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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

This always seems to be such a controversial view here, but if you think a meeting is pointless and that you have nothing to gain from it or contribute to it, just don't go. We're all grown-ups at work, and are ultimately responsible for our own productivity. Be prepared to articulate exactly why you feel some other use of your time is more appropriate, in case someone asks, but nobody is holding a gun to your head telling you to join the meeting. I'm double-booked for meetings all day, so I'm constantly making judgment calls about which one (or neither) is more important. It's not a big deal, and you don't need an app for it.

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It can also be useful to, perhaps, engage in either a passive or active interrogation of what the value and purpose of a meeting is in the eyes of others.

I agree there are some useless meetings. I would, however, classify more meetings as unproductive but important. That represents a different problem and necesitates a different solution but seems to beguile engineers. Does an unproductive meeting need to be cancelled or fixed?

Finally, I have experienced meetings where one person who believes the meeting is useless and just runs it off the rails. The meetings can BECOME useless because of that person's behavior. Others may see it as valuable for alignment, clarification, ideation, many other reasons even if you don't. In my experience, the people who are willing to act on a belief a meeting is useless more frequently misunderstand what the goal of a particular meeting is, misunderstand the role of meetings in engineering/technical work, or just are generally premaddona assholes.

Declaring a meeting useless for everyone is rarely a productive solution. The idea that technical work is primarily and individualized activity is about as outdated as waterfall project management.

You can constructively engage in a conversation of 'what is the purpose of this meeting in the short and in the long term' without talking about the cost. If we reduce everything to that metric of observability then coders should be paid in lines of code written not thinking done.

> If we reduce everything to that metric of observability then coders should be paid in lines of code written not thinking done.

If this happens I'll do well. Just don't ask how I "write" the code that gets submitted.

To add to that, if you default to the position that any meeting is pointless, you'll find yourself continually frustrated and likely wrong at times. Talk to your manager about time management and let them know where you think your time is best served. They may agree and give you the cover you need to duck out, they might revamp some meetings to be more effective, or they may just give you the context you need to have the meeting become more valuable to you personally.

Or they may become offended, or cut you out of communications, or tell you their misunderstandings as if they’re true…

Many organizations cannot handle discussing or even innocently questioning their communication problems openly.

I would never use this calculator, for the record. There are ways to redeem the time, including trying as much as possible to make the bad meeting worthwhile.

> cut you out of communications, or tell you their misunderstandings as if they’re true…

Tell you their misunderstandings as it they're true. I really appreciate the phrasing there. Super useful for my own experience.

I would agree with this. A lot of folks retreat rapidly. One of the most common responses is "Why didn't you tell me this sooner so I could make meetings more useful?" It's a really slick deflection tactic.

I agree there are always ways to use the time better though.

As a manager, I encourage my team to just say "no" where ever possible. I also always push to halve the times of meetings I'm in (and typically that works well).

- We have 10 min standup every day

- We have 30 min sprint planning every week

- We have 30 min retro every week

Beyond that we will talk as necessary between people. In reality pushing back is pretty effective at determining if a meeting is important. If they don't move it for you, you didn't need to be there.

> - We have 10 min standup every day

At my workplace we now have 90 minute daily standups because it was perceived the employees are not doing enough quick enough. It has obliterated any hope of progression in a single work day without overtime (unpaid!) since these typically will run over by a long margin, eating up what little time we had for actual development.

I've seen teams that have a 30+ minute morning standup, and an end-of-day standup of unlimited duration based on how much the lead wants to rant that day.

Wow, 90 minutes. That‘s mind boggling. How many people do attend these daily meetings? I guess there‘s only a few persons using most of the time for their talking?

The entire team...

So 5 people?? We have no idea how big your team is.

30 people. Didn't need to downvote me for not specifying an exact number.

Have you tried not showing up and seeing what the consequences are?

Threatening to put people on PIP, a few people tried to get excused from these meetings (even those who are rather all stars when it comes to output imo).

Agreement from me, although I'd avoid double booking. Double booking means that other people are expecting you to attend, they may wait to see if more people join, or need to reschedule if the right audience isn't able to make it. I think it's best to pro-actively reject meetings versus only showing up for one.

Depends. If your schedule has a lot of flux (meetings being cancelled ad-hoc, etc.) then it can be useful to accept everything but notify the host that you probably won't be there unless something changes. That way if something does change you at least still have it on your calendar (I use Outlook, maybe other calendar/meeting apps handle this better).

