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Somewhat regarding meeting length. I learned in Marine boot camp that if a group is asked, "any questions?" that first, you do not say, "No" because then anyon
by LanceH 5y ago
Somewhat regarding meeting length. I learned in Marine boot camp that if a group is asked, "any questions?" that first, you do not say, "No" because then anyone with a question can't be heard. Second, under virtually no circumstances should you actually ask a question.
Obviously the second has its exceptions, but for the general meeting where everyone is present, a question should be confined to something relevant to everyone at the meeting. Instead, what some people here is, "What would you personally like me to discuss with you?"
- stavros 5y agoHmm, that's interesting, maybe the question should be changed to "any questions relevant to the entire group?".
- LanceH 5y agoI'm not sure it would matter. It's the same people every time. I really don't mind a legitimate question, that isn't relevant by someone who genuinely is lost. It's the person who wants to work out their personal project with 40 people in attendance. Some three letter acronym, older US companies seem to be more prone to collecting these people, but they exist everywhere. Possible responses: "That is beyond the scope of this meeting." "Let's take this offline." "You need to talk to Dave." - bonus if Dave knows nothing about it - double bonus if Dave does not exist
- stavros 5y agoI will use this, complete with the name "Dave".
- zimpenfish 5y agoTriple bonus if you work at a Perl shop since they seem to proliferate with Daves?
- drewg123 5y agounder virtually no circumstances should you actually ask a question Its funny, as this advice is the opposite of the advice we got when doing engineering onboarding at Google in 2013. They told us that if we have a question in a meeting, go ahead and ask it. The reasoning is that its likely that many other people have the same question and will benefit from the answer, but were too shy to ask it themselves. Different target audiences, I guess :)
- HelloNurse 5y agoThere's a difference between teaching to a group and working as a team. I'd expect almost everything said in "engineering onboarding" to be equally relevant for all of an homogeneous group of new recruits who have the same questions and varying ideas about their importance and obviousness. On the other hand a meeting in the Marines is likely to be about the respective orders and status reports of several people, with everybody having different problems that should be discussed individually.
- drewg123 5y agoI should have been clear. The advice to ask questions in meetings pertained to all meetings at Google, not to the short onboarding session.
- urthor 5y agoI don't really agree with this. We have this issue a lot with our standups. The wording we've agreed on is "can I talk to anyone later about xxx?" Where you agree to take something offline, but don't necessarily who to talk to it about or if it's appropriate to the whole group. It's actually pretty weird thinking about how much time effort and sweat that was put in into coming up with those exact words.