For the larger scheduled meetings, if they drag over the hour because of some conversation our culture is that people leave/drop if they're not interested.
Being late is viewed as rude or lacking respect for others by a lot of people.
Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-dec-11-tr-insid...
Non-punctual cultures can view on-time people as clueless, over-eager, and annoying.
As someone who tries to be prompt to a fault, I can see that yes there are people who get annoyed at promptness. It's not that you're a bad person for being prompt. Rather you're a bad person if you start without them or otherwise push back on their lateness.
But there are people where shit seems to happen more than for others. Late once in a blue moon? No worries. Repeat offender? That's a you problem.
And the late people need to understand that sometimes they will miss the beginnings of things, but that's ok too; their inability to be on time (for whatever reason) should not waste the time of those who get there on time.
If an interviewee is half an hour early to a meeting that is rude if they actually expect to start now instead of the scheduled time
That's the meat of it. If I'm going to a meeting where consequences of lateness would suck, like a job interview or something else where it would be highly rude to be late, I'll get there early. Then I'll hang out and play with my phone or something until the person's ready to meet with me at our scheduled time.
I also make it clear that I know I'm early and don't expect the other person to be ready for me. I might use a friendly, stock phrase like "I'd rather wait for them than have them waiting for me" to emphasize that I'm perfectly fine entertaining myself while they're getting ready to see me.
But ultimately, I treat it like getting to my gate at an airport. If I'm there early with time to kill, then so be it. That's infinitely preferable to arriving late and suffering the consequences.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180729-why-brazilians-a...
I had a Chinese tutor who got pretty upset that I would show up to lessons before she got there. Her first approach was to assure me that it was ok if I showed up later. Eventually she responded by showing up very, very early.
In a different case, I had an appointment to meet a friend, and she texted me beforehand to ask whether I'd left home yet. Since the appointment was quite some distance from my home, and I couldn't predict the travel time, I had already arrived, but upon learning that my friend dropped everything to show up early... and asked me why I was so early. I don't see a problem with waiting for a scheduled appointment if I show up early! But apparently other people do?
The meeting itself might continue, but as an individual, once the meeting passes the scheduled finish time, you stand up and say "sorry, I've got another meeting to get to". The worse your company's excessive meeting culture is, the better this works.
Even more points when a participant speaks up at the very beginning, to announce, “I’ve got a hard-stop at 9:50, so I’ll need to leave at that point no matter what.” Then the responsibility for wrap-up is placed squarely on leadership.
Unfortunately I’ve also found that a poorly-run meeting won't get around to the wrap-up on time, and so leaving early may only hurt that participant, by missing something important.
If the meeting fails to accomplish its objectives in 50 minutes, then participants may excuse themselves with a clear conscience, but they may find themselves less-informed than coworkers who chose to stay for the entire session. Especially if there is "Q&A" for clarifications at the end of it.
Quite often I'd have to sit thru meetings that 99% of the time I'm not needed but for one specific minute I keep someone else from making an expensive time wasting mistake. It can be very difficult to determine what you're actually needed for in IT/Operations stuff.
We have a lot of meetings so he encourages we do basically whatever it takes to keep meetings timeboxed.
I once was in an incident call where one of the execs was brought in and eventually said "We have 20 people in this call who all have good salaries. It will cost $600 to just inform our customer service agents to take care of this. Let's get out of here"
Management has to push that culture downwards, and reinforce it themselves, and continually encourage it as people join and leave and teams change.
Unfortunately, I've been in a few meetings scheduled for 9:00 that only really started at 9:10. I think if they were scheduled for 9:10, they would've only started at 9:20...
Because all it will do is make you really good at time math.
I've seen it even back when people would set all their clocks in their car and home 5 minutes fast, they just got real good at doing five minute math.
This can be easily enforced because other neighboring teams would knock the door at the half hour mark and you can't really blame them or be grumpy about it.
https://record.umich.edu/articles/university-updating-start-...