Google Calendar has a Maybe option that solves it simply enough.

Outlook has Tentative, for the same reason.

As someone who has done this, I can tell that it's not easy to justify. In my previous company, there were two teams, one in India and the other in US, working on a project. Each team had a scrum master and a daily morning scrum call. The India team was expected to attend the US team's scrum call as well. This made no sense to me as I already provided updates in the Indian scrum call. So I made it clear that we should either cancel the Indian scrum call or we should not attend the US one. But I was a relatively junior developer and senior engineers were complying despite disagreeing with the arrangement. So, the US scrum master escalated it as far as he could take it. I did not back down and defended my position with senior management as well. It was a fun filled week though. Every day the US scrum master would think of a new silly reason to escalate my absense and I would have to counter it. Eventually, the practice of attending both scrum calls was dropped.

Good job. Fuck scrum masters who just want to show that they are running a meeting for 2x the number of people.

> We're all grown-ups at work

I want to work where you work.

Then just change jobs, duh. I mean, if you’re in a company where you can’t say “Look, it’s better if I skip this discussion to ship a feature”, odds are you’re wasting more time than you imagined.

"Just change jobs" isn't always feasible just like "just break up with them" isn't always feasible in relationships. Kids, health situations, money issues, professional enjoyment, location, and needed benefits (particularly remote work) can all play factors into why one might need to stay at a particular job.

And further, we should always be encouraged to first try to solve our issues before running from them. Yes, solutions may not always be possible but learning to solve difficult issues is an important skill.

It's pretty good for SWE to have positive alternatives to everything you mentioned these days, isn't it?

If by positive alternatives you mean backup plans, savings, and safety nets, then yes, I agree that emergencies should be prepared for as much as possible. However, life sometimes gets in the way.

i've seen similar techniques used before where meeting cost has been calculated. it's kinda geek-cool, but it's also pretty passive aggressive, a little petty (not only are you wrong for calling the meeting, but hey, everyone look how wasteful it is) and dare i say, toxic.

sometimes it can be hard to break out of routines and have frank conversations, and it's certainly easier to complain behind closed doors, ignore or otherwise be passive aggressive... but all that does is create a toxic environment where fear, speculation and rumor rule the day. i think the correct answer is to pull the organizer aside and provide direct feedback on the utility of the meeting... 9/10 times, they will listen and respond in a positive manner.

Here's the one simple trick they don't want you to know about:

email the organizer, making sure to CC everyone, asking for the meeting's agenda.

no, please don't do that. only asking for an agenda while cc'ing everyone is passive aggressive.

a more congenial approach would be to provide your understanding of the agenda, perhaps as a question, and then asking if there's more or another alternative: "it sounds like we're going to collectively make a decision on [x]. is there anything else on the agenda for this meeting?" even better if you do this one-to-one and, if needed, suggest the meeting invite be updated accordingly.

> a more congenial approach would be to provide your understanding of the agenda

That shifts works to me.

If someone sends a meeting invite without an agenda, either I trust them and we already agreed this was worth spending time on or they should learn to write an agenda.

I think this depends on my relationship to the organizer. If they are my employee or mentee then sure. If the perceived agenda takes 5 seconds, maybe.

But it takes a few minutes to compose a draft agenda for someone else’s meeting. So I could spend an hour a day trying to figure out what blank meetings are supposed to do.

Asking for an agenda is quick, helps the organizer with a signal for what’s expected, and I can sustain that behavior.

I wouldn’t cc all the invites unless I think they are all also curious about the agenda and I just want to stave off an email storm asking the same question. (But then if I know that others will ask the same thing, I might just do nothing because someone else will ask)

> I'm double-booked for meetings all day, so I'm constantly making judgment calls about which one (or neither) is more important. It's not a big deal, and you don't need an app for it.

It seems like your job is more meeting-centric than the average engineering job. I'd hate to juggle meetings daily instead of working on the same problem for hours uninterrupted.

If you are in a leadership position this is kind of a nightmare. If you are just an IC you're bolder than I. tbh my morning standup could be reduced to a sentence.

For your standup, I've really enjoyed my teams switch to writing out what were doing that day in our team's chat channel. Then we still have a standup, but we talk about interesting problems and blockers and not just what were doing.

Yeah I wish we could do this. It just makes so much more sense.

