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Comment by daniel_j | Hacker News Reader

I've found myself watching and waiting for at least 3 people to join a meeting before I connect to avoid the inevitable minutes of greetings and unrelated discussion that always happens. Our meetings always start 5-10 minutes _past_ the scheduled time.

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In my experience the unrelated discussion is usually the only fun and tangible value I get out of most meetings

Depends. If it’s with ICs, sure. But as soon as some manager or someone with a leadership position joins, then it’s just plain work. So I dislike chitchatting with such people.

I know we don’t get to choose our coworkers and teams necessarily and experiences vary, but I am sorry you dread/dislike a little chit chat with your teammates:(

I think it's likely a problem with me specifically - I said no to going to celebrations like christmas lunch etc. But at the same time our team doesn't interact with each other socially in any other way. I'm very new to the job, so it isn't that I pushed everyone away from me, there just wasn't any closeness in the first place. It doesn't really help that I don't much like the job either.

But there are other times for that, why in a meeting? I chitchat during day 1-1 (virtual/irl) with my teammates, I don't, for etiquette, have to do it again when starting a meeting.

> But there are other times for that, why in a meeting?

If you're in-person in an office, there are plenty of times for random social interaction. If you're full-remote, pre-meeting/post-meeting time is a low-friction source of social interaction.

I agree maybe ideally not in a meeting, but humans are imperfect and the larger the number of people invited, the greater the chance it’s going to take a few mins for everyone to arrive. So inevitably the folks who are prompt do some water cooler talk while waiting, and depending on the day/group/topic the water cooler talk might even extend a few mins after everyone has arrived, especially if people are enjoying the convo.

I do love that zoom feature that shows the avatars of who’s joined already. Although I don’t like the game theory of it when every attendee is watching those icons…

Those awkward 5 minutes of greetings and unrelated discussion are because other people don't join until 5 minutes past, and sitting in silence would be even more awkward.

I suppose this may be the case for a lot of people. In my case it is always the two managers talking about their life and/or child's successes. This still occurs when _they_ are the late ones.

Same! If I see the first people joining are managers or above, I just wait until I see other engineers join. I hate managers talk, I couldn’t care less about them.

Glad to know I'm not alone

This is borderline anti-social and a bit past introvert haha

> introvert

This has nothing to do with being introverted.

This. Can’t stand those fake “how’s your day?” and fake socializing bullshit.

"How was your weekend?" I really don't care.

Seriously.

> How was your weekend?

Fine, just like literally thousands of previous weekends before this one. And now I’m going to ask you the same and then zone out for 5 minutes because I literally couldn’t care less.

It’s been shown before that a couple minutes of pleasantries helps the meeting. I’m guessing it helps regulate everyone on a similar vibe. A lot like saying hello to someone and maybe how are you doing before launching into any requests.

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