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I made it through most of my career thus far, including pretty senior positions, where probably most of my days didn't have a formal meeting. It's been so stran

I made it through most of my career thus far, including pretty senior positions, where probably most of my days didn't have a formal meeting. It's been so strange to move to a big tech company where I could spend 30 hours per week in meetings if I was not pushing back. Any they're all 30 minutes. What the heck do you expect to accomplish in 30 minutes? You spend 20% of the time waiting for someone to show up.

gambiting 5y ago
I'm a team lead and most days I'll have 1 maybe 2 meetings at most, but having 0 isn't unusual. Is that weird? I do talk to people on teams all the time though. I know what everyone is doing and how they are doing, just without having a voice/video call. We just text most of the time - I can be in 10+ ongoing conversations at the same time.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  It’s culture thing. Personally, I prefer in-person or video meetings because it’s an event and people are usually focused on task. One on one calls are great too. Text is good or bad. It’s an attention thief, and you never know what you are getting. Also, I find that platforms like Teams are great for the present, but awful for history and context.
  - Consultant32452 5y ago
    In my experience 90% of meetings with more than 3 people are irrelevant to my work. Here's a couple examples: "Standups" that are really PM status calls that constantly go down rabbit holes. My update is 30s or less, but the meetings are always 30 minutes long and usually run over. "Code reviews" that are really run/monopolized by one person. The entire team is required to attend even if you have no code, but in practice no one other than the runner is allowed to provide feedback.
    - pc86 5y ago
      How are your standups taking that long? We have over a dozen people on our daily standup and it's 5-6 minutes long.
      - adamnew123456 5y ago
        I've noticed a similar pattern at $JOB - we started doing a daily "WFH status call" in early April last year. There was nothing like it previously, just a weekly report on important bugs, support items, etc. that we worked on. And the occasional (less than weekly) meeting which would include the PM and dev team. The calls started out shorter but over time they've become a hybrid of: - "Here's the outlay for today." The shortest are just this which only happens when things are going smoothly and everyone's tackling things of moderate difficulty. - "Here's something that's been giving me trouble" which prompts a few minutes discussion. Usually someone has a idea to pitch in which gets the person unstuck, but it can bleed into... - "I wanted to bring up this thing I noticed" which pulls us into a bigger half-hour discussion with some possible followups scheduled with the more senior members. So at the extremes, any given instance of this meeting could last from 10 minutes to 45 minutes. We usually refer to this as a "stand-up" but I could see how someone from a more regimented team would understand it to be something with a more tightly defined purpose.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
wpietri 5y ago
You don't have to spend 20% of your time waiting for somebody to show up! That's an organization culture issue. For the daily team coordination meeting I run, we had a problem with that. So after one especially egregious delay, I asked how people felt about that. They didn't like it, of course. I then said I wanted a consistent start time, but was open as to when it was. At the hour? 1 minute after? 5 minutes after? To my surprise, they picked 1 minute after. And everybody has stuck to it. A couple months in we'll occasionally have somebody turn up late, but the meeting starts without them, so they know not to do it again. It's great! We also build an agenda on the fly, keeping the pace brisk. Usually we finish a few minutes early, and sometimes the meeting will be a zippy 10-15 minutes. It's possible to have good, useful meetings!
- ljm 5y ago
  Funnily enough, my zippy meetings are the ones where an agenda, or at least a boundary, is set out in advance. Oftentimes we allocate more time than is needed to discuss, so we call it off the moment we're done instead of filling the time. Part of this is because I'm also fine with interrupting and telling people to take something async if a group meeting is becoming a hyper-specific 1:1. Soon enough, meetings remain direct and rabbit-hole free. Unless the entire purpose of the meeting was to collectively burrow into it. All it takes is a little discipline, and clear expectations.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    Video calls have also made this a lot easier. Before everyone kind of expected ~3 minutes of lateness to be the norm, dependent on elevator and stairway congestion. And god forbid one person is traveling from another meeting in another building a bit of a walk away.
  - rjzzleep 5y ago
    Being able to call out people to take their stuff out of the meeting is extremely important. Needless to say when I just recently did that with the two program managers in a fortune 500 I got punished. It leaves you wondering why these big corps have program and project managers when they: - consistently don't have an agenda - completely ignore scope - don't even try to define scope - keep talking about being productive - keep getting promoted for creating powerbi dashboards of other people's work
pc86 5y ago
Seconding the other comment on not waiting for people. As soon as the clock changes to the start time we are beginning the meeting, and we're not catching anyone up if they're late. They can figure it out. Obviously this gets a little slack if you're a super senior position (nobody's telling the company President they're not circling back on something already discussed) but for the most part meetings are much more efficient if you're absolutely ruthless with the clock. It's literally the only thing that nobody can control. On the flipside you have to be equally ruthless about not going over time. At 5 min before the scheduled meeting end time we start cutting off discussions that have become circular and start determining if we need to have a follow-up or clarification meeting for something. My biggest rule for this is that it can't be the exact same group, you'll just end up having the same meeting again. These follow-up meetings are most effective if it's a subset of the original group trying to clarify some specific point. 30 minute meetings can be useful if you stick to these rules.
manigandham 5y ago
Why do you need more than 30 mins? The major problem with meetings is that they’re mostly useless. Just talking for the sake of talking. Write up everything first for education and background, distribute that, then have a short meeting when there’s something actionable to do.

gambiting 5y ago

I'm a team lead and most days I'll have 1 maybe 2 meetings at most, but having 0 isn't unusual. Is that weird? I do talk to people on teams all the time though. I know what everyone is doing and how they are doing, just without having a voice/video call. We just text most of the time - I can be in 10+ ongoing conversations at the same time.

