5 ms·

It is pretty simple. If I am forced to attend unnecessary meetings I either bring my laptop and it is a valid assumption that I am not 100% following the meetin

by rffn 10y ago

It is pretty simple. If I am forced to attend unnecessary meetings I either bring my laptop and it is a valid assumption that I am not 100% following the meeting or I bring something else if laptops are banned (printouts, etc.). Worst case I will just space out. If meetings are relevant, well planned, interesting I will listen and contribute. I still might bring and use the laptop for notes.

limaoscarjuliet 10y ago
I cannot agree more. The amount of lunacy and idiocy going on during these "quick" meetings has been driving me nuts. Imagine a room full of VPs, each making no less than $200K a year, discussing the need to spend $1K on hardware. And the punch line - we just spent more salary $ during this meeting, than it would take to rent these for a year from OVH or AWS.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- rmc 10y ago
  "You need to get approval for a $1,000 purchase, but you can scheduled a 1 hour meeting with 20 people without approval"
- NetStrikeForce 10y ago
  I worked with a guy that used to say: "I need approval for a $500 hardware buy, but I can call a meeting that would cost thousands of Dollars in salaries any time I want" I wish companies had a "meetings budget" and had to justify the ROI of each meeting... One can only dream :)
  - vidarh 10y ago
    One practice I've found useful, that is more general, was to issue weekly reports breaking down the cost of each activity. That is, I'd solicit a ~5-10 line breakdown from everyone in my team of how they spent their time that week, and I'd apply average costs for their function and tally it up. So we might see posts like $2k for a planning meeting show up on the report, and suddenly people started paying attention to what time was spent on - both for meetings and otherwise. And making arguments like the one in your example. It also meant being able to make actual estimates over whether pursuing a certain optimization would be worth it vs. buying more hardware. Amazingly each place I've done this at, they were initially confused why I wanted to do this, as apparently it was weird and unusual to have engineering issue such breakdowns
    - Chris2048 10y ago
      Wonder how much "weekly report compilation" would cost :-)
- fermigier 10y ago
  Since you're mentioning OVH, it reminds me of a story I've been told about Octave Klaba, OVH's founder (not sure if it's true or not actually): he is said to have forbidden any meeting "longer than 90 minutes" in his company. By "longer than 90 minutes", he means that the total time spent by the people participating in the meeting should not be longer that 90 minutes (so 2 participants -> 45 minutes, 3 participants -> 30 minutes, etc.). This fits your logic perfectly.
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    That's an interesting way to make the participants actually plan and think about what they're going to discuss ahead of the meeting.
- vidarh 10y ago
  I used to work at Yahoo (a decade ago). At the time every hardware purchase went through a review committee in Sunnyvale. Even for e.g. Europe - I worked out of the European head office in London. That committee included one of the founders (I can't for the life of me remember if it was Yang or Filo). I had to buy $4k worth of hardware once and they spent 20 minutes grilling me about load data etc. from the current server. It just baffled me at the time that a multi-billion dollar company saw it as worthwhile for one of its founders to spend 20 minutes discussing a $4k purchase. Not to mention the signal value about how little they trusted the judgement of their engineering team. I concluded that it basically was about two things: 1) to keep said person away from more important decision, at the cost of annoying a lot of other people. 2) as an intentional barrier to make people think twice about asking for more. To #2 on one hand I appreciate fiscal responsibility, but at the same time I've seen too often how making people overly stingy often wastes huge amount of resources trying to engineer around something that could be solved for a tenth of the cost by throwing more hardware at it.
Intermernet 10y ago
I've been to hundreds of meetings and I can count on both hands the meetings that were actually important for the team assembled. I agree with the spirit of the article, but the problem remains that most meetings are, at best, fora for discussing things that could be discussed in a more decentralized manner, and, at worst, complete wastes of time where one person is flexing control muscle in order to inflate their self-importance. The problem with "meeting culture" is completely unrelated to the problem addressed in the article, except to say that the problem addressed in the article wouldn't be such a problem if the "meeting culture" problem were addressed instead. Don't call a meeting if you don't really need one. Hint: most projects really only need 2 meetings: one at the beginning, and one at the end. Everything in-between can be dealt with in a much more streamlined manner. This, unfortunately, includes "Agile" development "stand-up" meetings. With the correct tools they become completely unnecessary, and only serve to hinder (or artificially accelerate) development milestones. I'm sure that there are some teams out there who do this correctly, but I haven't been lucky enough to come across any yet.

