Hacker News Reader

Comment by hardware2win | Hacker News Reader

>Point 5 - meetings are great if remote. You can sit there muted on a zoom call for hours tweaking with your bike or playing games on your other computer.

You dont have to tell people about it...

View on HN

What is valued is presence and contributions. That doesn't necessarily require attention for the entire meeting. I'm not going to live forever so I would rather expend that wasted 80% on something that I value. The outcome of the meeting is always the same!

Sounds like you are part of the problem

Unlikely. I don't create meetings. I get invited to them. They are mostly unnecessary and have a net negative return of investment. I mean lucky if any of them have an agenda, minutes or an action and rarely does the facilitator actually have any conceptual knowledge of the subject. The meeting exists to service the facilitator's personal value and the naïve process model, not the business, the staff or the customers.

Why just dont attend them?

Im invited to like 10 of meetings each week

Nobody expects me to attend those where im not really important or need to discuss stuff

Because that means I have to justify not being a "team player" then. And I can't be bothered with that. I'm not creating conflict for the sake of it.

Just stop attending then and do actual work and raise it up with whoever you report to. You are just as guilty for blindly accepting this behavior and then fucking around. Either do your job or do something else.

What problem?

If you can’t identify it, then you are definitely part of the problem

Managers forget to ask themselves if a slack message / email could have done it instead of creating ANOTHER meeting.

And it is your job to tell them to go fuck themselves and stop wasting time

I've asked my coworkers to cancel a biweekly meeting that in my mind creates no value. That meeting still lives on, so I don't feel guilty about reading news or clipping my nails while it happens.

Have you asked what value they see in the meeting?

I think they decided to end the conversation there and then when I suggested axing the meeting, so I didn't bother. I just show up every two weeks muted and get noted as an attendee on some pointless meeting document. No skin off my back since I don't own equity.

Not GP, but I once asked my engineering colleagues if I was the only one who doesn't pay attention in the bi-weekly all-hands because most of the information is irrelevant to me (e.g. what new marketing strategies we're using). Some admitted that they would do some work on the side, but some also said "well, those people also want to have a chance to share what they did".

I found this remark puzzling and illuminating at the same time. Apparently, for some people, meetings aren't about productivity but about satisfying psychological needs.

My retention from any audio is simply better if I’m doing something other than staring at the screen. On meetings that I’ve listened to while taking a walk, I can think back to specific things on my walk and recall exactly what was being discussed, sometimes months or years later. This holds true for doing housework, yardwork etc. There’s some spatial component of memory that wakes up while I do that. It might look like I’m not paying attention to the meeting at all, but I’m actually paying more attention and getting chores done. Win-win.

And you wonder why execs are pushing RTO so hard

That's mostly because all that empty office space looks bad and it's worth nothing now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com