.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com