It'll say 10:00 c.t. on the event, meaning it actually starts at 10:15.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing...
I had a major-related class 10 minutes after, clear across campus, about a mile of walking. This professor was nice about it, but I was the only one coming in late at all.
So I made sure to sit in the front row of the earlier lecture, and left precisely when the class was supposed to end, leaving no doubt I had places to go.
Some people just think they set the conventions.
A microcentury is 100 nanoyears if you prefer that.
Perhaps I'm a tad on the spectrum which is why I have zero problem with this, either from the perspective of the people who booked it for 50 mins or those who booked it for 10.
However if there is one remote person you must never use a meeting location - either a room or just standing around desks. Make even people who are sitting next to each other communicate only by their headset. Otherwise the remote person is a lesser member of the team.
This is wierd and terrible, what does it mean, no interns and juniors get to attend engineering meetings? Tagging along to those meetings is how they learn and it's not expected that they have input at every one, sometimes it's just a question or two.
At that point you might not be able to relate anymore to what a day of people looks like that are half a dozen levels down and have decades less work experience.
Another way to say it, in the 90s workplace studies showed an engineering IC’s job was roughly 35 hours of meetings a week. If you work 40, that leaves 5 hours for coding. If you could get someone back just 5 of those 35 hours, you’d have double the coding output per engineer.
Long winded execs enjoying open ended meetings without any structure to constrain them. Which is to say, the kind of shops with micromanaging management who keep themselves busy with meetings with their own team.
The CEO of the company got caught fooling around with a co-worker and abruptly resigned. The new CEO came in and found out what a mess meetings had become and issued the same proclamation - if a meeting isn't productive and produce some actionable items, then it shouldn't be scheduled. If you're not 100% required in a meeting, don't go. If you're in a meeting and feel its a waste of time, then leave.
Just those simple rules got rid of half of my meetings and the several teams I was on suddenly were cranking through sprints, building some amazing apps and products and killing our delivery times. The entire company suddenly was cooking along. It was a real eye opener how you can really bog a Fortune 500 company down just by clogging people's time up with useless meetings.
I've been through too many of these. They like to sit at the head of the table and bask in the glow of their underlings like they're king for an hour.
Following this with "What outcome should we expect at the end of this meeting? If there are next steps, what would we like them to be?" helps cut to the chase, and in my experience, things got better across the board. Sure, there were one or two folks who still struggled to create agendas for meetings - but it wasn't long before they were updating their LinkedIn profiles. Accountability can do that sometimes.
Usually by this point the stuffy room and long meeting have people going in circles. Getting up, opening the door, getting the blood moving while one or two groups have a little sidebar, usually causes the rest of the meeting to wrap up fast.
Most of the people who will mind are exactly the kind of person that you're trying to keep from wasting everyone's time.
Now that I work 100% remote, I have more flexibility to mentally ignore the bits of all meetings that don't apply to me and can instead fill the time writing comments on HN.
Nothing worse than meetings that drag on, where everyone starts to lose focus, and where one or two vocal participants sidetrack it into a 1:1 conversation. Just get shit wrapped up and have your other conversations without demanding the time of people who don’t need to be involved.
In meeting-heavy orgs it is really annoying to have meetings led by people who regularly run up to or beyond the final minute of the time slot. Those extra few minutes practically never produce anything worthwhile enough to compensate for the rushing between meetings and having to choose between being more late to the next one or taking care of a quick bathroom/water/snack break.
(All I actually do about this is be the person who pops up in meeting-chat at XX:51 with a "time-check: we've gone over".)
walking back from lunch with my cow-orkers one day, i realized we were passing a clock store. i went inside and bought a not-too-expensive cuckoo clock and installed it on the wall of our single large conference room
it would make whirring noises every 15 minutes. a few clicking sounds before the hour, and then CUCKOO, CUCKOO as many times as necessary. the marketing and sales folks did NOT like it, but:
- meetings got shorter and there were fewer of them
- the CEO of the company loved that clock. if i forgot to wind it, he or our admin did :-)
Are you just reposting or are you the real dadhacker?
