Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

I like this very much:

"In reality, process is not my problem. It’s what discussions around new processes often preview within a company. Lack of focus. Peacetime thinking. Complacency."

I recently wrote a small book for small startups called "One on one meetings are underrated; group meetings waste time" and I have gotten a lot of pushback regarding my emphasis on intuition, pragmatism, and favoring direct action over process. And over and over again, people reach out to me with some variation of "So you think the people who run Google are stupid? You think the people who run Apple are stupid? You think all of these brilliant people are actually idiots?" And my defense has been: "No, I just think those companies are large, and my advice is for small startups. Small startups are different."

It should be common sense to say that small startups are different, and need to operate by other rules. But I have noticed, there are some people in the tech industry who seem to think that the way a small startup becomes a huge tech giant is by imitating that huge tech giant exactly, including all of that tech giant's "best practices." But what is "best practice" at a huge company will not work at a small startup. In fact, many of those processes would be fatal, at a small company. They'd cause you to move too slowly, and they'd also cause you to give up the few advantages that you actually have as a small company, such as the ability to trust one another (when the whole team is just 5 people, it is easier to trust one another than when you've a company of 10,000 people).

While my experience matches yours exactly, I just wanted to add to this point:

> "One on one meetings are underrated; group meetings waste time"

My rule of thumb is, “up to 5 people is a meeting; more than 5 is a presentation.”

> My rule of thumb is, “up to 5 people is a meeting; more than 5 is a presentation.”

I like this.

I do think it's possible to still have an effective meeting with more people (up to, I don't know maybe 8-10?) but it becomes increasingly important to have tight rules around how the meeting runs and what it's supposed to achieve.

Big meetings are often like everyone takes a turn to talk because they’re supposed to, and a few people argue poorly over some point derailing any plan.

I’ve often been in them in the baffling position of seeing two people try to discuss something in a way that’s abundantly clear that neither of them understands what the other is saying in more than a very basic way.

You can definitely have useful big meetings but it gets harder with increasing size. Rules are one defense, but having a room of people actually good at communicating is much better.

And really, do everything you can to kill the meetings where it’s just an obligatory “everybody figure out something to say”

> Big meetings are often like everyone takes a turn to talk because they’re supposed to, and a few people argue poorly over some point derailing any plan.

Yes! The meetings where a small number of people are just having a debate with spectators are particularly awful for everybody concerned.

> You can definitely have useful big meetings but it gets harder with increasing size.

One of the most frustrating meeting dysfunctions I've seen is where large numbers of people are mentally checked out of discussions they're actually needed for - they keep needing stuff to be repeated, which results in others mentally checking out.

Eventually it's like a punishment from Hades in which your meeting can never achieve anything but will never end until it does.

In the past I've actually run a (somewhat) larger meeting by applying pretty tight time constraints. Actually saying "we're going to get this process fully done in X minutes" focuses minds and makes it become true.

> Rules are one defense, but having a room of people actually good at communicating is much better.

Back when we were in a physical office I also experimented with banning use of laptops in larger meetings - I think it did actually improve the quality (and speed) of communication in the meeting.

But, generally, building that habit of good communication in a team feels really hard. And the shift towards massively more remote working over the last few years has changed the landscape a bit - it seems much easier to stay silent or check out of a video conference.

Any suggestions from HN for good principles / reading materials on this?

That’s an excellent rule. I’m going to use that.

C. Northcote Parkinson, in his book "Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress", discussed the evolution of the British cabinet. Don't remember the details but each institution that served as a Cabinet inexorably expanded and was replaced by a smaller one that the King, and later the Prime Minister, used as the inner circle. And five was about the right size for that inner circle.

Here in the United States, the official cabinet has over 20 members, obviously too big to serve as such an inner circle.

This is an interesting observation - I decided to look it up, and indeed the first presidential cabinet (including the president) had five members: the others were the Secretaries of State, War, and Treasury, and the Attorney General.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_the_United_States#H...

Those are more or less the functions that Parkinson described as who needs to be in the inner circle.

Parkinson's book is really brilliant observation, with a humorous overlay.

I think one of my bosses used to say that the ideal meeting size was 4.5 people. Meaning you needed a pretty good reason for number 5.

And two people can just meet at a desk. If cubes were still a thing you could do three people without even getting a room.

Yeah I agree. Only ever include people who are likely to contribute. Fewer is better. And yeah - the number 5 should be approached asymptotically.

I know from personal experience in volunteer work that I'm pretty comfortable orchestrating around 6 people including myself, and somewhere north of that I get overwhelmed by trying to keep so many plates spinning. I got blindsided with a group of visitors once and I thought my head was going to explode. We ended up having to re-do about a third of their work and another third over time. We came out net positive but most of the benefit went to them, if they had a good experience which I'm not sure I would have noticed either way. I really should have insisted on more help.

I don't actually know what my real limit is because I try a little too hard not to find out. Once bitten, twice shy. I'm sure at some point I'll be paid to find out, and I'll go as slow as they'll let me.

I’d say there’s a difference between orchestrating people and running meetings. You wouldn’t generally need to have a meeting with your whole team very often, presumably they have different roles and different goals that you can treat somewhat separately. And when you do need everyone in a room, you’d be better off running it as a presentation (ie, with all the prep and structure that comes with it).

(Stand ups, while arguably valuable, are like a series of short presentations, so IMO don’t count as meetings).

I've had several coworkers who felt strongly that the standup degenerates into repeating things that you should have put into the project management software.

I can't get the sentiment to stay put in the 'right' or 'wrong' column so it's always just sort of there bugging me, like a raspberry seed stuck in my teeth. As someone said either elsewhere in this thread or in another conversation recently, waiting until morning to tell people you're stuck is not an optimal solution. I tend to find that pain points are information, but I'm not sure what the clever solution is to this problem.

Both of these folks asserted we'd be better off spending some time discussing the ways in which we've gotten unstuck, as a counterpoint to talking about how we got stuck, as a more pro-active way of broadcasting hard-won knowledge to the group.

Personally I think more than 3 people starts to get out of hand

There's a lot of survivorship bias. For any given process or practice, it can be hard to tell whether Google is successful because of it or despite it. A profitable or well-funded company in an uncompetitive market can afford to waste staggering amounts of time and money indulging the whims of senior managers, or even just weird internal cultures.

> A profitable or well-funded company in an uncompetitive market can afford to waste staggering amounts of time and money indulging the whims of senior managers

For a while, even in a competitive market, they can waste money. I'm reminded of a friend who worked for a large national book seller in the late 90s. He was placed on a project to investigate the company branding (and possibly producing) their own wine, for sale in stores. In-store cafes were such a hit, upscale wine sales (and profits) would be huge right? This was green-lit from some sr management who... coincidentally, was a wine buff, and they put a team together to go research the wine industry (which meant... travel to wineries for research, etc). This project never got off the ground, but the team learned a lot about wine and retailing wine for about a year, then was disbanded. The company started losing a lot of ground within a few years, and was defunct shortly after.

Rather than pursuing better ways of accommodating the coming internet wave... they squandered whatever chance they may have had on ... lunacy. Another couple of contacts I had there were showing me their own skunkworks "personalized reading lists" (think barebones 'goodreads' system in 2000). Projects like that were frowned on and not supported, in favor of "wine exploration".

Any chance we get to see that book? I constantly trying to improve my company process (we are small, < 10 people) and I like to see how others are handling operation.

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