I think sometimes people may forget that in a lot of cases a person may be put on a meeting invite as a courtesy to inform them a topic is being discussed. This is a form non-repudiation such that the person being invited cant complain later they were left out of any decision making.

More positively, they are offering you the opportunity to head-off braindead decisions at the pass.

As engineer, I just continue working on other tasks in every single meeting. For me that multitasking works, and I don't have meeting fatigue at all. Then again, I'm not the main decision maker most of the time.

Also an engineer - I've always found this to be really disrespectful. It's not multitasking, it's ignoring the people around you. If the meeting isn't worth your undivided attention, it's better to drop the organizer a note about why you're excusing yourself from it.

Making the meeting host compete feel like they're constantly competing for your attention is just really demoralizing.

That's a good point. I personally got numb against people not paying attention the past year, doesn't mean everyone is.

It's just an easy way to reclaim time. I agree the better solution is to trim meetings.

Is there possibly a middle ground? If the meeting is about a big project and I have expert knowledge on a small part of that, I will often work through the meeting but stay tuned in for parts relevant to me. Spending the whole meeting in rapt attention would likely be a waste of time, but not attending at all is bad as well.

As others have said, an upfront agenda is helpful.

That's even worse, IMO, because you're contributing to the waste of every else's time and making the meetings seem more important than they really are.

Many meetings are completely useless, full of checked out attendees. I guarantee that many people with their cameras off are doing this exact same thing. Some of them are just using this time to get stuff done around the house.

> if you think a meeting is pointless and that you have nothing to gain from it or contribute to it, just don't go.

Or, even better, normalize showing up to a meeting, and if you feel like it is useless/irrelevant to you after 10 minutes, just stand up and leave. You never know ahead of time if the meeting would be useless for you or not (ok, in a lot of cases you do, but more often than not it isn't super-decisive). But after 10 minutes, it becomes a bit more obvious whether you would benefit from staying or not.

Saw a senior engineer from our sister team do it once, then he explained his logic to me later regarding this. At first i was afraid, thinking "ok, he is a senior engineer, he can do whatever without negative consequences, and I don't think I can afford to do it as an entry level engineer [at the time]".

One day I tried it, and never looked back. No one had any issues with it, and it had made me so much more productive. Then a new manager for my team came along, saw me do it once, and asked me about it, like "why did you do this". I explained to him the exact same reasoning as for why I was doing it. He ended up having zero issues with it after my explanation either, and had even mentioned this approach to other people on the team who were struggling with meeting overload as a recommended approach.

This doesn’t really work when power dynamics are in play. If you’re a junior or just have less experience than the person calling the meeting I can guarantee it’s causing some type of negative view of you by someone. You do that enough times and you’ll find yourself on a PIP, and eventually on the job market.

This is why meetings in general are net negative. There’s little need for scheduled meetings. Just do one stand up per week, ad hoc calls when needed, but mostly just let people work.

If you're an inexperienced junior developer, you probably should not assume you know better than everyone else what meetings are useful.

> This always seems to be such a controversial view here, but if you think a meeting is pointless and that you have nothing to gain from it or contribute to it, just don't go. We're all grown-ups at work, and are ultimately responsible for our own productivity.

I tried doing this. Was told I need to attend more meetings. So I asked how many? They said, "it depends". "It depends on what?" "On how often we want to meet."

So whatever the hell that means. I think I need to meet every week for some reason. Just to prove 'something'

Eject.

I had a colleague with this problem. Kept being told that they had to attend meetings and they thought the meetings weren’t useful.

They left and solved their problem, but the group problem remains.

Sometimes I can’t fix cultural issues despite working really hard, so moving to a new team or company is the best move. Also, I think there are people who like lots of meetings so it may be a function of people finding the right culture fit for them.

Thankfully, technology may help us to find a middle ground. For one thing, it's possible to work on one computer while attending a meeting on another. My home office is two computers for this reason. This is useful for those "status update" meetings where each of 12 people gets 5 minutes to update everybody on their tasks.

You can also accept a meeting invite with the proviso that you will participate if you are actually needed.

This seems like the last place that that view would be considered controversial.

Agreed. I posted this exact thing in a comment the other day and it got downvoted. If you get an invitation to a party, you don't just automatically accept, you would (or should) question whether you will enjoy this party. A meeting should be the same, except it's not about enjoyment but about worth. What are you expected to contribute to the meeting? What will you gain by attending? If this isn't clear, ask for clarification. If it's still not clear, decline the invitation.

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