by rffn 10y ago

limaoscarjuliet 10y ago

I cannot agree more. The amount of lunacy and idiocy going on during these "quick" meetings has been driving me nuts. Imagine a room full of VPs, each making no less than $200K a year, discussing the need to spend $1K on hardware. And the punch line - we just spent more salary $ during this meeting, than it would take to rent these for a year from OVH or AWS.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
rmc 10y ago
"You need to get approval for a $1,000 purchase, but you can scheduled a 1 hour meeting with 20 people without approval"
NetStrikeForce 10y ago
I worked with a guy that used to say: "I need approval for a $500 hardware buy, but I can call a meeting that would cost thousands of Dollars in salaries any time I want" I wish companies had a "meetings budget" and had to justify the ROI of each meeting... One can only dream :)
- vidarh 10y ago
  One practice I've found useful, that is more general, was to issue weekly reports breaking down the cost of each activity. That is, I'd solicit a ~5-10 line breakdown from everyone in my team of how they spent their time that week, and I'd apply average costs for their function and tally it up. So we might see posts like $2k for a planning meeting show up on the report, and suddenly people started paying attention to what time was spent on - both for meetings and otherwise. And making arguments like the one in your example. It also meant being able to make actual estimates over whether pursuing a certain optimization would be worth it vs. buying more hardware. Amazingly each place I've done this at, they were initially confused why I wanted to do this, as apparently it was weird and unusual to have engineering issue such breakdowns
  - Chris2048 10y ago
    Wonder how much "weekly report compilation" would cost :-)
fermigier 10y ago
Since you're mentioning OVH, it reminds me of a story I've been told about Octave Klaba, OVH's founder (not sure if it's true or not actually): he is said to have forbidden any meeting "longer than 90 minutes" in his company. By "longer than 90 minutes", he means that the total time spent by the people participating in the meeting should not be longer that 90 minutes (so 2 participants -> 45 minutes, 3 participants -> 30 minutes, etc.). This fits your logic perfectly.
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  That's an interesting way to make the participants actually plan and think about what they're going to discuss ahead of the meeting.
vidarh 10y ago
I used to work at Yahoo (a decade ago). At the time every hardware purchase went through a review committee in Sunnyvale. Even for e.g. Europe - I worked out of the European head office in London. That committee included one of the founders (I can't for the life of me remember if it was Yang or Filo). I had to buy $4k worth of hardware once and they spent 20 minutes grilling me about load data etc. from the current server. It just baffled me at the time that a multi-billion dollar company saw it as worthwhile for one of its founders to spend 20 minutes discussing a $4k purchase. Not to mention the signal value about how little they trusted the judgement of their engineering team. I concluded that it basically was about two things: 1) to keep said person away from more important decision, at the cost of annoying a lot of other people. 2) as an intentional barrier to make people think twice about asking for more. To #2 on one hand I appreciate fiscal responsibility, but at the same time I've seen too often how making people overly stingy often wastes huge amount of resources trying to engineer around something that could be solved for a tenth of the cost by throwing more hardware at it.

Intermernet 10y ago

I've been to hundreds of meetings and I can count on both hands the meetings that were actually important for the team assembled. I agree with the spirit of the article, but the problem remains that most meetings are, at best, fora for discussing things that could be discussed in a more decentralized manner, and, at worst, complete wastes of time where one person is flexing control muscle in order to inflate their self-importance. The problem with "meeting culture" is completely unrelated to the problem addressed in the article, except to say that the problem addressed in the article wouldn't be such a problem if the "meeting culture" problem were addressed instead. Don't call a meeting if you don't really need one. Hint: most projects really only need 2 meetings: one at the beginning, and one at the end. Everything in-between can be dealt with in a much more streamlined manner. This, unfortunately, includes "Agile" development "stand-up" meetings. With the correct tools they become completely unnecessary, and only serve to hinder (or artificially accelerate) development milestones. I'm sure that there are some teams out there who do this correctly, but I haven't been lucky enough to come across any yet.