Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room
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At U of M, they solved this problem by having classes officially start 10 minutes after the time they were advertised as. That is, a class listed as being 10-11am was actually 10:10-11am; nobody showed up until 10:10.
Sure, technically it's the same thing, but there's a pretty massive anchoring effect for things on the hour. Still being in the meeting room at 11:01 feels a lot later than still being in the meeting room at 10:51.
When I studied it had already been mostly abolished. Sometimes starting times were explicitly marked “sine tempore”.
10am c.t. = 10am with extra time
10am s.t. = 10am without extra time
The Latin prepositions cum (with) and sine (without) are always followed by the ablative case. German has grammatical cases too, but no ablative. The German propositions mit (with) and ohne (without) are followed by the accusative case.
So c.t. = cum tempore = mit Zeit = with time (or with some delay), and s.t. = sine tempore = ohne Zeit = without time (or without delay).
That doesn't change anything else you said, though :)
And of course, as everyone has already mentioned, spookie's comment is complete nonsense because the case is required, and fully explained, by the prepositions.
> German does not have ablative case
Some younger Latin recipes use 'cum sal' as a one-liner at the end, to tell the chef to season to their taste, for example.
I have some questions:
1. What cultural use? Are you saying that German culture involves writing recipes in recreational Latin?
2. Why is sal in the nominative case? That can't possibly work.
3. Shouldn't there be a verb? For example, Apicius always ends recipes with a direction like "serve" / "bring in" / "enjoy".
(Technically, those verbs are all in the future indicative, so I guess I shouldn't call them 'directions'. But it's hard to think of them as something other than directions.)
Nominative case - Its how its used. Can't say I've studied the evolution of that particular idiom, but breaking expected rules is not unusual.
There might have been a verb, once. But as with all slang, what gets dropped tends to confuse the foreigner, but be understood to the local.
c.t. is still standard at many German universities (and at all Bavarian universities I know). However, I know at least one university of applied sciences where lectures start at full hours.
I've heard it dates back to when people didn't have easy access to precise time. It would allow students to hear the hourly bells and walk to the class.
Thankfully
It’s a good convention.
All my classes were 1.5 hours long. Yet professors still regularly chose to introduce new material on days with back-to-back classes, leaving standalone classes for practice or “less important” topics.
Almost exactly as much as one that's 55 (or 60) minutes long but many people are late to.
But yes, "1 hour" is fairly short for any deep topic progress. I vastly prefer classes that are 2 or 3, it gives time to have questions and not be in a blind rush.
(There's some nuance to that statement as science courses tende to have labs - I don't remember why first-year physics was a requirement for software engineering, but it was - mathematics courses tended to have weekly assignments, and at least one software course had a very unusual style of putting us in a room one whole day per week for a semester to work on group projects.)
As an aside, it's a little absurd that people wouldn't go to class given how much money they're paying.
Private colleges are around $39k USD per year. That's a lot of dough per class-hour.
The reality in my experience is that, whilst students are on paper adults (mostly) and responsible for their own successes and failures, a significant number benefits from being forced to attend. That's unfortunate for the ones that could "safely" skip the lectures and have to go, but on average it leads to better overall outcomes. So in that regard the attendance policies are sensible.
For some lectures it was great, you really needed those 15 minutes to get coffee, go to the bathroom, etc., but for some late afternoon stuff, you just wanted to shorten the last three breaks to 5 minutes and leave half an hour early.
Most lectures were allocated double slots, though, for example from 10 to 12. In that case the actual official lecture time would have been either 10:15 to 11:00, followed by a quarter hour break, and another 45 minutes from 11:15 to 12:00. Alternatively -- and probably more commonly -- there was no break, and the lecture was 1.5 hours from 10:15 to 11:45.
It's pretty obvious, you can't travel to a meeting instantly and 100% appreciated when you work in such a place. For those senior enough for all day back to back meetings you get toilet breaks!
If you work in a company that doesn't do this take note and if you're senior in a company you should start pushing for this to be implemented. A lot of calendar tools have options for meeting buffers by default and enabling it is all you need to do.
Now meetings actually start at :05 or :07. The prior meeting will often drag until that time, but you don't feel bad knocking at :00 or :02 and asking for the room to clear.
Unfortunately UMich ended "Michigan time" back in 2018. I always thought it was a great solution to the problem.
https://www.michiganpublic.org/education/2018-02-20/universi... / https://record.umich.edu/articles/university-updating-start-...
Sad.
