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Comment by steve8918 | Hacker News Reader

I guess I'm old school, but I've always been a bit taken back these days at how some people think it's okay to take phone calls during a meeting.

If you're being paid by your employer to attend meetings, what phone call could possibly be so important that you can't let it go to voicemail and you get to it after the meeting?

But I'm probably at least 10+ years older than the average person on HN, so maybe that's why. I still remember a time when people who took out a cell phone at a restaurant was considered rude and obnoxious, so I guess times do change.

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  If you're being paid by your employer to attend meetings, 
  what phone call could possibly be so important that you 
  can't let it go to voicemail and you get to it after the 
  meeting?

Do you remember a few months ago when Amazon's EC2 had problems and took down Quora, Pintrest, Heroku and that lot? [1] Or when Knight Capital managed to lose $440 million in 45 minutes due to a software glitch? [2]

What meeting could possibly be so important that you can't postpone it to deal with a critical production issue?

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/07/01/survey-... [2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2...

Sure, there are some people that are important enough to warrant interrupting a meeting, but the vast majority of the people that I've seen that get up to leave a meeting to answer the phone don't fit in that category.

More likely, the problem is that people are dragged into unimportant meetings they don't need to attend.

I used to work in a very client-focused industry. Internal meetings, even those led by a CEO, were secondary to your relationship with your client. People would pop in and out of meetings constantly taking calls and following up on things.

My current company doesn't have a very big team or office space, but if/when I set one up that's the sort of culture I would expect. Mettings should be voluntary and secondary in importance to the work that you do. It's me talking after all, not a prophet.

I'm probably 10 years older than the average HN'er as well.

Client-serving is very different, and I'm sure a good CEO would insist that you take the call rather than be in a meeting. I was thinking more about from the developer angle, so I guess I should have been clearer.

Like I said below, interrupting a meeting and leaving to take a call from your mechanic because your car is ready, or from a friend to plan your activity that night, is rude, and I've seen a lot of that.

Missed this comment.

I still don't agree. I think it's important to realize people can't always separate their work and personal lives -- especially things like taking a call from a mechanic at 11:00am. I wouldn't expect people to make all of their personal calls at 6:01 every day since it's generally not practical. I say this from a management perspective where I used to be pretty demanding about attention. After a while I realized that sometimes your team has to take that call from their vet. I think letting your team make that decision for themselves goes a long way in building a relationship.

I kind of see it like this:

You're either in an "all hands" type meeting or a small group or two-person meeting. If it's the former then I think participation is completely optional as you're likely to get a recap from a colleague afterwards or via email. If it's the latter then you're likely to be a relatively important part of that meeting and the others can wait for you if you need to interrupt. Of couse that doesn't mean that you should take every call whether business or personal but I don't think it's a case of either/or. There are plenty of company-related calls that could be temporarily ignored and vice-versa.

> If you're being paid by your employer to attend meetings, what phone call could possibly be so important that you can't let it go to voicemail and you get to it after the meeting?

A family member is suddenly in critical condition in the hospital? Your spouse was kidnapped on a business trip and is being held for ransom? Use your pretentious old school imagination.

Obviously emergencies are an exception, but for the meetings I've been in, the phone calls that I've seen my peers take have never been an emergency. They are people taking calls from their friends, their significant others, their mortgage broker, their mechanic, etc.

The worst is when they start talking on the phone even before they leave the meeting room, and disrupt the meeting.

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