Because if you are, I was reading your blog since I was like 14. Sad it's down now. But absolutely great stuff that helped prepare me for today's industry :)
"Malicious compliance" would be if the same team booked a 50min meeting then a 10min meeting in the same room.
If anything, the company saved money with optimizing meeting room capacity and the CEO's desire to give breaks was enforced.
The team pushing back against leaving at 50m was the only "malicious" party, and they weren't compliant.
At several companies I was at this rule would have removed the last slack time I had to fix, refactor and maintain systems.
I actually asked a manager to add me to a monthly 2 hour 50+ people reoccurring meeting just so I could do some refactoring.
I guess that is a form of Malicious compliance.
Been at companies where they last _45-60 minutes_
The problem with meetings always falls into one of two camps for me:
1. Some company leader is in the meeting and everyone sits tight while they waste time bikeshedding on whatever they read on LinkedIn today.
2. Two engineers are quarreling over the nuance of a status update.
I find meetings that should be short (stand ups) are better done over slack. Submit a quick update and then people can DM if needed. Then you’re not holding people hostage.
The response was ice cold. "No, this is our time." (Go ahead and stop us.)
So it isn't the problem of the people booking the meetings, it's the problem of the people who formulate and implement the rules.
For those wondering, is Deviant Ollam's talk on elevators.
Well, no one agreed upon which 5 minutes were to be shortened, and like the post, it often wasn't observed anyways. So the result was 10 minutes of confusion every half hour.
A contemptible law breeds contempt for all laws.
Once people get used to bullshit everything turns into bullshit. They don’t get rid of those rules because it’ll hurt someone’s feelings. But our feelings get hurt all the time so clearly it’s whose feelings they care about.
I can empathize. I'm in the middle of an extremely prescriptive re-org (down to the team level) that kinda feels like some leader forgot that the rest of the org isn't some cookie cutter copy of the leader's personal experience.
It's so satisfying when the leader describes the results of the re-org as exactly opposite to what actually happened.
DonHopkins on June 12, 2017 | next [–]
The old expression "all our wood behind one arrow" was actually "one of President and CEO Scott McNealy's favorite quotes", which Sun used as a marketing campaign slogan and in presskits around 1990.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080515194354/http://www.sun.co...
Sun even produced a TV commercial in which an arrow that presumably had all of Sun's wood behind it whooshed through the air and hit the bull's eye of a target. (Nobody at Sun ever knew what the target was, but by golly they all knew which arrow to put their wood behind.)
Photo of Scott McNealy in his office at Sun with a huge Cupid's Span style wooden arrow through his window, and a small Steve Martin style wooden arrow through his head:
https://findery.com/johnfox/notes/all-the-wood-behind-one-ar... [sorry, link broken, not on archive.org]
>Sun's Workstations Still Shine, But Rivals Cloud The Outlook
>Daily Gazette - Nov 10, 1991
>Associated Press (Google News Archive)
>Sun touts an "all the wood behind one arrow" slogan, meant to describe a company focused on one goal - workstations. As an April Fool's joke in 1990, Sun employees built a 60-foot-long arrow in McNealy's office with the point going out the window.
Phrase: more wood behind, all the wood behind one arrow
https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2011-Septe...
Yet now he's hugging the Trump Tree!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39501069
DonHopkins on Feb 25, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Institutions try to preserve the problem to which ...
>exhortation I assumed you were talking about Sun, and I read that as "extortion".
It reminds me of the vicious intimidation tactics that Sun executives made their poor sysadmin enforcers perform on their behalf, to ruthlessly coerce other reluctant executives and employees to run Solaris instead of SunOS!
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...
I remember an all-hands meeting where Scott McNealy told everybody, "You're going to have to stop hugging your tree!"
After the meeting I went to my manager and demanded a tree: I never knew about any trees! Why did everybody get a tree but me? I want my tree! I promise I will not hug it.
