“Tinder for Canceling Meetings”
meetcala.com
meetcala.com
There is no source code, and it gets READ access to your meetings!
Please do not make the error and give a non-vetted source access to your PRIVATE data!
Makes me wonder if this cycle of internet innovation is over, and whether we're now going to be subject to 50+ years of stagnation and increasing regulation while the more risk-averse personality types start dominating. Similar to what happened in the automative industry -- think of the insanity and lack of concern for safety that went on at auto companies in 1920s Detroit that also simultaneously allowed for the core innovation and fast iteration in automotive to happen.
My guess would be, even more "do not want". 15 years ago, "cloud" was not even really a thing, and many were understandably very averse to it when it was introduced. If anything, the megacorps have only convinced us to give up more of our privacy since then.
Some say data protection today inhibits development. I do not think there is much merit to arguments of this kind.
I don't even believe the most important innovations wouldn't have been possible with more data protection at all and that includes huge datasets to feed AI.
Maybe the market for data being sold would be smaller. But that isn't innovation really.
- Collect a paycheck
- Enjoy their job as much as the employer will let them
- Progress in their career
In 2023, there is usually zero loyalty in either direction. Much of management is about how you get people who fundamentally don't care about you (beyond the above) to do something in your interest.
This goes all the way up to most CEOs, so "your interest" means the CEO's interest (while not being fired by the Board).
Morally speaking, you can decide that the employer doesn't have loyalty to you, so you won't have loyalty to the employer. But if that's your morality, then there is no rationale for being either loyal or disloyal, because you'll just mirror what someone else does. This makes the decision less meaningful than tossing a coin; it's a morality of randomness, which is dysfunctional and anti-social. It's better to live your own principles (such as loyalty) regardless of whether someone gives you the same back.
Practically speaking, doing your job the way your job wants you to do it (caring about data privacy) helps you in your career and improves the business, and improving the business keeps you in a job and again helps your career.
It's also a quarter of your life. Don't you want to do your job as well as you can, so that all that time wasn't a waste?
1) Mutual loyalty. This changed in the eighties, as jobs became transactional. Typical SWE tenure is three years today, and human resources are treated as just that, resources.
2) Improving the world. Would you rather individuals act in the interests of Shell Oil, Phillip Morris, Microsoft, Lockheed-Martin, or in the interests of society as a whole? Why do you care that a particular corporation survives or dies, rather than everyone being better off? If Google is replaced by DuckDuckGo or Bing, and customers / investors / employees switch over, what's the moral value of that?
It makes rational sense to do your job as well as you can, but "as well as you can" isn't defined the same as "to the benefit of maximizing shareholder value."
Most people I know switch viewpoints after a decade or two in industry. It takes an event or understanding the internals of corporations well enough.
As a footnote, "doing your job the way your job wants you to do it" doesn't even make sense. A corporation doesn't want anything. It's a collection of individuals. Your boss might want something, the CEO might want something different, yet a different thing might be in the interests of shareholder value, something completely different in the interests of customers, and a policy document stored on the intranet might dictate something yet different.
Acting in the interests of a corporate entity and the interests of society aren't mutually exclusive. It's extremely beneficial to society for ethical people to work at large corporations to ensure the corporation does not harm society.
Well clearly a corporation does want things, as a corporation is a capitalist entity. It wants to increase its profits and maximize shareholder value. The rules, regulations and bylaws of that corporation are what it wants executed by its employees (and which you are contractually obligated to comply with).
Doing one's job as well as one can means weighing many different competing forces and making the best choice you can. The same happens in your own personal life. Do you eat an entire pizza every night because it's tasty, or do you moderate how much pizza you eat to stay healthy? These are two competing interests (your tastebuds vs your health) that you have to juggle and make the best decision you can.
I do maintain my car so it continues to work for me, but it doesn't "want" oil or gas. I want it to work for me.
The same is true for corporations. Corporations are a useful construct for keeping society free and productive (relative to, say, command economies or feudalism). I want the retirees who invested in the corporation to be able to retire, customers to be happy, and employees to have a healthy work environment. The extent to which that aligns to what you think a piece of paper in Delaware wants varies. It sometimes aligns and sometimes doesn't.
