Hacker News Reader

I've asked some friends at Amazon this and never quite got a satisfactory answer.

It feels really disrespectful to waste my time, when I've bothered reading the preparatory material, because X number of other attendees haven't. And, presumably, for Amazon to do this for every single meeting, it must have been commonplace for folks to not manage their time effectively to get prepared for the meetings they attend? Quite a bizarre approach.

View on HN

"Quite a bizarre approach."

Or a pragmatic one. Also I imagine there are other positive side effects like preparing a focus for the topic at hand. And 5 minutes, or even shorter might be enough for most topics I think. Better than people pretending they know what is going on.

The optimal is for everyone not to do the reading, there’s time for it in the meeting. And in terms of time management, managers can be in back to back meetings for a large portion of the day and this provides focus time to not just wing it.

Wouldn't it be optimal to have read, understood and thought about it before the meeting? Although this probably never happens, except maybe if you go full async and request a thoughtful response from everybody before a meeting might happen.

Right I shouldn’t have said optimal, it’s the Nash equilibrium though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com