He also insisted students purchase a stapler and staple their homework. And he would give negative points on assignments. You could say "I don't know how to do X" for a step in a proof (0 pts), but if you put in something wrong, you would get negative points on that part.
He was a good prof, and I enjoyed his classes.
I remember reading (maybe from Nate Silver) of a professor who would use this technique to teach about uncertainty. You could weigh your overall grade with a proclamation about how certain you were about the answer. Right answers with high certainty could really amp up your grade, but conversely if you claimed 100% certainty on a question you got wrong, you’d fail the course!
You pick the winner and then assign 1-25 (or whatever) points to it (using each number for only one category) and if you get it right you get that number of points.
It basically prevents ties. It lets you make risky picks without falling out of the running. The downside is a shocking number of people won't be able to follow the rule and end up with 22 used twice or whatever.
I don't think it's surprising or notably bad that people will have trouble tracking everything when you ask them to order a big list while making other decisions that affect the order.
Make it a web app or hand out cards where the order is the certainty.
Your Prof Ramsey would have penalised me for this unknown condition. This isn't behaviour to be celebrated.
I try to be generous as much as is reasonable. I generally assume the person who cuts me off in traffic may have an urgent need, but vaulting every misdeed to an assumption that it's due to some unknown disability crosses into unreasonable territory, if for nothing else than it's probabilistically a bad assumption. Taken to the extreme, it becomes enabling for everyone who does not have a disability but gets away with bad behavior.
On the contrary, your anecdote is evidence of how this seemingly arbitrary behaviour can actually uncover real issues and prompt people to question and investigate.
No. How could he? Instead, I'm pointing out the value of empathy, tolerance and flexibility.
If you know you're late all the time, then make allowances. 8 hours not enough sleep, go to bed earlier. 1 hour not enough time to wake up, set your alarm to give you 2 hours.
This isn't related to knowing you're sick, just knowing you're late often.
It always makes me wonder when I hear "empathy, tolerance, flexibility" pointed at a group of 30 or more, who need to work around one persons inability to do the same.
I had a co-worker who was always late. I told her she was lying when she said she'd be there at 2. She got miffed. I replied. "You're late so often, do you expect you'll be on time. I know you'll try, but do you really believe you're not going to be late." She paused. "If you know you're very likely going to be late and tell me you will be somewhere at time X, then you are lying."
You think it's the disabled person's responsibility to never put a burden on others when others' expectations puts an unreasonable amount of burdens.
And we're talking about this specific kind of disability, but as someone else said in a sibling comment, it could be anything. Imagine you really have to go to the bathroom for some reason (pregnancy, diarrhea, ...). That can happen to a lot of people. Should all of them be prevented from being accepted into class ?
That's why we speak about "empathy, tolerance, flexibility". Empathy towards the weaker few, not empathy towards the "normal" many.
[1]: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hypersomnia/s...
I don’t think anyone here is disagreeing that those with a disability should be protected. The distinction is that many don’t go so far as to assume someone has a disability when their behavior is maladaptive. In game theory, systems break down when they are too many people abusing the system. Giving everyone a break on all instances just in case they have a disability sets the table for creating an unstable system ripe for abuse.
You point out the specific case of sleep disorders. But the numbers of medical disorders is functionally infinite. If we apply the same rule across the board, we would be creating a world where nobody is held accountable because they might just have some obscure illness they aren’t aware of.
I think there are better approaches that don’t devolve like that. As another congener said, you can create a system where late-comers can quietly come in the back.
Illness is only one of the possible issues a student may have that may be impacting them. A little flexibility goes a long way.
Not locking a door allows the students who were delayed on the road by a car accident, as much as the disabled student who took five minutes longer than expected after falling down some stairs.
Every single person makes mistakes at times. If those are not absorbed by flexibility, then they go on to affect everyone else connected to the punished.
If the professor is delayed due to a tire puncture, should they lose their tenure?
Most 90% of students is not late on any given day. Should they all be penalized for the actions of a few?
That, is a lack of empathy. Especially as for about the last hundred years universities have had a process that allows for the necessary flexibility.
To take this to the extreme... Should we simply fire everyone who is late to work, without reason? If someone else causes a car accident, should we simply revoke the licenses of everyone involved, regardless?
Not necessarily, but I think you’d see a much more consistent attendance rate. Which is of course the whole point of such a policy.
And I think education benefits when you define the student as a student, before anything else.
For example, if students enter from the rear of the room, then delayed students can join without disrupting the on-time students.
If we start the design process with the awareness that some students will be late, then we can design systems which support all students.