So he gave me an old set of SunOS manuals.
ChuckMcM on Feb 25, 2024 [–]
One of my mentors was Steve K. at Sun who I consulted with about how badly Sun did changes. It really pissed me off that Sun wouldn't put NIS+ into SunOS because they were allegedly worried it would "reduce the incentive to migrate to Solaris."
I would say I was not particularly successful at being a 'change agent' there.
DonHopkins on Feb 26, 2024 | parent [–]
It's not just changing badly, but changing to the wrong thing. They'd beaten AT&T in the Unix marketplace, then celebrated by getting in bed with them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125284
DonHopkins on Dec 25, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]
You're right, it was Slowlaris that killed Sun, and Java was meant to be a "Microsoft Killer", not a programming language.
Sun was a dead man walking long before Java. And Scott McNealy's me-too obsession with Microsoft was extremely unhealthy, leading to him actually naming the division "SunSoft". Never define and even NAME yourself in terms of your enemy. Scott McNealy knew neither himself nor his enemy.
“If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle” - Sun Tzu’s “The Art Of War”
Sun could never measure up to Microsoft, and McNealy was totally obsessed with fighting them, to the point that Java was not actually a programming language for solving developer's problems per se, but primarily a weapon in his personal vendetta against Microsoft, and Java developers were considered expendable mercenaries in that war, above all else. Everything they did with Java was measured by how much it would harm Microsoft, not help developers.
Scott McNealy was pathetically and pathologically obsessed with being and beating Bill Gates and Windows, yet so unfit for the task, just as he has been more recently obsessed with licking Trump's boots, raising money for him and his failed coup attempt, and towing his anti-mask anti-vax anti-science line of bullshit.
https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/17/mcnealy_trump_fundrai...
Michael Tiemann on "The Worst Job in the World":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann
>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...
>Subject: The Worst Job in the World
>From: Michael Tiemann <tiemann@cygnus.com>
>I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]
The author of this story seems to be just adjusting. Like "really, we mean 60 minutes?" New rule is, book for 60 if you need 60. Leave it at 50 if not.
at the same time, do you really need a meeting room for a standup?
We're stuck in the office, the least you could do is not subject everyone within earshot to your meetings.
I have struggled very hard to not fill this comment with profanity and insults.
If things are running over because of something important like the financial future or your org or the health and safety of your clients then people will deal with the spiders roaming at terrifying speeds. But if everyone is just bikeshedding then the room will empty out pretty quick.
At U of M, they solved this problem by having classes officially start 10 minutes after the time they were advertised as. That is, a class listed as being 10-11am was actually 10:10-11am; nobody showed up until 10:10.
Sure, technically it's the same thing, but there's a pretty massive anchoring effect for things on the hour. Still being in the meeting room at 11:01 feels a lot later than still being in the meeting room at 10:51.
When I studied it had already been mostly abolished. Sometimes starting times were explicitly marked “sine tempore”.
10am c.t. = 10am with extra time
10am s.t. = 10am without extra time
c.t. is still standard at many German universities (and at all Bavarian universities I know). However, I know at least one university of applied sciences where lectures start at full hours.
I've heard it dates back to when people didn't have easy access to precise time. It would allow students to hear the hourly bells and walk to the class.
Thankfully
It's pretty obvious, you can't travel to a meeting instantly and 100% appreciated when you work in such a place. For those senior enough for all day back to back meetings you get toilet breaks!
If you work in a company that doesn't do this take note and if you're senior in a company you should start pushing for this to be implemented. A lot of calendar tools have options for meeting buffers by default and enabling it is all you need to do.
Now meetings actually start at :05 or :07. The prior meeting will often drag until that time, but you don't feel bad knocking at :00 or :02 and asking for the room to clear.
Unfortunately UMich ended "Michigan time" back in 2018. I always thought it was a great solution to the problem.
https://www.michiganpublic.org/education/2018-02-20/universi... / https://record.umich.edu/articles/university-updating-start-...
