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Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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