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Comment by namdnay | Hacker News Reader

That is also the case in France for public universities - the "VPs" and above are all elected by the teaching staff.

To give a disadvantage, it makes it very hard to push through any big changes. Neither the leaders nor the electorate have ever worked in large private orgs, meaning you end up with bizarre situations like an entire university that does not use the Calendar feature in Outlook ("so microsoft knows what i'm doing? that sounds like big brother!"), instead relying on online event-organising tools to ask people to give availability for every single meeting , or a block refusal of opening paid professional courses or opening to foreign students (due to a very hard "teaching must always be free" stance from their voters) , which could bring in much-needed cash to subsidise the "real" students

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These objections all seem to be objections to the community having the ability to make autonomous decisions that you don’t personally agree with. Democratic organizations are messy but the opposite has its own downsides.

It’s kind of an athenian democracy. The only ones who can vote are tenured professors. Admin staff can’t vote, students can’t vote, non-tenured staff can’t vote.

Except it’s an Athenian democracy where none have any skin in the game. The professors aren’t going to lose pay if the university attracts mediocre students, they aren’t going to lose pay if the infrastructures crumble around them - they’re civil servants, their job and pay are fixed and guaranteed . So they have no incentive to take decisions that are difficult for them but better for the students

That is kind of not how academia works. Prestige is everything. If you don’t attract the best students, you get less citations. Infrastructure crumbling? That means less grants, and therefore less citations.

The worst part is that tenured professors don’t really feel the brunt of being in a shrinking department, because they are never personally at risk. They do lose prestige, but the last few are at the stage of their careers that it doesn’t matter enough.

Honestly it feels a lot more like the fall of (Western) Rome to me. A lot of people who don’t remember what we did to get this great system, and are slowly chipping it away for their own benefit until it finally collapses. Ridiculous amounts of infighting while the humanities are burning down. Both the woke crowd and the Trumpers united on how resolutely they stand against academic freedom.

Fall of the Western Roman Empire vibes everywhere in the west these days, outside maybe of tech. But even that depends on the infrastructure, human and physical, that the rest of the system provides so it’s just a matter of time.

I console myself by saying we’re just in the low part of Peter Turchin’s secular cycle - but I hope that’s true.

Why should the university be forced to use Microsoft calendar? And yes, I worked in private companies for decades now.

And second, just because I have free time on my calendar does not mean that you are free to schedule meeting for me there. You need to ask about my availability anyway, becuase I have stuff to do that is not meetings.

Because it saves everyone time. If you have things to do that are not meetings you can block off your calendar. It is a tool to solve scheduling challenges. Not using it is a choice, but it creates operational inefficiency.

It can save time but not always. An overzealous pm can really burn a lot of people’s time by over scheduling. The extra cost of setting up a meeting discourages pointless checkins and recurring meetings. I personally like being able to quickly coordinate with a calendar, but it’s important to not abuse that power.

Just don’t accept the meetings. Or even better talk to the offender and explain why you won’t be going. A bit of communication is a small price to pay for the upsides of easy scheduling

There are many things that I have to do that I would shift around fluidly to accommodate an important meeting but not for a random, time-wasting meeting.

If I have a 1-4 window open and you have a time-wasting but unavoidable meeting, I’m going to try hard to get it into a 30 minute slot on some other day, or to put right at 1 instead of smack in the middle.

In most calendar systems (including MSFT and Google) , meetings aren’t autoaccepted even if you’re available. You choose to accept each one

OK, then just assume that I used the system and didn't accept any meeting.

It's not about a particular product, it's about that certain tasks become easier for everyone if standards are followed. For example, at my uni a professor forwarded all his e-mail to his Gmail account where he had setup elaborate filtering rules for all his courses. Unfortunately, he didn't understand how Gmail's filtering worked well enough which resulted in all my e-mails to him being dropped.

I say MSFT because they already use teams and outlook. Just not the calendar feature.

It’s be the same objection with any solution I think

And meetings aren’t autoaccepted , they’re marked tentative until you manually confirm

That calendar system sounds ideal for the way I work. I'd probably write some tooling to make it a little easier, but sending around little iCal files and reviewing my schedule often means I have a good intuition for what I'm doing, and when.

When I start to get annoyed by the amount of stuff I've got scheduled, and the consequential overhead of managing it, it means I'm trying to do too much, and I need to reduce it. Outlook considers every moment not spent in a meeting as "free time", unless you specifically block off "reserved time", and that's just not how I work.

As with the travel business, the main complexity is rescheduling. A sudden big sales opportunity at the same time as an important internal meeting you’re hosting with 10 people? What could be done in a few clicks with outlook or equivalent is going to take you half a day of panic

You can mark yourself as busy, with a recurring event, outside the windows of time you wish to accept meeting requests.

You could tell them to use cal.com for their calendar needs, open core/ source

cal.com looks interesting, but doesn't it mean that it will have access to all the information in ALL my calenders? So not only does microsoft know about my embarrassing condition doctors appointment, but so does cal.com?

You can self-host it. I worked there briefly.

Their market is big enterprises and govt that won't fly a hosted solution, they offer both a SaaS and self-hosted licenses

Then it's up to you how you sync with calendars, if a self-host caldav instance is enough no microsoft there

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