This seems like a false equivalency. The student isn’t getting dropped from their degree program, they’re missing a class. If a professor is late, especially habitually late, I may not advocate for them losing tenure, but I’d certainly expect it to have a smaller impact like being brought up in a performance review.
A class that they have paid to access.
A class that the professor would not be teaching, if they did not believe it essential to the degree program.
They are being denied access to something both important, and already paid for.
What of the daycare that's expecting you to show up and pick up your kids on time. Should we tell the workers to wait, because the guy replacing you at work was late. Then of course we tell the cleaners of the daycare to start their shift 30 mins later because they have to wait for the last kid to leave. Oh and the cleaners will have to stay 30 min extra to clean, so now we tell the people relying on them to wait. Or.. Or we tell the cleaners to work a bit harder so they don't take an extra 30 minutes..
So the 30min you're late messes up the day of not just the person expecting you, but all the people expecting them.
How about on principle anticipate that you're going to be late, and make an effort to arrive early. If you know you're late all the time, start giving yourself more time.
It always baffles me. Make accommodations for your conditions.. So the 30 plus students are meant to have their time interrupted by a late arrival. I have ADD, so when in a class if someone comes in late, I get distracted and can't pay attention. Which person should this prof accomodate? Me with ADD or you.
The "make accommodations" is always argued by the few, against the needs of the many. It's self centred. If waking up is hard, go to be earlier, get a better alarm clock, pick classes later in the day. Make accommodations for your own disability.
My ADD has me working from home, with noise cancelling headphones. I accommodated my own-self.
In cases where a student shows up 10+ minutes late to a course and disrupts the lecture, what percentage of the time do you estimate the reason for tardiness is a diagnosed or undiagnosed illness or hardship.
_THAT_ is flexibility.
This was the worst part of being a person who is prompt and on-time for all meetings and events. If you're going to always accommodate people who are chronically late, then you don't respect my time or effort. You just slapped me in the face for being prompt when you rewound your lecture or repeated your introduction. You wasted ten minutes of my time to cater to other people who are [habitually] wasting ten minutes of everyone else's time.
It was horrible and reprehensible, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it or mitigate it. What was I going to do, be late on my own?
I learned about 25 years ago never to be late to anything, particularly an appointment or a job/volunteer role where I'm indispensable. I was fired as a volunteer from a very important role because I was late only once. It was a role which was strictly dependent on timing and promptness. I learned at that very moment, never to be late again, and riding public transit as I did, I always built-in at least 30 minutes of lead time so that I was super-early rather than on-time, or God forbid, late.
"Malicious compliance" would be if the same team booked a 50min meeting then a 10min meeting in the same room.
If anything, the company saved money with optimizing meeting room capacity and the CEO's desire to give breaks was enforced.
The team pushing back against leaving at 50m was the only "malicious" party, and they weren't compliant.
I think I even saw a 5.25 mph sign once!
And an enforceable sign could never be a weird number because speedos don’t have ticks but every 5mph.
Disneyland famously has a 14mph speed limit for their property. They do this both to get your attention, and because the tram moves at 14mph (because 15mph requires seatbelts).
After that I 100% followed the yellow signs.
I have to know! What was the scariest thing?
I was lucky there was no car in the lane to my right.
Here are my two scariest recent ones...
I was driving north on Highway 87 in San Jose in the #2 lane (second lane from the left) when directly in front of me was a big metal rack, standing up in the road! It looked like something you might hang clothes hangers on. Which made it all the worse because it wasn't as visible as a heavier rack.
I hit the brakes and swerved into the #1 lane to avoid it. Luckily no one was in that lane. I try to keep situational awareness of the lanes to my right and left, so I felt pretty sure that no one was in that lane next to me.
The other was driving on northbound El Camino in Menlo Park, in the rightmost lane, at night.
Someone was riding a bike in that lane, dressed all in black (and even a black hoodie), with no lights or reflectors or anything to make himself visible. And he was doing that thing that some young people like to do where they weave back and forth for no reason at all except that it's fun?
Another brake slam and swerve to avoid him. It ended OK but was definitely a white knuckle moment!
Long winded execs enjoying open ended meetings without any structure to constrain them. Which is to say, the kind of shops with micromanaging management who keep themselves busy with meetings with their own team.
The CEO of the company got caught fooling around with a co-worker and abruptly resigned. The new CEO came in and found out what a mess meetings had become and issued the same proclamation - if a meeting isn't productive and produce some actionable items, then it shouldn't be scheduled. If you're not 100% required in a meeting, don't go. If you're in a meeting and feel its a waste of time, then leave.