Beyond that, there is no fundamental moral imperative for helping your employer grow anymore than there is for oiling a car.
There is a moral imperative to doing what you agree to do (which includes contracts), the strength of which varies by context and culture. I can go into that in much more depth.
Morally you have an obligation to yourself and other people, and following moral principles in relation to a company should be considered the same as moral principles applied to people. Like you point out, companies are made of people, your actions impact people in and through the company, hence your morals apply to the company.
You don't have any moral obligation to your car. But if you don't eventually change the oil, someone is going to be impacted by it; the people stuck behind you in traffic, the tow truck driver, the mechanic, your kids stuck at after-school practice, etc. And even further, you impact yourself by not maintaining this machinery, by failing to live a principle of hard work, responsibility, caring for others impacted by your actions, the environment. You also fail to treat yourself well through the maintenance of the vehicle you own and use, losing a valuable asset. Pick your philosophical poison, there's not a lot of moral justification for these things. But you're right, you don't do them because you owe it to the car.
https://www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-betwee...
That's web link #1. Further links showed a few more distinctions, but none which matched what you wrote. It sounds like it's an important point, but I don't know what it is.
In terms of obligations to car (or corporation) versus human beings, it's not a "pick your philosophical poison." I'll give distinctions:
- If I have a friend who in need of help, and a car which would be damaged if driven without maintenance, the ethical behavior is to kill my car and help my friend. If, on the other hand, my spouse is sick, and helping my friend involves neglecting bringing my spouse to a hospital, I should probably "maintain" my spouse's health.
In corporations, a few examples:
- Pricing. I can set pricing to maximize profits / growth or to maximize customer benefit (which involves the company surviving, but not necessarily growing).
- Legal anticompetitive behavior. I can focus on harming my competitors (which may be best for shareholder value but contributes negatively to the world) or on building value
- Spyware / privacy. Profits may be maximized, but customers are harmed.
- Sales, litigation, etc. are all activities which mostly take away value from the world. It's good if people know about what solutions exist, but the profit-maximizing investment goes many times beyond that.
.... and so on.
In many cases, "good of the world" and "good of employer" align. If I'm working on a word processor, it's best for everyone if it works well, doesn't crash, etc. The distinctions come in when there's a misalignment. If all people pick "good of the world" over "good of employer," individual companies will be less competitive, but the ecosystem will be more efficient overall, and the world will work better.
I assume people on this forum immediately picture high paying engineering jobs and not the average worker's job.
Corporations don't have interests. They're abstractions -- ways of organizing people to be productive members of society. Individuals within those corporations have interests.
If you look at a company as if it were a sentient human, you'll get to the wrong conclusions. There is no moral imperative for a company to survive. There's a moral imperative to make sure everyone has gainful, productive employment, healthy levels of stress, etc.
If you're at Google, and you can work on:
(1) an advertising user-profiling technology with no social benefit but contribution to Google's bottom line
(2) a civics-focused open-source project with no benefit to shareholder value, but significant value to society
Which would you pick?
If you're at Enron pre-scandal, and can either:
(1) successfully cover up evidence to prevent the scandal; or
(2) blow the whistle
Which do you pick? That's where the moral imperative sits. These things are much more complex with a partner. There's a moral imperative not to betray your partner, as well as one to not support immoral actions, and some balance. With corporations, there is no such moral imperative. If an unethically-organized corporation dies, and resources move into ethically-organized ones, the world is better off.
It's perfectly reasonable to make a commitment to "not be evil," and to "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That was the founding mission of Google. That's very different from loyalty to a colorful logo, a set of incorporation documents, and an abstraction.
First sign of BS, give up and never try again.
Do you think contractors shred plans of your house after you hire them for a remodel? Or do they just throw them away in a dumpster, with your address on them, behind their offices.
The two are sometimes the same, and sometimes very different. To the plumber point, if you work for a plumbing corporation which requires you to up-sell unneeded repairs, you have no ethical obligation to do so, and indeed, you have an ethical obligation to subvert that particular requirement.
