6 ms·

This was not as dystopian an idea I thought it would be from the title. I'm all for innovative ways of cutting down on unnecessary meetings - creating an intern

• tehlike 7y ago
  Brilliant idea actually. When people are paid to spend time, and with very little oversight on how they spend it, people tend to get lazy. I personally started to not go to meetings that fit certain patterns: - is there a less senior, but capable engineer that can do it without me? If so, great. Lets make it their project [edit: this is to help them increase their impact] - is there a weekly meeting that fits 'status checking' style? Do not go. I am mostly not needed anyway, and if i am they can reach out to me - does the meeting involve >5 people? If so runaway, it cant be productive anyway (except if it is some sort of review with vps on project launch etc). I try to be available and approchable anytime, and doing just the two above cuts my meetings by more than 50-60%. For others, i try to ask an agenda and whether things can be resolved offline Meeting creep, process creep are real things that get in the way of productivity. I can see how "showing" some monetary impact of having a useless meeting can help reduce it.
  • throwaway2048 7y ago
    Unfortunately its very difficult to act unilaterally, for most people just not showing up to meetings is a good way to ensure you will never get a promotion, or worse, receive a "performance improvement plan" aka we are documenting a case to fire you with cause. Nobody applauds your productivity gains, they just think of you as a smug jerk that thinks your time is worth more than anyone else's. Same thing with leaving at 5pm sharp in many businesses, it doesn't matter if you outperform the rest of the office combined, you WILL be singled out and delt with.
    • tehlike 7y ago
      My case is a bit easier, as I was working in advertising, and it is easy to quantify the impact - which is kind of the point in the article (quantifying negative impact of a meeting, for example). Depending on your manager, they will also fight for reducing meetings to necessities only, and find ways to work more in harmony (for lack of a better word) instead of the relatively forced nature of meetings. For most solid engineers, 10 minutes chatting on IM/in person every now and then is more productive then weekly forced meetings (where everyone stares at their laptop). We came up with plenty of improvements where I pinged someone or they pinged me, and it was done soon after. Everyone knew their responsibility, and they did not hesitate to ask for help where they needed. However, your point does sound plausible, and very likely. When everyone is fine with status quo, the one that challenges it can be singled out.
    • inlined 7y ago
      FTA this company docks you currency for staying late.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • tarsinge 7y ago
      I agree with you if you naively do that isolated, but if you play the political game you can get more value for your productivity (like becoming an ambitious manager’s secret asset and then riding on their promotion and just having they back you up when you skip a meeting)
      • tehlike 7y ago
        That one i never could manage to do. I had often conflicted with my manager.
  • purplezooey 7y ago
    Careful tho. If you don't show up at enough meetings and subtly tell everyone all about your own accomplishments and diminish those of others, people will ask, what does he/she do again? And you'll be put on the next RIF.
    • tehlike 7y ago
      You dont need to diminish others to prove your own. That is the key to a healthy org. I give a lot of praise to engineers when it is due, and tend to insist on taking things where i think its dull work (i personally feel sad punting on dull work, and try not to do it), so it works both ways. By skipping good chunk of meetings, i spare more time to eng, and hands on help.
      • ken 7y ago
        One could say you don't need to charge for conference rooms in a healthy org, either. Like a Sufficiently Smart Compiler, though, where do I find a Sufficiently Healthy Organization that every single employee is completely above politics?
    • jonsen 7y ago
      RIF?? Rest in feace?
      • DoreenMichele 7y ago
        I'm guessing: Reduction In Forces. Ie "You will be downsized."
  • PeterStuer 7y ago
    I knew a guy that did exactly as you describe above. Probably most productive employee of the firm, solid tech skills. He's was let go after about 14 months of the above.
    • H8crilA 7y ago
      Wow, why? Also I suppose that's good for him, employee salaries are always forced down/up to the average of the company. So if you figure out you're really good at your company it's probably the time to find a higher paying job. And if you're bad you should cling on to that job.
      • dsr_ 7y ago
        I can venture a guess. The point of a company is to do things that one person can't do by themselves. If you reject most of the coordinating activities, you've rejected the company. (And according to Coase, the other function of a company is to reduce the friction of making deals: if you need to negotiate a contract every time you want to get a programmer to do their job, you decrease the value of the programmer by the cost of the negotiation.)
        • tehlike 7y ago
          We do need people a few std deviation above the mean productivity. Leaps and breakthroughs happen because of them. So i would assume very strongly company is losing. I can also think managers (if not companies) should work on reducing the need to do more meetings.
        • jimmaswell 7y ago
          Meetings aren't real coordinating activities. They're generally listening to a boss drone on about stuff that could have been said in an email for an hour and people asking pointless questions that mostly only pertain to themselves.
    • tehlike 7y ago
      I imagine he still found a great job somewhere else.
• fzeroracer 7y ago
  To be honest, reading the article made it sound even worse than the title. Having everything at your company priced for individual workers (from PCs to desks to smaller things) is a lot of nonsensical stress placed on workers. I already do enough econ bullshit outside of work, the last thing I want to do is start keeping spreadsheets for things that my workplace should provide me.
