Ask HN: What companies have zero/minimum meetings? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What companies have zero/minimum meetings?

8 pointsleonagano9 comments

EDIT: I posted this and then realised it doesn't answer your question. To be more in line with what you asked... I am not aware of any companies that have no meetings. I have been looking at job boards recently and have not seen that as a selling point in any company.

Meetings are not inherently bad. For example, if I want to talk through some technical architecture diagram with you I will ask when you're free and schedule a meeting. That is a potentially useful meeting and a good way to share information.

Bad meetings are normally have some of the following characteristics:

* Too many attendees

* Only a subset of attendees do the talking

* No agenda

* Reoccurring

* Serve the purpose for one person rather than the group

* Are for planning about planning

* Are too high level - not getting into details

Almost my entire day is spent in meetings with at least three of these characteristics. I love it. I get paid to just go from meeting to meeting and talk to people. It's been like this for so long that I'm afraid to try and go back to writing code. This is so much easier.

There's different kinds of easy and hard. There's hard like chipping away at a complex technical requirement until you finally understand it well enough to make what looks about as good as you might hope to make it. Then there's hard like you've been debugging for many hours on a problem over multiple days, to finally discover that there is a typo in your test input.

Attending these sorts of meetings even a few times per week sounds like the latter kind of hard for me--lack of progress for no good reason and a special kind of hell to have to repeat regularly.

I go between thoughts like that and extreme worry about losing my skills.

One problem is that the work is expected to be done.. even though everyone knows there is no time to do it since we're in meetings all day.

Gumroad is an example of a company with no scheduled meetings.

According to Sahil, he runs almost everything async.

I worked at one a few years ago where everything was on Slack. We didn't have meetings because we were excited, always chatting about what's going to happen next. Some would wake up at 4 AM just to chat.

It didn't last, though. The people who felt they were the smartest in the room left to other companies, and this continued until it was left with people who wanted to be the smartest in the room.

Just be aware that minimum meeting doesn't mean minimum interaction. People can very well bug you in chat instead.

Your own company.

You will have a ton of meetings with customers if you want to stay in business.

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