On the other hand, you do have a duty to do plumbing right.
Capisce?
That said, lately I have favored Kagi FastGPT for two (three) reasons:
- I trust Kagi a magnitude more (or even more) than I trust any FAANG company except Apple [1][2].
- It seems to be way more up to date.
- (It seems a bit less shy.)
[1]: Why? Sound business plan, incentives align.
[2]: Does it mean I trust them? No, that would have meant I hadn't learned a thing from WhatsApp. And no, after the photo snooping stunt from Apple a couple of years ago I don't trust them either, I only consider them my best option at the moment.
As written above: "Sound business plan, incentives align."
> reselling Bing search results at a premium,
Should I also refuse to deal with ex-Facebook employees? Ex-Google employees?
These two companies has created a lot more hassle/stress/worries in my life than Godaddy.
> reselling Bing search results at a premium,
With the value add he offers it makes it a great deal for me. I don't care if other make money on me, even lots of money, as long as it is a good deal for me.
In fact, I actually see it as good sign if people make money on the services they provide me, as it will both incentivize them to continue providing these services as well as encouraging others to start competing providers.
> with a history of "attracting customers at one price, then increasing the price substantially"
I got in at an really low price and got grandfathered into a deal that is still the best in the market. They have announced the change in a clear way and since I was free to cancel anytime I wanted I cannot complain.
Had I been tied to the service somehow I would probably have been annoyed even if the service was the same and the price hike was the same, but I wasn't and I find this to be within expectations for an early stage start up.
> who flags HN posts bringing these facts to the public's attention
I'm not aware of this. Would you care to link some sources?
If not I would just expect it was a totally unreasonable post and some happy customer like me flagged it. (And on a side note: While non YC companies aren't bound to YC standards I really hope most companies who frequent HN stick to the standard of not flagging complaints against themselves.)
Edit:
> has generated so much enthusiasm here. Maybe I missed something?
For some of us, a working search engine can save us significant amount of time every day. After first having had a working search engine for years, then lost it and struggled for years with workarounds, I'd say my enthusiasm is rather understandable.
And I know this is not everyone's experience, but with my search patterns, and in the bucket Google has put my account, I get irrelevant results all the time and I get irrelevant and insulting ads all the time.
As a random example: Trello can list any customer in their promotional materials (you have to dig through the legal docs to find the opt-out email). As the CEO of your own company, how would you like to see your company listed in a Trello ad when you're trying to do business with a Trello competitor, or gain a customer who competes with Trello?
Point being: employees use 3rd parties all the time in ways they shouldn't, often leaking a lot more data than meetings. It's why DLP is so popular.
Both Trello and my email provider can do this. Both will have consequences.
I'd imagine they offer Trello for free to entice you to start paying for Jira (or god forbid, Confluence).
There’s a big difference between me choosing what to put in trello (usually trivial data) vs giving an app unlimited read access.
Duh.
If you used this logic, you couldn't use any non-open-source calendar tool, or apps like Superhuman.
It's not black-and-white for me, more like an intuitive estimate of probability of mishandling data, colored by relevant policies. But some specific examples from work:
- I wouldn't use Trello or GSuite without clearing it with corporate; however, I would still trust the two much more than a random Tinder for Meetings app, because the two are well-known multinationals (read: stationary targets for lawsuits), while that Tinder for Meetings thing is a small thing, and could easily be a scam / data exfil attempt by someone who'll disappear the next day, never to be found;
- I use O365 tools, because corporate has signed appropriate deals with Microsoft and I can safely assume those tools are OK to use;
- I'm not worried about third-party packages from MELPA exfiltrating proprietary data via my Emacs, because of a combination of Free Software culture, Open Source culture, Emacs being niche, and this never happening before to my knowledge;
- I am worried about third-party extensions to VS Code, because it's more mainstream software culture, has mass appeal meaning it's a good target for scammers, and the entire ecosystem is thoroughly infused with analytics and surveillance bullshit;
- I use ChatGPT for various things (via API, through alternative frontend), but I do not use it for generic, non-company specific things, always triple-checking that I'm not accidentally revealing any IP; this is in line with recent company policies;
Etc.