Just those simple rules got rid of half of my meetings and the several teams I was on suddenly were cranking through sprints, building some amazing apps and products and killing our delivery times. The entire company suddenly was cooking along. It was a real eye opener how you can really bog a Fortune 500 company down just by clogging people's time up with useless meetings.
I've been through too many of these. They like to sit at the head of the table and bask in the glow of their underlings like they're king for an hour.
Following this with "What outcome should we expect at the end of this meeting? If there are next steps, what would we like them to be?" helps cut to the chase, and in my experience, things got better across the board. Sure, there were one or two folks who still struggled to create agendas for meetings - but it wasn't long before they were updating their LinkedIn profiles. Accountability can do that sometimes.
In other contexts I'm notorious for keeping people on the agenda. It's generally appreciated.
Usually by this point the stuffy room and long meeting have people going in circles. Getting up, opening the door, getting the blood moving while one or two groups have a little sidebar, usually causes the rest of the meeting to wrap up fast.
Most of the people who will mind are exactly the kind of person that you're trying to keep from wasting everyone's time.
Now that I work 100% remote, I have more flexibility to mentally ignore the bits of all meetings that don't apply to me and can instead fill the time writing comments on HN.
Nothing worse than meetings that drag on, where everyone starts to lose focus, and where one or two vocal participants sidetrack it into a 1:1 conversation. Just get shit wrapped up and have your other conversations without demanding the time of people who don’t need to be involved.
In meeting-heavy orgs it is really annoying to have meetings led by people who regularly run up to or beyond the final minute of the time slot. Those extra few minutes practically never produce anything worthwhile enough to compensate for the rushing between meetings and having to choose between being more late to the next one or taking care of a quick bathroom/water/snack break.
(All I actually do about this is be the person who pops up in meeting-chat at XX:51 with a "time-check: we've gone over".)
walking back from lunch with my cow-orkers one day, i realized we were passing a clock store. i went inside and bought a not-too-expensive cuckoo clock and installed it on the wall of our single large conference room
it would make whirring noises every 15 minutes. a few clicking sounds before the hour, and then CUCKOO, CUCKOO as many times as necessary. the marketing and sales folks did NOT like it, but:
- meetings got shorter and there were fewer of them
- the CEO of the company loved that clock. if i forgot to wind it, he or our admin did :-)
Are you just reposting or are you the real dadhacker?
Because if you are, I was reading your blog since I was like 14. Sad it's down now. But absolutely great stuff that helped prepare me for today's industry :)
i may bring the site back, but it's not a priority, and i'm not sure i can write much at the moment without getting into trouble :-)
(+ nice catch @verall)
In general, your management should take care of this.
Otherwise, if they are unwilling, it requires becoming slightly antagonistic once the meeting runs long. In my case, as soon as someone mentioned another meeting I just interrupted abruptly and said, "We do not need another meeting." The groans of agreement got the point across.
Otherwise, if that doesn't work, you can do something like, "Everyone but [person droning on] needs to leave the room, now." Once everyone leaves, point out that "these long meetings are killing team productivity, morale, and are completely unneeded. Stop wasting the engineering team's time. We don't need to be here."
For the larger scheduled meetings, if they drag over the hour because of some conversation our culture is that people leave/drop if they're not interested.
Being late is viewed as rude or lacking respect for others by a lot of people.
Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-dec-11-tr-insid...
Non-punctual cultures can view on-time people as clueless, over-eager, and annoying.
Are there any highly developed countries where the business culture is still "non-punctual"? I struggle to think of any. In short, if you have two businesses side-by-side, and one operates more punctually, then it will probably out-compete the other. To be clear, I'm not talking about social culture. Yes, Italians might be late by an hour to go to dinner with friends, but I doubt people in Milan will be so late to a sales meeting with client.
FWIW I am personally a very punctual person with heritage from one of the most punctual countries. But when in Rome…
As someone who tries to be prompt to a fault, I can see that yes there are people who get annoyed at promptness. It's not that you're a bad person for being prompt. Rather you're a bad person if you start without them or otherwise push back on their lateness.
But there are people where shit seems to happen more than for others. Late once in a blue moon? No worries. Repeat offender? That's a you problem.
And the late people need to understand that sometimes they will miss the beginnings of things, but that's ok too; their inability to be on time (for whatever reason) should not waste the time of those who get there on time.
So then you waste even more time when someone recaps for them.
It's almost like people need to think about their day when they're scheduling things instead of just accepting every single meeting.
You can request different times for things. That's an option.
