Hacker News Reader

Comment by mirawelner | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I’m just a silly lab engineer who doesn’t know how big companies work (i did work at a startup for a time but that’s even more anti meeting than a lab) but I feel like maybe if you have so many back to back meetings that you need to plan around them you should have fewer meetings?

Also why is there a hard end time rather than a maximum time? What is even going on? How are you getting work done?

View on HN

At large companies, there's just a lot of coordination needed. Which means a lot of meetings typically. Probably more than there is needed but one of the points of a large company is having a critical mass of people pulling in roughly the same direction(s).

>also why is there a hard end time rather than a maximum time?

Depends on company, culture, and individuals. If you get through the purpose of the meeting, the meeting organizer may well say "Let's give everyone 20 minutes (or whatever) back." I do think that it's a worthwhile goal to default to <1 hour meetings.

In any case, agendas and thinking about how the meeting time should actually be spent is worthwhile.

At least at my multinational company, we have teams iny department that are 12 hours ahead of us. That makes the window of overlap time we have small, so we often have blocks of meetings during that overlap time that compete for time slots for staff that make higher level decisions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com