Big corporations are also good targets for lawsuits - they may not be easy, but they are stationary, and if you have a good case, chances are many other people have one too. This is, again, establishing some baseline of trust, even in absence of a proper business contact.
Random SaaS / fresh startups? They're a highly-mobile targets. There's a good chance they may close shop and disappear overnight. There is no baseline of trust there, and much more thorough due diligence is required.
Accountants have tens of clients, online apps have thousands or millions. For an app, the relative benefit from skimming a bit off every client is higher, the relative cost of losing one client who notices is lower.
Point is, my dealings with my accountant(s) is highly regulated, and there is expectations of confidentiality, trust, and privacy -- with rules and laws to back that up.
Not the case with some random app handling your corporate data. Plus Outlook and other calendars integrate with many other systems, and there are a lot of nasty hacks if you can get someone's email. Lotta risk for negligible gain.
Things like your MacOS install being on 12.3.1 instead of 12.3.2, blindly listing off AWS/GCP recommendations without any consideration to how the service is implemented and/or how the infrastructure is used, or making engineering teams jump through seventeen hoops to deprecate an endpoint..... all while there's like a SQL injection in the primary public-facing customer API or something.
A good security team will manage to find the time to also identify and address the actual concrete security issues.
Flashy application with no contact information or legitimacy trying to access data. Your alarm bells should be going off at that point.
Whenever the erosion of privacy comes up, folks here point to regular folk being ambivalent until their identity is stolen. But even among the tech literate? Chill, don't worry, everybody is reading your work email!
It's the modern day equivalent of tossing USB sticks in the parking lot.
They could, from a technical perspective, but their privacy policy states that they don't.
It only takes one day to write an app like this, and endless waves of tech people will give up their data for the chance to downvote a meeting.
I'm wondering how many Privacy Policies are read by at least on employee of the company, and how many are copy-pasted from the competitor's web.
> Meeting Swipe
> Worldwide Corporation
Here's me wondering what that's even supposed to mean.
sooo like whatever cloud thing you'd give it access to ?
Perhaps it isn’t an issue for you, but in case it’s not obvious, calendar entry titles and descriptions can (and have) contained confidential information that would present various forms of business risk if leaked. BigCo corporate IT policy often forbids placing such information on untrusted third-party hardware/software/services.
"Meetings are like lasagna without the cheese—dull, bland, and ultimately unsatisfying." - Garfield
"Garfield." Cartoon. Created by Jim Davis. Published May 5th, 1987. Garfield.com, https://www.garfield.com/comic/1987/05/05. Accessed 15 May 2023.
"Meetings: The art of keeping the people who need to work in a room too long so they can't get any work done." - Dilbert
"Dilbert." Cartoon. By Scott Adams. Published October 7th, 2003. Dilbert.com, https://dilbert.com/strip/2003-10-07. Accessed 15 May 2023.
(and yes both references and quotes are fake)
At a job a few years ago, managers and project owners were in the habit of canceling meetings last-minute if no agenda.
In principal this was great - give people back time - but it was unfortunately unilateral and too late. Basically, if you don't see the Slack message about "hey, anyone have stuff for this meeting, if not I'll cancel" in the thirty minute window before the meeting, you didn't get a say - so in practice this meant the managers/project owners were the ones making the decisions and upward and sideways communication just didn't happen very frequently. E.g. if manager A has a standing meeting with individuals B, C, and D, and A individually was up to date on what all three of B, C and D were doing, A would cancel the meeting and B/C/D wouldn't be up to speed on what they were doing unless they all set up more individual meetings taking up more time than the original one "gave back."
That was less of a problem in-office where others are likely to bump into each other anyway, but when things went remote it was isolating.
Hard blockers get added, but otherwise I've found ICs to be very hesitant about adding to the agenda. Especially when it's just "I want to know what's going on in the other teams/projects" because nobody wants to admit ignorance.
As a manager, I often reach out on the “opposite” day (Monday if the meeting is on a Thursday) and ask if there are things they want to talk about that are not already there. I also put things weeks ahead to give some sense of structure.