If an interviewee is half an hour early to a meeting that is rude if they actually expect to start now instead of the scheduled time
> I lived in Toronto for many years and traffic and public transportation are unpredictably - it could take me an hour or it could take me three hours.
That's the meat of it. If I'm going to a meeting where consequences of lateness would suck, like a job interview or something else where it would be highly rude to be late, I'll get there early. Then I'll hang out and play with my phone or something until the person's ready to meet with me at our scheduled time.
I also make it clear that I know I'm early and don't expect the other person to be ready for me. I might use a friendly, stock phrase like "I'd rather wait for them than have them waiting for me" to emphasize that I'm perfectly fine entertaining myself while they're getting ready to see me.
But ultimately, I treat it like getting to my gate at an airport. If I'm there early with time to kill, then so be it. That's infinitely preferable to arriving late and suffering the consequences.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180729-why-brazilians-a...
I had a Chinese tutor who got pretty upset that I would show up to lessons before she got there. Her first approach was to assure me that it was ok if I showed up later. Eventually she responded by showing up very, very early.
In a different case, I had an appointment to meet a friend, and she texted me beforehand to ask whether I'd left home yet. Since the appointment was quite some distance from my home, and I couldn't predict the travel time, I had already arrived, but upon learning that my friend dropped everything to show up early... and asked me why I was so early. I don't see a problem with waiting for a scheduled appointment if I show up early! But apparently other people do?
I would be unsurprised if that's how she thought about it, but it didn't really come up.
My sense was that, since she was the service provider and I was the customer, she felt that it was inappropriate for me to be waiting for her.
No. Not for meetings. What is perceived as rude is making a big deal about it. You think it's a major social faux-pas, they think it's a "meh", and if you make a big deal about it and get offended now you're just being rude for no reason at all.
For personal and informal meetings, yes, being "on time" may mean annoying the host a bit. Why? Because when they say the party starts at 6pm, everyone should understand it as they should start showing up no earlier than 6:30pm etc.
I am not saying I agree or take side with any of these, just presenting it as both sides see it.
Either way, he saw me get to meetings a few minutes early and legitimately accused me of not having enough to do.
That was one of two jobs that I've ever walked out of.
The meeting itself might continue, but as an individual, once the meeting passes the scheduled finish time, you stand up and say "sorry, I've got another meeting to get to". The worse your company's excessive meeting culture is, the better this works.
Even more points when a participant speaks up at the very beginning, to announce, “I’ve got a hard-stop at 9:50, so I’ll need to leave at that point no matter what.” Then the responsibility for wrap-up is placed squarely on leadership.
Unfortunately I’ve also found that a poorly-run meeting won't get around to the wrap-up on time, and so leaving early may only hurt that participant, by missing something important.
If the meeting fails to accomplish its objectives in 50 minutes, then participants may excuse themselves with a clear conscience, but they may find themselves less-informed than coworkers who chose to stay for the entire session. Especially if there is "Q&A" for clarifications at the end of it.
Quite often I'd have to sit thru meetings that 99% of the time I'm not needed but for one specific minute I keep someone else from making an expensive time wasting mistake. It can be very difficult to determine what you're actually needed for in IT/Operations stuff.
We have a lot of meetings so he encourages we do basically whatever it takes to keep meetings timeboxed.
I once was in an incident call where one of the execs was brought in and eventually said "We have 20 people in this call who all have good salaries. It will cost $600 to just inform our customer service agents to take care of this. Let's get out of here"
Management has to push that culture downwards, and reinforce it themselves, and continually encourage it as people join and leave and teams change.
Unfortunately, I've been in a few meetings scheduled for 9:00 that only really started at 9:10. I think if they were scheduled for 9:10, they would've only started at 9:20...
Because all it will do is make you really good at time math.
I've seen it even back when people would set all their clocks in their car and home 5 minutes fast, they just got real good at doing five minute math.
But I agree with the parent, if you need to move something then move the start.
This can be easily enforced because other neighboring teams would knock the door at the half hour mark and you can't really blame them or be grumpy about it.
https://record.umich.edu/articles/university-updating-start-...
If everyone is on the same page then there should be a 'page' resulting from the meeting; something to look back at to represent what everyone agreed on. Those are the 'decisions' being made.
The worst meetings are ones where people share ideas, nod their head in agreement, then write nothing down. Inevitably this leads to an identical meeting later down the road, after people have forgotten key details and the game of telephone has distorted others. Then later it leads to upset people when they find, often close to delivery time, that their understanding conflicts with others on the team.
