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Comment by exegete | Hacker News Reader

We do this at my work and guess what - meetings tend to run 5 minutes late because everyone knows the next meeting doesn’t start until 5 past.

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Sounds like the issue is back to back meetings then.

Also every meeting taking the exact time it was scheduled for is a bit of an org smell too. If you have your meeting etiquette dialed in you should hopefully be finishing meetings early more often than running over. If you are running to the minute or over all the time you might just be having crap meetings.

Yeah, this works because it's novel. If it became the norm, people would adjust to it and we'd right back where we started.

Novelty might be a factor but the author was relying on "social pressure" to wrap things up by top of the hour. That pressure doesn't exist in all work cultures.

Meeting software should eject everyone when the time is reached.

Zoom offers this feature, but you have to not-pay for it.

Works best when your meetings are 40 minutes long

Obviously, meetings shouldn't be longer than they need to be. But 15-20 minutes of unused time tend to be dead. That's mostly not long enough to do anything useful.

That said, nothing wrong with 30 minute meetings. In my previous analyst stint we tried to default to that--especially for non-clients. Didn't need all the throat-clearing stuff and industry background that we knew perfectly well.

This is a bad idea. We used a software that did this for a while, and everybody scheduled meetings 30 minutes longer than necessary and specified the real time in the description, just to avoid cutting people off mid sentence.

Isn’t the point of TFA that meetings _unavoidably_ run 5 minutes late, and so starting at 0:05 will avoid being impacted by the previous meeting?

I see two flaws:

1) This only works as long as nobody else does it. If the meeting prior to yours follows the same strategy then you’re in the same position as today

2) it starts 5 minutes later but has no plan for ending 5 minutes earlier, which means the next meeting will have to start at 0:10…

To me ending at 0:55 is a million times more logical than starting at 0:05… and if there was an issue then rolling back to 0:50, or 0:45, or whatever it takes for honest accounting and/or meeting discipline to emerge.

Decades ago at an engineering firm I worked for it was baked into the groupware settings.

The smelly basement nerd running IT seemed normal back then, but here are in 2026… Turns out he was an unsung smelly genius ahead of his time. A giant among men who bathe.

Meetings running over is avoidable. People just need to stop enabling bad behavior.

I work with a PM who is notorious for meetings running long. People just start hanging up while she’s talking if they have another meeting to go to. When she start hearing a bunch of beeps of people leaving, she starts to get the message that she needs to continue on the next meeting and stop. People are tired of it and don’t entertain it anymore, as much as she keeps trying to talk.

Meetings are avoidable. People just need to stop enabling bad behavior.

This is standard at the large tech company where I work and is extremely effective and universally respected.

You have correctly identified that this is a cultural issue not a meeting software issue. I often have meetings with people who have to deal constantly with urgent operational issues, that cost $mega if not solved on time. I accept they may be late, but try hard not to keep them waiting.

At previous companies this wasnt the case, so we started meetings on time

That, and on top of it people now come 5m late on 5m past so we start 10m past and finish 10m late.

My org had the opposite problem in the Covid remote transition. At one point we successfully enforced meetings ending 5 minutes before the hour, but then somebody would just open the next meeting 5 minutes early.

Even if someone starts a meeting early, I still don't join until the start time out of spite.

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