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Comment by bigmattystyles | Hacker News Reader

Solved this for my former work by creating a meeting cost plugin - displaying - (time * corporate avg salary * participants). I should revive this. It's jarring when you see it.

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.

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I think there is a balance where you have to be careful here - this same logic can bring you to a place where you never do team days, team building, all hands meetings, customer visits, client meetings etc which are activities which can be difficult to justify objectively on an individual basis but incredibly worthwhile from a soft perspective.

For those on the Middle Meeting rung of the corporate ladder - going to a meeting is at least "billable" as the alternative use of their time is they sit and browse the internet instead.

Brilliant

Nothing like the realization you're stuck somewhere pointless that costs $1500 an hour.

A very real (and morale boosting way) to put this into action would be to require anyone wishing to hold a meeting with more, than, say, 5 people present buy lunch for all attendees.

How do you do this without revealing salary information?

Avg corp salary, not individual :-) - at the time I used Glassdoor data. (Or maybe I even just ballparked it?)

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...

> Really makes you think - would I pay this much for what I'm trying to solve here?

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.

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