Sad.
He also insisted students purchase a stapler and staple their homework. And he would give negative points on assignments. You could say "I don't know how to do X" for a step in a proof (0 pts), but if you put in something wrong, you would get negative points on that part.
He was a good prof, and I enjoyed his classes.
I remember reading (maybe from Nate Silver) of a professor who would use this technique to teach about uncertainty. You could weigh your overall grade with a proclamation about how certain you were about the answer. Right answers with high certainty could really amp up your grade, but conversely if you claimed 100% certainty on a question you got wrong, you’d fail the course!
Your Prof Ramsey would have penalised me for this unknown condition; I wonder how many other people he unfairly punished. This isn't behaviour to be celebrated.
Maybe it's because I worked in a different office or whatever, but 25 and 50 minute meetings were pretty common and if somebody else scheduled the room it was 100% respected.
It wasn't really considered pedantry or anything, just the basic respect of honoring the commitment of the meeting calendar.
Some examples:
- a class
- a briefing
- a classic "all-hands meeting"
- standup (if you haven't had a standup which ended in 45 seconds because everyone reported "no obstacles, no requests", your standups have too many people in them or your organization is under too much stress)
- lunch-and-learn
My point is, there can be rules about what is and isn’t allowed in a meeting, but the people at the top can always change those rules on a moment’s notice…and those of us who are less socially adept won’t catch on.
You can join later, that's fine, but I'm not waiting longer than 150 seconds.
Waiting 150 seconds feels like waiting a long time. Whereas being 2.5 minutes late feels like being on time.
So I find that phrasing it this way is more impactful.
(by now you probably figured out that I am not very popular ar work)
I bet your colleagues appreciate it if you’re similarly strict about ending meetings on time.
No, they were software developers
If anything, a group booking a meeting in the ten minutes in between increases meeting room usage, since the next meeting can now start at :00.
What? I can't really imagine that. If I'd booked a room until X:50, and someone came in at X:50 saying they had the room, I would leave, because that's the right thing to do. If I really wanted the room until (X+1):00, then that's what I'd book it for, regardless of what the defaults are in GCal.
FWIW I've never seen top-down efforts to make meetings more efficient stick. Humans are humans, not automatons. They're chatty. They're messy and unorganized. And attempts to build "culture" that curbs those things isn't going to stick when people constantly change jobs because it no longer pays to stay at the same company for decades. (You know, assuming they don't just lay people off because that's the way the wind is blowing...)
realitysballs•5h ago
OrderlyTiamat•5h ago
M3L0NM4N•5h ago
nottorp•5h ago
Let me guess, there is no group text chat where people can randomly whine and get unstuck by whoever notices and is an expert on the problem?
SoftTalker•4h ago
nottorp•4h ago
carefulfungi•5h ago
wjamesg•5h ago
baxtr•5h ago
No functional/topic discussions. If they’re required you schedule those in the standup and decide who participates.
No need to expand beyond 15min in that mode.
SoftTalker•4h ago
baxtr•2h ago
It reduced the number of back and forth on slack/other tools quite a bit.
exhilaration•5h ago
shermantanktop•4h ago
vessenes•3h ago
bee_rider•5h ago
malfist•4h ago
Everyone answers 3 questions:
* Do I need something?
* What is my _top_ priority for the day?
* Am I blocked?
The answers for the first and third question should always be "No" because you should have raised them before standup, but it's a relief valve if you didn't.
What is your top priority should be short and focused. If you let people talk about what they did or didn't do yesterday it becomes a slog with people justifying their progress or non-progress. Ultimately it doesn't matter. Focusing on the top priority he's focus people on their main task for the day.
n4r9•4h ago
How do you manage (if you have to) more research-heavy/blue-sky tasks that may take a few days or weeks without linear daily progress? Like, some days may just involve doing some sketches and playing around with code in order to internalise some data structure. Does that person just say "I'm continuing with task X" several days in a row?
frabcus•3h ago