Same for the team’s meeting agenda: people, especially senior team members, are more keen to edit that one, though. Often, I try to copy elements that they add to our 1:1 to discuss their concern ahead of time.
When another team member raises a concern about another member, I ask them to tell them to add it to the agenda. That hasn’t worked, ever, but it highlights the role of that agenda as an asymetric way to handle the relations.
Just decline any meeting that doesn't have an agenda with a comment of "I don't think I'd bring any value to this meeting."
If the meeting does have an agenda but doesn't have any goal decline it with a comment like "I don't have a strong opinion about the goal here, so I'm happy to accept whatever the outcome is."
If there's an agenda and a goal then attend that one because you don't often get to see a mythical creature.
If you want to be an edgelord about accepting meetings it's not going to work in your favor for most people/companies.
In my experience in American bigtech, an engineer who rejects all meetings that don’t meet their own personal set of rules for what constitutes a worthwhile meeting (or I’m sure more accurately, applies those rules whenever they don’t want to attend) would be viewed very negatively. We’re expected to collaborate a lot by default, and by American standards it’s also a very snowflakey (making all meeting invites have to conform to your special little rules for you to grace us with your attendance) and aggressive way to express distaste in something.
IME it would be much better to directly just ask the creator if your attendance is truly necessary or even just noshow. But perhaps etiquette is different in other parts of the world.
And yeah, you can toughen up and decline anyway despite all that, but processes should be based on giving employees the right incentives, not hoping they toughen up. (See also, blameless post-mortems.)
And then... the meeting veers in to something else, a decision is made about something that affects you or... simply commits you to do work.
Insane, but it's happened to me more than a few times. Sometimes directly ("you do xyz") and sometimes indirectly. "Person X will do xyz" really means I now have to manage/oversee/review person X because they're very junior. Push back, and you're "not a team player".
Doesn't happen a lot, but has happened enough for me to be wary in new orgs until I get a few months in.
So far, I've managed to get some mileage out of RSVP-ing as "tentative", with a comment that boils down to "how about you add some agenda to the meeting invite, because at this point I kind of don't know WTF is this about and why am I even on the invitee list?". I haven't thought of treating a goal of the meeting as distinct thing from the agenda. I'll try it next time, whenever it comes - for some reason, I seem to not get all that many meeting invites anymore ;).
Larger meetings like all-hands are different.. no way you’re getting every attendee to agree on canceling those, that’s more management politics.
Depending on org culture, being direct about opting out of meetings can cast you in a negative light at best, or put your job at risk at worst.
The better the culture is around creating safety to be direct and have agency to do so, the less likely these hacks are needed.
I’m am very blunt with the dozen or so people who report up to me: if you don’t think you need to be in a meeting, say so, and drop me a message if I might have to defend the decision across the org or manage up. But all orgs are different along with their politics and quality of middle management.
And IME the useless meeting problem is pretty common when you have an ineffective manager who likes to “hold court” with as many cross team stakeholders as possible. You probably aren’t close enough to candidly tell them the meeting structure needs to change or just to cancel the recurring meeting, you need to be on their good terms because you work with them relatively often and ask favors of each other, the worst your or their team is doing the more you need the meeting as evidence of crossteam collaboration…
At any company you’re going to end up with this problem, maybe at a startup its easier to communicate frankly and weed out the type of person who would do this, but I think it’s still quite possible for an otherwise good employee to make the mistake of creating inefficient meetings/processes where everyone is too nice or polite to give candid feedback.
I have done what you describe in the last paragraph, and also cancelled team meetings or sent a single representative. I also sent people back to their seats halfway through a meeting if it no longer concerned them. I have no regrets. Nobody complained. My team seemed to appreciate it.