If there's no desire to have updated plans or documentation after the meeting has concluded, then I question the true intent of the meeting. Was it because the person calling the meeting felt out of the loop? Why was that allowed to happen in the first place? Why were the requirements and the team's progress not easy to observe at a glance?
In companies where presenteeism is valued, this can be a welcome break from pretending to work.
I like to say that part of becoming a good software developer is experience. And hearing about other people's experiences helps with that; experience by proxy. It's also why I read (and write) blog posts where people working through issues. Because seeing how the person found, analyzed, and solved the issue can make _me_ a better developer.
Some examples:
- a class
- a briefing
- a classic "all-hands meeting"
- standup (if you haven't had a standup which ended in 45 seconds because everyone reported "no obstacles, no requests", your standups have too many people in them or your organization is under too much stress)
- lunch-and-learn
My point is, there can be rules about what is and isn’t allowed in a meeting, but the people at the top can always change those rules on a moment’s notice…and those of us who are less socially adept won’t catch on.
Two out of ten attendees talked for 30 minutes and didn't write anything down, really isn't.
For some reason, I'm seeing a lot more hesitance to record or document, and I don't think it is a good thing at all.
A contemptible law breeds contempt for all laws.
Once people get used to bullshit everything turns into bullshit. They don’t get rid of those rules because it’ll hurt someone’s feelings. But our feelings get hurt all the time so clearly it’s whose feelings they care about.
At several companies I was at this rule would have removed the last slack time I had to fix, refactor and maintain systems.
I actually asked a manager to add me to a monthly 2 hour 50+ people reoccurring meeting just so I could do some refactoring.
I guess that is a form of Malicious compliance.
Sometimes one has to demonstrate value to counteract the cultural erosion caused by action and outcome bias to enable that empowerment.
These big wasteful meetings are typically a product of action and outcome biases, and one needs to have a medium and longer term strategy to address them which is exactly why my manager was willing to sponsor it.
My intention was to deliver value when the team thought it was impossible.
At most companies you can’t see other people’s calendar event names, but even if you can, I highly doubt someone would look at an event and overlap it without asking you first.
Maybe it's because I worked in a different office or whatever, but 25 and 50 minute meetings were pretty common and if somebody else scheduled the room it was 100% respected.
It wasn't really considered pedantry or anything, just the basic respect of honoring the commitment of the meeting calendar.
Perhaps I'm a tad on the spectrum which is why I have zero problem with this, either from the perspective of the people who booked it for 50 mins or those who booked it for 10.
I've always thought that the preparedness of employees to boot seniors out of their booked meeting rooms was a bellwether of good corporate culture. Places that values everyone's time and leaders follow process by example.
The problem with meetings always falls into one of two camps for me:
1. Some company leader is in the meeting and everyone sits tight while they waste time bikeshedding on whatever they read on LinkedIn today.
2. Two engineers are quarreling over the nuance of a status update.
I find meetings that should be short (stand ups) are better done over slack. Submit a quick update and then people can DM if needed. Then you’re not holding people hostage.
Well, no one agreed upon which 5 minutes were to be shortened, and like the post, it often wasn't observed anyways. So the result was 10 minutes of confusion every half hour.
I can empathize. I'm in the middle of an extremely prescriptive re-org (down to the team level) that kinda feels like some leader forgot that the rest of the org isn't some cookie cutter copy of the leader's personal experience.
It's so satisfying when the leader describes the results of the re-org as exactly opposite to what actually happened.
No, they were software developers
The response was ice cold. "No, this is our time." (Go ahead and stop us.)
So it isn't the problem of the people booking the meetings, it's the problem of the people who formulate and implement the rules.
For those wondering, is Deviant Ollam's talk on elevators.
FWIW I've never seen top-down efforts to make meetings more efficient stick. Humans are humans, not automatons. They're chatty. They're messy and unorganized. And attempts to build "culture" that curbs those things isn't going to stick when people constantly change jobs because it no longer pays to stay at the same company for decades. (You know, assuming they don't just lay people off because that's the way the wind is blowing...)
You can join later, that's fine, but I'm not waiting longer than 150 seconds.
Waiting 150 seconds feels like waiting a long time. Whereas being 2.5 minutes late feels like being on time.
So I find that phrasing it this way is more impactful.
(by now you probably figured out that I am not very popular ar work)
I bet your colleagues appreciate it if you’re similarly strict about ending meetings on time.
It'll say 10:00 c.t. on the event, meaning it actually starts at 10:15.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing...
I had a major-related class 10 minutes after, clear across campus, about a mile of walking. This professor was nice about it, but I was the only one coming in late at all.