  • tehlike 7y ago
    This i agree. Cognitive load of pricing everything would be very high. I agree on putting monetary impact on meetings, however.
    • 1123581321 7y ago
      The cognitive load needs to be high; it’s the thought required to make better decisions about time and resources. Normally little thought goes into these things. Plus, it seems that over time it becomes easier to operate more effectively. A team who has decided to save $200 a week by skipping status meetings isn’t thinking about them anymore beyond a periodic re-evaluation.
  • rtpg 7y ago
    Yeah, applying “free market principles” instead of getting workers to just _make better decisions_ is real consultant bullshit that upper management eats right up Imagine you have a bunch of workers who don’t know how to effectively avoid meetings, because they haven’t learned about working more asynchronously. You start charging them for the meeting rooms Now you have a bunch of people who don’t know how to effectively work without meetings, who can’t use meeting rooms anymore.
    • dmix 7y ago
      These guys can get heavily rewarded by using those meetings effectively. It's hardly just punishing people for doing regular business activity, it's all about earning bonuses on top of a base income combined with a decentralized managerial approach. It says top performers can get a full years salary each quarter which is hardly working for some peanuts like most bonuses. The workers can choose which managers to work under based on their ability to perform, while allowing workers to bid and propose what to work on, while freeing up budget capital directly under the people doing the actual work. Which together is an amazing concept by itself. Plus I don't see how this fuels consultant speak or useless managerial processes. If anything this is very hostile to those types of people who feed off useless meetings, long email threads, powerpoint presentations, unwieldy google docs, etc at high hourly rates. I can't count how much of my career (and millions of other people's careers) was wasted appeasing heirachical managerial processes, usually via useless meetings so the managers can feel like they are doing something. Although I agree that the small stuff like charging for "space for a wet umbrella" is taking the concept too far. Sometimes basic ideas work really well in some core areas... then people get excited and try to pigeonhole it onto everything (gamification is a good example of this in software). The other challenge is avoiding rewarding "vanity metrics", which means they need a very good analytics and data science teams working with top management to establish KPIs, with frequent retroactives to evolve the reward models. This also obviously isn't for everyone but I could see this working very very well with certain types of people. Valve has a similar structure, minus the currency part, which resulted from hiring a very left-leaning economist to help build out a decentralized company structure. So it's not just "free markets" vs top-down authoritative control. But rather strict hierarchical managerial structures vs decentralized individual units. Combined with a purely fixed compensation vs a basic income + fluid performance based compensation. TLDR: It sounds brilliant to me, given a couple of the above asterisks (avoiding vanity metrics; pushing back on pigeonholing incentive systems onto everything just because you can; not every personality or industry niche flourishes in these types of environments).
• brightball 7y ago
  When people don’t feel a cost for a thing, they have no reason not to continue to ask for it. It’s the same reason you have to have rush rates for a contract programming business. There will always be people who insist they have to have certain work done urgently. If your rate doubles and they still need it...it’s truly urgent. If it’s not, you’ll quickly find out and save yourself a lot of headache.
• benj111 7y ago
  Do you not think this would introduce a ton of mental load just keeping track of everything? You're almost a one man business, doing their own books, and then you've got the sources of conflict that come with that. What if you an a colleague agree to split the costs of a meeting room and he doesn't pay? So already you're introducing rudimentary contract law, and having to keep track of people that don't pay their bills. This does raise an interesting question of whether you'd get meta employees providing services for the employees, perhaps credit ratings, banking, perhaps you could book up all the meeting rooms yourself and sub let them. Ultimately in these situations you're doing the bidding of higher ups. If they decide you're having too many meetings, they'll find ways to cut down the number of meetings, then some thing will go wrong, lack of meetings will be blamed, and they'll be rolled back out again.
  • petre 7y ago
    > What if you an a colleague agree to split the costs of a meeting room and he doesn't pay In Japan? Not likely. And probably their app already handles that.
    • benj111 7y ago
      I'm sure there are people in Japan that are dishonest or forget, or get sick and don't come into work on the relevant day. The app possibly could handle most of it, there surely has to be a point somewhere where the decision to share the room has been made, but hasn't been formalised yet. There may be a system where it requires both of you to agree to rent the room, so you aren't left with an unpaid bill, you may be left without a room that you needed though, which may be worse.
      • james_s_tayler 7y ago
        But Japanese people never make mistakes. They always pay their bills. They are always on time. They are robot gods. Turns out they actually do do all of the things you suggest, but that's not how they perceive themselves to be, so 'they don't do that'. True story - I worked on implementing a billing system for a Japanese utility company and when our team asked for the requirements around how to handling dunning when people don't pay their bills the response we got back was "Japanese people always pay their bills." I shit you not.
• RaceWon 7y ago
  They should charge for sending emails where I work. They'll copy peeps from a 5 different departments at times, you know just to keep them in the loop. It is unreal.