The actual feedback my manager and I would both want to give is “this meeting is in practice just <other team’s manager> giving and getting a status update we don’t need to be present for, then asking us questions for his projects, we’d rather it be more collaborative or less frequent” but that would hurt that other manager’s feelings. And we need their buy in to help us with things sometimes. And probably we dominate meetings sometimes that the pointy haired guy (or members of his team) goes to anyway. It’s kinda aggro to just refuse to let him hold court and it might burn a bridge we need to be maintained…
I’ve seen the same thing happen with a TL or manager who tries to force a really inefficient process like 30-60m 10+ person standup every day. Yes to an extent status updates are necessary but in this other case the manager is even pointier haired and has no idea how to manage, his ICs are actually quite talented, this is just his way to hold court.
With anonymous meeting feedback you can have a better way of surfacing a signal that the meeting isn’t valuable to most attendees. And you avoid foisting the political risk on whoever is bravest enough to speak out. I know you might think all these failure modes I mentioned are just big company politics, but I think they can happen in basically any situation where there is a power imbalance (even a little startup with a ceo insisting on an excess of meetings with the 4 other employees).
I can give you an insight into one way to measure that. (Like every time you measure things with a normative proxy, this gets far more controversial than you’d like or expect very fast.)
Measure the speaking time for everyone.
How is that controversial?
Well, you can ask what the goal of the meeting is, but if the point is “discussion” and the boss talked 94% of the time, we are in “this meeting could have been an email” territory. Because the boss is very much a listener, as he likes to remind people, that isn’t a great look. Or rather, whoever suggested to measure who is speaking isn’t a great fit for the team.
My other thought was to seek feedback for meetings automatically - close the app, ask how useful was this. Send monthly reports for the sake of anonymity.
Nothing like the realization you're stuck somewhere pointless that costs $1500 an hour.
Truth be told, it gets so expensive so fast, even with the entry level salary. Especially once you're over 2 participants. Really makes you think - would I pay this much for what I'm trying to solve here? And yes, it's not perfect, in fact, nothing is truly this reductive, but in lieu of a better metric...
I think this is the potential subtle failure in this thought - it shouldn’t be if you would pay, it should be if the company would pay.
And people will often dramatically under-estimate what a company will pay for something, particularly if it is a sunk-cost and not an ‘actual’ cost they will immediately realise.
Reminds me of Athenian ostracism. I always thought we should have a write-in line on ballots where if more than a third of voters write one name, they’re banned from public office for ten years.
The point is to expel demagogues, thereby incentivising compromise and not demonising a series of minorities. Athenians just banished the least popular person, assuming a quorum was met [1]. (I made up the one third threshold with limited thought.)
Since this app needs approval and getting everyone on board to use it, you can just do the same with the sentence above. It has the advantage that it will also reduce meetings that remain, as well as cancelling ones no one wants to attend.
This also makes me realise how few interesting products are mentioned on HN lately.
It's a funny 30min skit, well worth watching until the end, with a nice recap in the last 5 minutes.
If you follow those guidelines, you will have productive meetings.
In particular, with regard to this app, the meeting would have been cancelled way before any need to swipe, because the chairperson would have not scheduled it (or cancelled it if recurring) in the absence of any agenda items.
Similarly, swiping without knowing the agenda seems unproductive. If there were real issues involved, you've simply postponed until nearer the deadline.
Sometimes a meeting is important and shouldn't be cancelled, but the scheduled day/time ends up being inconvenient for one reason or another. Not inconvenient enough to justify claiming a last-minute conflict, but enough that you would still rather do it another time if it turned out that everyone else was in the same boat.
Definitely wish I had it at some past employers that had certain regular sync meetings that were pretty useless. People tend not to want to point it out so as to not offend the manager who loves organizing them.
And so if the manager wants the meeting anyway this would not help at all.
https://twitter.com/zackhargett/status/1653757448468193280
Zack Hargett & Paulius Dragunas
"Details regarding Cala dispute resolution process are available in the Cala Terms of Use."
But Cala Terms of Use doesn't link to anything and /terms doesn't load...
1. If you have such a bad meeting culture in the office that you think something like this might ever be useful. Fix your meeting culture.
2. If "anonymous voting" is considered reasonable or necessary given the office culture. Fix your communication. Have 1-to-1 meetings were you can discuss things like too many meetings, etc.
Maybe this is made as a joke, and if so, well done.