So I made sure to sit in the front row of the earlier lecture, and left precisely when the class was supposed to end, leaving no doubt I had places to go.
Some people just think they set the conventions.
A microcentury is 100 nanoyears if you prefer that.
I do have empathy for the people in the room who expected to have 10 more minutes for there meeting, and I'm not a pedantic rule follower, but I expect some grace and self awareness here.
Yes, your meeting was unexpectedly interrupted, but my meeting was unexpectedly delayed. Your problem was caused by a system that—however unfair or inscrutable—we all have to conform to. My problem was caused by ignorance, accident, or malfeasance on your part. If I show respect and empathy in this situation, I expect you show some respect and humility.
This is wierd and terrible, what does it mean, no interns and juniors get to attend engineering meetings? Tagging along to those meetings is how they learn and it's not expected that they have input at every one, sometimes it's just a question or two.
At that point you might not be able to relate anymore to what a day of people looks like that are half a dozen levels down and have decades less work experience.
Another way to say it, in the 90s workplace studies showed an engineering IC’s job was roughly 35 hours of meetings a week. If you work 40, that leaves 5 hours for coding. If you could get someone back just 5 of those 35 hours, you’d have double the coding output per engineer.
The author of this story seems to be just adjusting. Like "really, we mean 60 minutes?" New rule is, book for 60 if you need 60. Leave it at 50 if not.
at the same time, do you really need a meeting room for a standup?
We're stuck in the office, the least you could do is not subject everyone within earshot to your meetings.
I have struggled very hard to not fill this comment with profanity and insults.
DonHopkins on June 12, 2017 | next [–]
The old expression "all our wood behind one arrow" was actually "one of President and CEO Scott McNealy's favorite quotes", which Sun used as a marketing campaign slogan and in presskits around 1990.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080515194354/http://www.sun.co...
Sun even produced a TV commercial in which an arrow that presumably had all of Sun's wood behind it whooshed through the air and hit the bull's eye of a target. (Nobody at Sun ever knew what the target was, but by golly they all knew which arrow to put their wood behind.)
Photo of Scott McNealy in his office at Sun with a huge Cupid's Span style wooden arrow through his window, and a small Steve Martin style wooden arrow through his head:
https://findery.com/johnfox/notes/all-the-wood-behind-one-ar... [sorry, link broken, not on archive.org]
>Sun's Workstations Still Shine, But Rivals Cloud The Outlook
>Daily Gazette - Nov 10, 1991
>Associated Press (Google News Archive)
>Sun touts an "all the wood behind one arrow" slogan, meant to describe a company focused on one goal - workstations. As an April Fool's joke in 1990, Sun employees built a 60-foot-long arrow in McNealy's office with the point going out the window.
Phrase: more wood behind, all the wood behind one arrow
https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2011-Septe...
Yet now he's hugging the Trump Tree!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39501069
DonHopkins on Feb 25, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Institutions try to preserve the problem to which ...
>exhortation I assumed you were talking about Sun, and I read that as "extortion".
It reminds me of the vicious intimidation tactics that Sun executives made their poor sysadmin enforcers perform on their behalf, to ruthlessly coerce other reluctant executives and employees to run Solaris instead of SunOS!
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...
I remember an all-hands meeting where Scott McNealy told everybody, "You're going to have to stop hugging your tree!"
After the meeting I went to my manager and demanded a tree: I never knew about any trees! Why did everybody get a tree but me? I want my tree! I promise I will not hug it.
So he gave me an old set of SunOS manuals.
ChuckMcM on Feb 25, 2024 [–]
One of my mentors was Steve K. at Sun who I consulted with about how badly Sun did changes. It really pissed me off that Sun wouldn't put NIS+ into SunOS because they were allegedly worried it would "reduce the incentive to migrate to Solaris."
I would say I was not particularly successful at being a 'change agent' there.
DonHopkins on Feb 26, 2024 | parent [–]
It's not just changing badly, but changing to the wrong thing. They'd beaten AT&T in the Unix marketplace, then celebrated by getting in bed with them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125284
DonHopkins on Dec 25, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]
You're right, it was Slowlaris that killed Sun, and Java was meant to be a "Microsoft Killer", not a programming language.
Sun was a dead man walking long before Java. And Scott McNealy's me-too obsession with Microsoft was extremely unhealthy, leading to him actually naming the division "SunSoft". Never define and even NAME yourself in terms of your enemy. Scott McNealy knew neither himself nor his enemy.
