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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Don't doubt for a minute this happened. As a serial offender in the "does this meeting matter" whine, I have to acknowledge sometimes, talking is worthwhile. My problem is when people see their secret superpower as meetings.

I must admit a colleague of over 30 years and I agree there is a malicious compliance path in meetings: take them over and wrest the agenda to conform to your desire.

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"malicious compliance path in meetings: take them over and wrest the agenda to conform to your desire."

We used to have an IT director who had mastered the art of stealing meetings. He contributed nothing during the meeting but in the end with an authoritative voice he summarized what was said and who would do what. And the meeting was his without ever contributing anything.

This could be a good thing, depending on context. He was paying attention, but let people do their job. An IT director is a facilitator, they don't need to make ALL the decisions, just high-level ones, there are experts on the team for that.

The director NEEDS to make sure the company's goals are considered first, that the overall strategy is on track, and that everyone has the resources to do their jobs.

Not sure if I’d call that “stealing meetings”, I find it incredibly useful to rephrase what’s been decided on and who will do the next steps because that can easily get lost in the meeting,

An IT director who listens to the people under them and lets them work? That sounds great. There is nothing worse than someone who isn’t involved enough to know/need to know about something that slows down meetings asking everyone to explain what they mean.

The only thing worse is when someone isn’t paying attention but perks up with certain topic/keywords come up. Often asking questions that were just answered had they been listening.

so he took notes, summarized the meeting, and ensure that expectations were clarified as to who owns what?

that's what whoever called the meeting should be doing, and if they're not, someone should.

like it's annoying that the boss needs to keep doing that, but I bet things get done...

I should have added that this was the only thing the guy ever did. Otherwise his output was zero or mostly negative.

As the slightly unwilling current receipient of the role of chair for several local organisations and their meetings - a position that some would call 'leadership' and a sign of greatness or whatevs - been there done that... B^>

Meetings can be made to be good, especially if they have a useful purpose. Meetings that are there to stroke someone's ego or exercise personal selfish power are difficult to justify. Focus on the purpose.

> Meetings that are there to stroke someone's ego or exercise personal selfish power are difficult to justify.

If you are confident this is the case then a smart person would realise that complaining about the meeting being a waste of time is both true and likely to have significant blow back on them.

In my experience, if you can't create an agenda, then it's more than likely the meeting is unnecessary.

In my experience meetings should only be:

1) 1 on 1

2) Presentation with questions at the end

3) Roundtable status update (so like 2, but each person taking turns)

4) 4-person maximum whiteboard to decide on a very specific point agreed ahead of time

great list of criteria. I'd also add

5) End the moment there's nothing left to cover.

Those were 4 different types of meetings.

I guess the question is: how do you, say, design a new feature that needs input from more than 4 people?

You write a design, accept valued but nonbinding comments on it, and then deliver a presentation after which you’ll proceed with the project unless someone vetoes.

Exactly, also use some kind of design document tool that accepts comments (like Google Docs or Confluence) and try to get people to read and make notes _before_ any meetings.

It’s often useful to meet individually with each person before the presentation too, especially those people who are likely to throw up roadblocks. Ideally everyone is in agreement before the meeting, and the final decision is essentially a formality.

I’d like to see you try that when trying to improve a flow at, say, a hospital where that involves separate teams of nurses, lab workers, doctors pharmacists and admin staff.

But how do you know what to design?

You intuit it from discussions you've had with users about what they want, and with other developers about what can feasibly be built. If there's some reproducible process to identify good product ideas, I've never seen it in action, and I suspect the software market would look quite a bit different if it existed.

Status updates rarely require a meeting. If there is a group and they all need to give status updates to each other, a meeting (e.g. a standup) can be an efficient way to do that, but so can a shared document or group email, which have the benefit of being asynchronous.

If a team of people need to give status updates to their manager, that should certainly not be a group meeting. Nothing worse than the "status meeting" where you spend 5 minutes giving your report and then 25 minutes waiting for the meeting to be over.

> My problem is when people see their secret superpower as meetings.

Seriously, uptighty good girl/lad does notes in different colors kind of meating people, they do have a secret super power.

Kinda like devs that document their work.

Obviously I hate meatings and docs too. I am too cool for that.

Great, now i'm hugry and off to cook steak.

Oh. Ye sorry about that. I'll use more e and less a next time.

"This meeting could have been an email" is a common refrain from an associate of mine who works as a software dev for a major finance/print shop in the states. If having to use an obscure COBOL variant wasn't bad enough, the management and IT teams are absolutely garbage.

It's a tradeoff. "This meeting could have been an email" has an evil brother named "a meeting could have saved us all these emails".

(I have also seen a merely scheduled meeting doing wonders for reaching consensus over email. The meeting was then canceled as no longer necessary, which I think is the best result.)

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