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Comment by nlawalker | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, at least, it's because a lot of "meetings" aren't actually meetings, they're presentations that are actually better consumed async after the fact, but historical precedent demands that everyone be invited to attend the live taping and emote and cheer politely.

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At my previous company, one I started, I would try to organise a meeting with only the most essential people and then people would forward the invite as people would be upset they were not invited (normally because it is a prelim meeting to a wider meeting), the meeting would go from 4 people to 15, people would attend the meeting find it was irrelevant to them or too early to them, which is why they were not invited in the first place, and then complain about too many meetings. Ugh.

This is my experience too. My meetings tend to be presentations of results. I invite the bare minimum of people who are likely to be interested, and like you, end up with a full meeting room plus others connecting online, often all over the world.

I figure, they're consenting adults, they're responsible for managing their time.

A lot of mine at the time were workshops. I find workshops work best when there is an agenda and small teams, then you present to the wider group when ideas are more developed. A lot of the time, when additional people attended they would be seeing too early of a concept or idea and too many people would debate little details. I believe the best productivity is in small teams.

It's not just historical precedent, it's about creating common knowledge that everybody has received the relevant information

It is historical precedent. Having everyone sit slackjawed through twenty minutes of droning is no more proof that they received the relevant information than emailing them would be - that’s why schools have exams and other assessment on the knowledge they intend to impart.

So an email? You could not read the email, but I can just as easily not pay attention.

You have a way better chance of getting people to pay attention to a few paragraph email than that same information stretched to fill an hour.

However, it's a lot more socially acceptable to say "I missed the email" than "I sat there for 30min while you were talking but didn't actually listen"...

I'm sympathetic to this knowing how few people actually read their emails (and slacks etc.). If you've ever sent out a 30 second survey to your coworkers, you know what I'm talking about. But I also know people don't really pay attention in these meetings either.

I feel async communication could work this way with the right cultural hygiene (e.g. consistent labeling, brevity, novelty, and relevancy), and some places I've worked were better about this than others, but they all tend to suffer from tragedy of the commons. If anyone works somewhere where you and all your coworkers actually count on each other to read emails, please tell me where!

The reason people don't read email is that companies have poisoned their communication channels. If an important email is right beside a practically junk message, it will be lost.

An interesting aspect of this: Where I work, an email subject line including "important" or "urgent" is a 99% indication for junk...

90% of the work emails I received were indistinguishable from spam. And they were sent by my employer.

“Did you know HR has an XYZ workshop” or “Look at what your coworkers are saying on Internal Company Social Network” (that I never once logged into). Literal spam. It’s no wonder I became completely desensitized to email notifications from my own employer’s domain.

As well as those standups which are just micro-presentations where each person talks in turn about their respective card but there's no discussion. The teams that moved to async standups where they just post status updates in Slack and amigo only when needed seem happier.

Text-only stand-ups also have a tendency to devolve into just posting text into the void than nobody reads, so you may as well move to the even simpler "I need to discuss" flags which reduces communication even more. But then some people don't like that.

I am afraid there's no perfect solution, and it just boils down to people's preferences and the skills of people involved. And the chemistry between them.

I've been in teams which flip flopped over time between "communication worsened" and "wasting everyone's time". Being remote for 15+ years I enjoy the "convivial" side of stand-ups but I hate when they devolve into rote status reports.

The worst part about the standup ritual is that no one talks outside standups.

With async text communication channels you'll post when an issue shows up. With the standups you'll wait until the next standup and maybe forget the details until then, or forget about the issue entirely and that will lead to technical debt.

> when an issue shows up

Advanced usage: post proactively before you reach the task/issue. This way people have time to comment on it and when you do get to it it's been clear what to do for 1-2 days.

> With async text communication channels you'll post when an issue shows up

You clearly work with excellent teams who don’t need this then. My experience is that a large number of people, even competent people will not post when an issue shows up and will wait for however long until an update is asked of them and then say they couldn’t do it because they’re blocked.

I might be lucky. Or I might be avoiding large organizations on purpose. Most of the time at least.

That's caused by daily meetings, not a reason to have them.

I didn’t mention they’ll wait til the next daily update. They’ll wait until someone messages them on slack or pings them on jira/linear or the sprint planning

> With async text communication channels you'll post when an issue shows up.

I do this all the time, but often no one cares about the issue I raised at that time. So I have to wait until next day standup anyway, because then I can raise the issue in group and force someone to comment or reply.

I would have agreed, but the reporter shares multiple anecdotes where that's not the case. Most crazily, the person she was meant to be interviewing sent an AI note taker in his place, very much not a presentation and she just sat alone with the AI until it became clear he was a no-show. I don't get the thought process there, just cancel the interview if you're not going to show up.

In general I think people need to be more comfortable both calling out useless meetings, and calling out people who are making meetings useless by not being engaged or "multi-tasking" (a.k.a. not paying attention). When I facilitate meetings if I see people aren't paying attention or it's very low engagement, I call it out and ask honestly if people think the meeting is worth their time. The first time people hear that they think I'm just being passive-aggressive, but colleagues who know me well know they can be honest and if the meeting isn't valuable we can stop and in the future we'll either have a better agenda/facilitation, do it async, or not do it at all. Even if the meeting would have value if people were engaged, if I fail to get people's attention then it becomes useless and I would rather not waste my or anyone else's time.

I've totally sat through one of these "dry run" VP presentations before they do it before an exec audience. "All the metrics and dashboards are green". Next day: Layoffs and reapply for your job, also introducing Dopinder who will shadow your succession.

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