“If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle” - Sun Tzu’s “The Art Of War”
Sun could never measure up to Microsoft, and McNealy was totally obsessed with fighting them, to the point that Java was not actually a programming language for solving developer's problems per se, but primarily a weapon in his personal vendetta against Microsoft, and Java developers were considered expendable mercenaries in that war, above all else. Everything they did with Java was measured by how much it would harm Microsoft, not help developers.
Scott McNealy was pathetically and pathologically obsessed with being and beating Bill Gates and Windows, yet so unfit for the task, just as he has been more recently obsessed with licking Trump's boots, raising money for him and his failed coup attempt, and towing his anti-mask anti-vax anti-science line of bullshit.
https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/17/mcnealy_trump_fundrai...
Michael Tiemann on "The Worst Job in the World":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann
>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...
>Subject: The Worst Job in the World
>From: Michael Tiemann <tiemann@cygnus.com>
>I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]
Obviously the solution is to have buffer where rooms can't be booked rather like hotel checkout and check-in times. I also think psychologically that a 9:10am start and 10am end would make people stick to their slot better.
I'm glad I work remote and this is a distant memory:
> Meetings continue until the participants of the next meeting are clawing on your door like a pack of zombies.
This made me laugh!
By the way I can't think of how you can do malicious compliance here. You can annoy your boss by refusing a meeting if you have nothing to say... but while annoying this is the point of the edict.
Been at companies where they last _45-60 minutes_
If anything, a group booking a meeting in the ten minutes in between increases meeting room usage, since the next meeting can now start at :00.
Speedy Meetings, meet Tardy Meetings. I want 50 minute meetings & time to transition, but our culture of "let's wait a few minutes for people to arrive" is way too deeply engrained at my company to shift it. Solution: Speedy Meetings, but instead of end 5/10m early, start 5/10m late. We could turn this on company wide without a revolt.
Alright google cal eng: Go get that promo!
There are team updates & all-hands that are one-to-many. They are often basically a seminar so can be recorded, sent out online, and Q&A delivered in a follow up 24-72 hours later after everyone has submitted & voted on questions. any interactive bits the only bits left.
There are 1:1s. These can be in person in a meeting room, online, or taken on-the-go.
Then there are decision & planning meetings; these are what was being optimized.
But if the other types of meetings were changed as above there’d have been no need.
I'm not sure if this is they told them or he thinks he would tell them that he wouldn't give up a meeting room they had booked. If I had a meeting room booked and it was just an internal team they wouldn't leave they would quickly be learning what me and my team did the day before and what we plan to do today.
If things are running over because of something important like the financial future or your org or the health and safety of your clients then people will deal with the spiders roaming at terrifying speeds. But if everyone is just bikeshedding then the room will empty out pretty quick.
However if there is one remote person you must never use a meeting location - either a room or just standing around desks. Make even people who are sitting next to each other communicate only by their headset. Otherwise the remote person is a lesser member of the team.
Why the hell not? Do people like meetings? I would want to get out as soon as the time is up.
In high school when the bell rang everybody ran out of the door. Maybe meetings need a bell too.
The people booking the available meeting room are complying with the policy.
The people not getting out are not complying but not doing so maliciously. They’re not attempting to subvert the policy. They’re just not getting out of the meeting room when they need to.
What? I can't really imagine that. If I'd booked a room until X:50, and someone came in at X:50 saying they had the room, I would leave, because that's the right thing to do. If I really wanted the room until (X+1):00, then that's what I'd book it for, regardless of what the defaults are in GCal.
Let me guess, there is no group text chat where people can randomly whine and get unstuck by whoever notices and is an expert on the problem?
No functional/topic discussions. If they’re required you schedule those in the standup and decide who participates.
No need to expand beyond 15min in that mode.
It reduced the number of back and forth on slack/other tools quite a bit.
Everyone answers 3 questions:
* Do I need something?
* What is my _top_ priority for the day?
* Am I blocked?
The answers for the first and third question should always be "No" because you should have raised them before standup, but it's a relief valve if you didn't.
What is your top priority should be short and focused. If you let people talk about what they did or didn't do yesterday it becomes a slog with people justifying their progress or non-progress. Ultimately it doesn't matter. Focusing on the top priority he's focus people on their main task for the day.
How do you manage (if you have to) more research-heavy/blue-sky tasks that may take a few days or weeks without linear daily progress? Like, some days may just involve doing some sketches and playing around with code in order to internalise some data structure. Does that person just say "I'm continuing with task X" several days in a row?
Absolutely. If other devs or even a manager or project lead or someone feel they've been doing the "same" task too long, they should be reaching out and checking in. "Hey, running into any problems? How are you doing?"