Comment by jononomo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jononomo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I have always been bewildered by the anti-meeting sentiment in the tech community. There seems to be an assumption that meetings are bad. But obviously, meetings facilitate communication. You can waste a lot more time by not having a meeting and letting misunderstandings abound.

Shopify employees are going to get paid for their time whether they're in a meeting or not, so this calculator should consider the cost savings that result from having a meeting instead of not having a meeting.

"Meetings are a waste" is just such a juvenile perspective. If meetings truly are a waste in your organization, then the problem is your employees.

I.e., it is probably you who is the waste, not the meeting you're in.

Meetings are not a waste but they are costly to ICs because they interrupt our context, and recovering from context switch is expensive.

The unit of work for a manager is a meeting because they need to coordinate.

The IC is more of an execution role which requires sustained concentration.

If managers don’t understand this difference and call for meetings willynilly, they are actually costing the company productivity.

Regular syncs are important so that people are working on the right thing but people also need time to work.

http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

I’ve been to too many meetings where we decide something and then revisit it next year because we literally can’t remember how the meeting went. Sometimes many of the attendees have moved on now. Meetings need an agenda and a recording (video, minutes, whatever) to have value comparable to docs or email threads. Everyone we hire tomorrow will have missed every meeting, but docs are waiting for them.

Meetings are also noisy, so it’s hard to contribute if you need quiet to think.

I used to feel this way as well. But meetings can spiral out of control. In my previous company, my stand ups were taking 30 min minimum and sometimes up to an hour. At one point, I was looking at 3 hours of meetings a day. As an IC, I felt pretty powerless because it was my EM that was making these decisions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com