Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

> Meetings are there to ensure that everything is going smoothly and on schedule.

Are they? At one time in my career you just let people know when something isn't going smoothly/not on schedule. A quick email (or equivalent) was more than sufficient to raise awareness.

For various reasons I eventually fell into this meeting culture. I don't get it. It produces this weird state where everyone saves up what they have to say for the meetings to avoid an awkward lack of participation or "I have nothing" in the meeting, which results in a barrage of mostly useless information, all while the nuggets of gold that the meeting would benefit from regularly get missed because everyone is too overwhelmed by the information overload.

And because everyone saves up what they have to say, the team seems more distant, which diminishes other beneficial outcomes that arise when everyone is regularly chatting with each other. The information lag also dramatically decreases the overall efficiency of the team, not having useful knowledge as it becomes available.

> You might not like it, but the information must be shared for the system to remain efficient.

The thing is, I actually like meetings. After you've recognized something isn't going smoothly, calling a meeting to formulate a plan of attack under the narrow scope of that specific problem at play can often lead to really great outcomes.

But I dare say that if the meeting is there simply to find out that there is a problem, you are doing something wrong.

this so much. we have these stupid weekly meetings where this one guy just asks us a dozen question. and then we try our best to answer them on the spot with incomplete information. just post that shit in the chatroom and we'll answer with a thought out answer when we can.

standups are pointless status updates where no one listens to each other.

even doc reviews, which can be useful, often get fucked because the clever folks with things to say can't leave them as comments on the doc so the owner had time to review and think about them.

save meetings for things that require actual discussion, not questions or status updates

> It produces this weird state where everyone saves up what they have to say for the meetings to avoid an awkward lack of participation or "I have nothing" in the meeting

This is an odd meeting culture. Just remove the requirement that everybody has to bring up something.

FWIW I've never felt like that in my teams.

I'm not sure it can be removed, fundamentally.

After all, if everyone sent out their emails, so to speak, what would be left for the meeting? I mean, what are the odds of someone discovering something worthwhile to communicate to the team just seconds before the meeting starts? Any earlier and the email would have already been sent and there would be nothing left for the meeting. Maybe it happens once in a blue moon, but regularly across a wide number of people? No way.

I've never attended a status meeting that was completely void of participation, so there must be withholding of information done so to pad the meeting. Not everyone may feel such pressure, but it is apparent that some – and I dare say most – do.

> I'm not sure it can be removed, fundamentally.

I've not had this for the last 10 years, so it can definitely be removed.

Obviously everybody is welcome to bring up whatever is interesting nd worth discussing, and that's what we do in my current and previous workplaces. But there should not be a requirement that everybody has to bring up sth, which would lead to the described issues..

> I've not had this for the last 10 years, so it can definitely be removed.

You’ve sat in regularly scheduled silence for the past 10 years and people still show up?

> Obviously everybody is welcome to bring up whatever is interesting nd worth discussing

But logically they would have already said it when it first became interesting, unless they felt pressure to pad a scheduled meeting with content, withholding information from the group until the meeting takes place. So, again, what’s the point of sitting in silence or purposefully denying the team information to satisfy the social pressure?

I don't understand what you are talking about. Obviously we don't sit in silence. Some things are just easier to discuss in a meeting than over 100 Slack messages. Those things we discuss in meetings.

Right. Like I said in the first comment, after you know there is a problem, calling a meeting to discuss that problem can be quite fruitful. You only need 1 Slack message to say “Hey guys, this isn’t going smoothly. Can we talk?”

The original context was about meetings intended to let others know there is a problem. A time to allow you to say things aren’t going smoothly. But why would you wait for a meeting to let others know there is a problem?

The only reason is because you feel pressure to ensure the meeting isn’t silence. Otherwise you would have logically made it known long before. What is really gained in withholding information from the team?

Not all issues are urgent. Most issues I encounter in my job are not urgent. Sometimes it's not even issues, perhaps just a random but interesting observation. It can be less distracting to the team to bring them up next time you have a regular team meeting scheduled, instead of blasting it into a slack channel or even calling a specific meeting. That's what sync ups are good for.

I agree there is little urgency. After all, if there were, the withholding of information would be devastating, not just annoying.

But you're right that having a low priority Slack channel that you can casually look at when you're at a natural stopping point is way less disrupting than having to drop everything you are doing because the clock says it is meeting time.

I wonder sometimes if people who get engrossed into this meeting culture have just never experienced better? Anything can seem like a good idea if it is all you know.

> After all, if everyone sent out their emails, so to speak, what would be left for the meeting?

One thing I've learned is that a lot of people simply don't read emails.

You can send out all the status emails you want, no one is going to read them unless it's directly related to their own work.

Short, frequent status meetings ensure that people are actually aware of the status and gives them a chance of unblocking you if they can.

You are right that people won't pay attention to anything that isn't already of interest to them, but the medium of exchange makes no difference there.

In fact, there was once advocacy towards a style of meeting (oft called a "standup") where you explicitly called upon participants to give their status update because it was recognized that they wouldn't be paying attention and needed prompting to snap them back, although this has largely fallen out of favour as we realized that only kept their attention for the length of their update and didn't achieve the desired effect.

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