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Comment by gregshap | Hacker News Reader

Banning recurring 3 person meetings initially sounded overly reactionary and reductive to me. It does sound like proliferation of meetings has become a growing problem and I wonder how much the video-off-zoom-attendance is a contributor.

The article implies that they previously had multiple 50+ person meetings per week(!!) "Big meetings of more than 50 people will get shoehorned into a six-hour window on Thursdays, with a limit of one a week."

As someone who has never worked a company larger than ~300 people, can anyone enlighten me on what kind of meetings would have that many attendees, outside of say a quarterly all-hands?

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The one company I worked for over 300 people that held a weekly meeting made it entirely optional- it was an end of the week, end of day Friday meeting where someone would give a demo of either something cool they built or a success story for a client. I don't believe more than half the company showed up on a regular basis, but it was a really nice social hour for people who wanted to partake.

This predated COVID by many years, and remote work was only just becoming a thing, so we had custom built video streaming software once we opened additional offices so that the whole company would see the demos, if not so much the in-person chatter and snacks before and after.

I really like this, especially when overlapping/doubling as a social happy hour. A former company did something similar, I always enjoyed seeing what other parts of the company were up to.

Department all-hands, business unit all-hands, product line all-hands... Every level of a large business feels like they need to do all-hands with some regularity. If you don't do them people complain that they feel "disconnected" and don't know what everyone else is working on. One problem it's that depending on your team and product some higher-level orgs matter a lot or not at all. The folks running those orgs of course also get mostly to interact with people to whom other efforts in the org matter most.

Then you have central efforts liked software supply chain security, DE&I, etc

> Department all-hands, business unit all-hands, product line all-hands... Every level of a large business feels like they need to do all-hands with some regularity. If you don't do them people complain that they feel "disconnected" and don't know what everyone else is working on.

The best setup I've seen required only managers to attend such meetings, and those managers could open up invites to team members if they wanted them, or if they had something worth presenting. The meetings were all recorded anyway, so if someone felt like they missed something after the fact or couldn't attend, they could watch it at a more appropriate time.

The only real "all-hands" meetings we had was off-site, in person, and bi-annual. The only department that had more frequent all-hands meetings was sales with their quarterly kick-offs.

Agreed. I started telling my team that most of these are optional and then updated a Slack threat with highlights

Do you mean you threatened your team in Slack?

“Read this summary, or else you’ll have to start attending these meetings.”

Zoom-video-off has been the best thing to happen to crappy meetings since forever. Now you don't even have to drag a laptop down to a meeting room and roughly pretend to pay attention like you're in a boring 101 lecture class again.

"no it's okay I just brought my laptop to take notes, just like the other 45 engineers in this meeting."

I'm reminded of the scene from Real Genius where a class devolves to a reel-to-reel tape recorder lecturing smaller tape recorders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB1X4o-MV6o

My company has around 3000 people split in to six legal entities and sub divided in to a further 18 operations most people would call "companies"

A 50+ person meeting could be the global team brief (monthly), the regional team brief (weekly), kick off or milestone meeting of any project branching across multiple legal entities, change to global policy such as HR or finance, further meetings for IT to plan and implement these changes.

The list really goes on.....

I tend to mute myself and do some housework. I find i can get 99% of the detail from 5 minutes with the slide deck and the minutes.

At one point at a previous company of 300-400 we had UI demos that invited 100+, sprint demos that invited 50+, a weekly all-hands that invited everyone, a bi-weekly departmental all-hands that invited 150+, and a Friday social hangout that invited everyone in the same office. Add monthly departmental retros (100+) and group learnings/feature enablement (50+), quarterly trainings (150+) and off-sites (50+) and it was a bit much. And this was all pre-pandemic with most of the company in one office/location — we already saw a lot of each other even without these meetings.

At the client I work for we have 2-3 meetings every other week that are frequently attended by 50-100 people. One is a "demo meeting", where teams present their work, the other one is called "architecture guild", where people discuss the system's architecture, how to improve it, recent changes and developments etc. Attending the meetings is not strictly mandatory, though.

All-hands happen, as you say, approximately every 2-3 months.

Many companies have weekly all-hands. E.g. My previous company had a weekly all-hands for the entire company (150 people).

That seems incredibly counterproductive to me. If its more for face-time and getting-to-know people fine, but if its supposed to be an actual _thing_ with actual impact then I'm skeptical.

My previous company (during Covid) had 3 all-hands each week (~300 people). It was a little over the top

we have one at my company, and it feels like a bit much. A lot of repeated talking points/useless info because we have an hour to fill every week

If the meeting requires your attendance but you have little to no input and are learning nothing from it, a fun game to play is do the math of how much that meeting just cost the company.

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