Spooky23 5y ago
It’s culture thing. Personally, I prefer in-person or video meetings because it’s an event and people are usually focused on task. One on one calls are great too. Text is good or bad. It’s an attention thief, and you never know what you are getting. Also, I find that platforms like Teams are great for the present, but awful for history and context.
- Consultant32452 5y ago
  In my experience 90% of meetings with more than 3 people are irrelevant to my work. Here's a couple examples: "Standups" that are really PM status calls that constantly go down rabbit holes. My update is 30s or less, but the meetings are always 30 minutes long and usually run over. "Code reviews" that are really run/monopolized by one person. The entire team is required to attend even if you have no code, but in practice no one other than the runner is allowed to provide feedback.
  - pc86 5y ago
    How are your standups taking that long? We have over a dozen people on our daily standup and it's 5-6 minutes long.
    - adamnew123456 5y ago
      I've noticed a similar pattern at $JOB - we started doing a daily "WFH status call" in early April last year. There was nothing like it previously, just a weekly report on important bugs, support items, etc. that we worked on. And the occasional (less than weekly) meeting which would include the PM and dev team. The calls started out shorter but over time they've become a hybrid of: - "Here's the outlay for today." The shortest are just this which only happens when things are going smoothly and everyone's tackling things of moderate difficulty. - "Here's something that's been giving me trouble" which prompts a few minutes discussion. Usually someone has a idea to pitch in which gets the person unstuck, but it can bleed into... - "I wanted to bring up this thing I noticed" which pulls us into a bigger half-hour discussion with some possible followups scheduled with the more senior members. So at the extremes, any given instance of this meeting could last from 10 minutes to 45 minutes. We usually refer to this as a "stand-up" but I could see how someone from a more regimented team would understand it to be something with a more tightly defined purpose.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

wpietri 5y ago

You don't have to spend 20% of your time waiting for somebody to show up! That's an organization culture issue. For the daily team coordination meeting I run, we had a problem with that. So after one especially egregious delay, I asked how people felt about that. They didn't like it, of course. I then said I wanted a consistent start time, but was open as to when it was. At the hour? 1 minute after? 5 minutes after? To my surprise, they picked 1 minute after. And everybody has stuck to it. A couple months in we'll occasionally have somebody turn up late, but the meeting starts without them, so they know not to do it again. It's great! We also build an agenda on the fly, keeping the pace brisk. Usually we finish a few minutes early, and sometimes the meeting will be a zippy 10-15 minutes. It's possible to have good, useful meetings!

ljm 5y ago
Funnily enough, my zippy meetings are the ones where an agenda, or at least a boundary, is set out in advance. Oftentimes we allocate more time than is needed to discuss, so we call it off the moment we're done instead of filling the time. Part of this is because I'm also fine with interrupting and telling people to take something async if a group meeting is becoming a hyper-specific 1:1. Soon enough, meetings remain direct and rabbit-hole free. Unless the entire purpose of the meeting was to collectively burrow into it. All it takes is a little discipline, and clear expectations.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  Video calls have also made this a lot easier. Before everyone kind of expected ~3 minutes of lateness to be the norm, dependent on elevator and stairway congestion. And god forbid one person is traveling from another meeting in another building a bit of a walk away.
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  Being able to call out people to take their stuff out of the meeting is extremely important. Needless to say when I just recently did that with the two program managers in a fortune 500 I got punished. It leaves you wondering why these big corps have program and project managers when they: - consistently don't have an agenda - completely ignore scope - don't even try to define scope - keep talking about being productive - keep getting promoted for creating powerbi dashboards of other people's work

pc86 5y ago

Seconding the other comment on not waiting for people. As soon as the clock changes to the start time we are beginning the meeting, and we're not catching anyone up if they're late. They can figure it out. Obviously this gets a little slack if you're a super senior position (nobody's telling the company President they're not circling back on something already discussed) but for the most part meetings are much more efficient if you're absolutely ruthless with the clock. It's literally the only thing that nobody can control. On the flipside you have to be equally ruthless about not going over time. At 5 min before the scheduled meeting end time we start cutting off discussions that have become circular and start determining if we need to have a follow-up or clarification meeting for something. My biggest rule for this is that it can't be the exact same group, you'll just end up having the same meeting again. These follow-up meetings are most effective if it's a subset of the original group trying to clarify some specific point. 30 minute meetings can be useful if you stick to these rules.

manigandham 5y ago

Why do you need more than 30 mins? The major problem with meetings is that they’re mostly useless. Just talking for the sake of talking. Write up everything first for education and background, distribute that, then have a short meeting when there’s something actionable to do.