Comment by smcin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smcin | Hacker News Reader

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No, your claims are too broad, generalizing from specific instance (apparently a small company, high accountability, no diagonal lines or conflicting organizational incentives). A standup meeting to try to ensure visibility and accountability are necessary but by no means sufficient; you only get as much of those as the underlying company culture, plus the seniority of the person running the meeting. People can still turn the thing into a talking shop, filibuster, perpetually roll deadlines, specs that are never fully nailed down, "hidden dependencies" that no-one is held responsible for not spotting, cross-department issues that don't have a single owner. I've been in situations multiple times where I had to call a meeting to diplomatically shine a light on different branches of an org not working well together, or sometimes even actively undercutting each other (or working on a cost-plus/time-and-materials basis).

So your claim "One effective solution is to schedule a standing meeting... works across organizational boundaries too." is way overly strong. Just because you've had an instance or two where it did work, doesn't mean that works in general, for other orgs.

Meetings may or may not be forcing functions, depending on the organization. Sometimes they are. Oftentimes they aren't.

The better mantra to ask is "Who in this organization is actually incentivized to make this project succeed... where specifically is there accountability?" Sometimes, believe it or not, the org doesn't have much of that.

Instead of your claim, I'll tell you the key organizational symptom that I found actually determines accountability, or lack of: (discreetly) find out what happened to the careers of CXOs/VPs/directors/execs/managers on projects that failed: were they promoted/ given bonuses/ retained/ demoted/ reassigned/ fired? (sometimes they get a token punishment/demotion, leave, go found a startup/sit on the beach, then get reacquired at a higher level than what they left).

Author here. I wrote about context being important for any advice you read years ago: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2020/01/13/context-is-kin... I could put such a disclaimer into any post I write, but I think that'd be a bit tedious.

I will say I've seen this work across organizations as small as 2 person startups and as large as 100k organizations (though, to be honest, I was embedded in a team as a contractor in that org).

I'm sure there are orgs where it doesn't work, which is why I said "One effective solution is to schedule a standing meeting".

I like your perspective--accountability is the basis; the meeting is one method, but I'm sure there are others. Do you have other solutions that you've seen work?

But you posted here under the overly broad headline (not "Meetings can be forcing functions", or "How to make meetings forcing functions") with its overly broad claims.

Also you asserted "One effective solution is to schedule a standing meeting" not "... can be a solution, under some conditions".

> I've seen this work across across organizations as small as 2 person startups and as large as 100k organizations*

and I've seen it fail across orgs as small as 15-person startups and as large as ~100k organizations; and sometimes work. How large was your sample size N?

> Do you have other solutions that you've seen work?

As I emphasized above, the mantra to ask is "Who in this organization is actually incentivized to make this project succeed... where specifically is there accountability?" If there isn't any such person running/chairing the meeting/ or at absolute minimum reading its minutes, you just get a meaningless talking shop, which as other people here are saying is negatively productive and intensely annoys engineers, rightly so. a) A meeting is only as productive as the subset of people invited (or, equally, excluded). b) You can only enforce or appeal to as much accountability as the management chain intrinsically has (unless you or the senior mgmt or shareholders get them replaced, which is usually major power politics. As a consultant in particular, beware of fighting other people's battles, especially executives.).

(and to help answer the conundrum about who's actually incentivized to make a project succeed, I said you have to do some archaeology on what happened on their previous projects in that org (or previous orgs); the pathological case is if they failed repeatedly but kept getting rewarded, or developed an old-boy network around them.)

Sometimes, although not always, it might be (but certainly could never be) wise to hedge, maybe.

In others, clarity comes from making the point and assuming above average intelligence of the readers to know that context is always relevant.

We can be assured that assumption incorrect, in this case.

> In others, clarity comes from making the point and assuming above average intelligence of the readers to know that context is always relevant.

It's not cool to insult the readers' intelligence when someone makes a shaky overly broad claim. Better to retract or modify the claim. The headline "Meetings are forcing functions" is borderline clickbait. Most of us here have been in companies that meeting'd themselves to death, or at minimum, underachieved. And those companies had scheduled meetings too, so beware success bias and survivorship bias. My key positive message to OP is to emphasize cultural signs of accountability (or lack of), without which everything else (like standups and progress reports) is out the window. For example, how many of you have ever seen someone organizationally punished for accurately reporting status in a meeting?

Perhaps it’s worth considering you both have valid experiences that are context dependent and not mutually exclusive.

In either case I think you might be coming in a bit hot. OP is just sharing their perspective. No one wants to get into internet fights.

“Water is critical to life”

‘Well, achshully, too much water can drown someone, so it’s not a universally true statement that it’s critical to life’

Meetings are forcing functions. They force me to sit in stupid recurring nightmares that are wastes of time, in many cases.

In the right context, as the author has called out, they offer a rhythm to work that drives behaviors.

You are tying meetings to all the woes of the modern white collar job, and raising ill-constructed arguments that don’t pass muster.

“Meetings are forcing functions” - Clickbait?! “The Secret to Driving 10x Better Work” is clickbait. The title is as succinct a summary of the work as one might endeavor toward.

You are acting the fool, my man.

You don’t make a confident statement and then dismiss critique with “te-he, I could be wrong, Baka”.

The criticism is just "you dared to be confident in expressing your view". It's metacriticism, not criticism of the view itself. That makes a metacriticism level response legitimate.

You can make a confident statement and assume your readers are smart enough to understand it as "this may not be true in all situations always" but then they may be so desperate to insert stupid memes into their responses that they miss the point entirely, anyway.

> A standup meeting to try to ensure visibility and accountability are necessary but by no means sufficient; you only get as much of those as the underlying company culture, plus the seniority of the person running the meeting.

Not to mention that having a standup doesn't actually solve the need for 'maintenance, admin, and firefighting'. If your team needs to do a lot of maintenance and firefighting, that work will eat up the whole week until you pay off the technical debt that's accruing it. A meeting won't solve that on its own. If the owners don't prioritize investing your time in paying debt down, you'll be firefighting until the end of time.

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