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Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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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