7 ms·

We secretly love meetings (2010)

softwaredoug 4y ago
I find we like _our_ own meetings. The ones we initiate or run, but we but dislike _others_ meetings. Schedules fill with meetings because each meeting-initiator doesn’t want to let go of their meeting - and more deeply the status or control it represents. So you can easily get a lot of meetings on your calendar and the inertia is not to burst the bubble of other folks status/whatever by questioning the need for their meeting. Moreover the people who have the most authority to reduce meetings - managers - don’t really directly feel the pain as they’re already in a bunch of meetings. Losing this one meeting would just mean a time slot with another meeting. It’s the heads-down ICs who experiences the downside from a random meeting that interrupts their flow. And sadly they have the least amount of formal authority to challenge the number of meetings.
irrational 4y ago
> give them an outlet for sharing their personal feelings and opinions, not only on work issues but also on personal or political topics Holy cow! Are people really sharing personal or political topics in work meetings?! I’ve worked with people for more than a decade whom I meet with nearly every day in stand ups and other meetings and I know nothing about their political, religious, personal beliefs and life. I would never share that kind of stuff in a business setting. It is completely inappropriate. Separately, we have a company rule of no meeting Fridays. By far and away this is my favorite day of the week.
- gherkinnn 4y ago
  How is that inappropriate? Within reason I’d even expect to. Even the Finns I work with mention this and that in passing.
  - hunterb123 4y ago
    Don't talk money, politics, or religion. It's basic etiquette.
    - Enginerrrd 4y ago
      To strangers, and in the most formal contexts... MAYBE, but teams of coworkers are most effective when more traditional human bonds form between them and that won't happen without being somewhat informal with them.
      - hunterb123 4y ago
        Working is one of the most formal contexts. Politics and the workplace don't mix. Don't be that annoying activist bothering your coworkers and making people feel uncomfortable with incoherent political rants. -- edit @ cutemonster -- > GP mentions how to create a more trusting and closely bonded team Yes my counter is that you aren't bonding, you're most likely isolating others. You can rarely change someone's core religious or political beliefs, especially with the weak arguments of today. The workplace is not a place to try to do so. Talk politics with your friends, not with your coworkers, they are too nice to say they don't want to hear it. -- edit @ blowski -- > Quite a lot of overgeneralisation there I'm not generalizing, I'm saying if you're amongst friends and know they're okay with talking politics go ahead. If you're amongst coworkers and don't know then shut your mouth so we can all work in peace. > In some cultures your comment woud be 100% true, but in others, your refusal to discuss such topics would look aloof. Oh, which cultures? That's kind of my point though, don't force people to talk politics. They shouldn't have to worry about their refusal to discuss a topic or looking "aloof".
        cutemonster 4y ago
        GP mentions how to create a more trusting and closely bonded team, and you reply "annoying activist bothering your coworkers"?
        blowski 4y ago
        Quite a lot of overgeneralisation there, I suspect you're projecting your own personal preferences onto everyone else. In some cultures your comment woud be 100% true, but in others, your refusal to discuss such topics would look aloof. Choose to work in a culture you like, rather than trying to impose a culture you like on one you don't.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
  Yes, it's become really common. (Between a few different gigs and hearing from friends, I've gotten to see inside lots of companies' product teams over the last few years.) There's a constant drumbeat of forced intimacy and incessant prying into your personal life. "What did you do this weekend?" "Tell two truths and a lie!" "What'd you think of the $SPORT game?" "Where are you going for vacation?" "Are you thinking about moving, getting married, having kids?" "Don't forget to vote!" "Don't forget to donate!" Combine that with the endless oversharing that's used as a mock-facade for true psychological safety, and the net result is very little time spent on actual work. I know way too much about which engineers are on which antidepressants, who's having weddings/babies/whatever, how they're voting, and what race/gender/etc they identify with... but simple conversations about schema-design or even code-review still veer into awkward, passive-aggressive intensity within a matter of minutes. It's honestly absolutely exhausting. I do my best to duck out for the few minutes (or 20 minutes) of the meeting that gets frittered away on it. But it's inescapable, sooner or later. I've learned to have some bland nonsense ready to answer this sort of thing.
  - kdmccormick 4y ago
    > "Tell two truths and a lie!" > "Don't forget to donate!" Sure, I get what you're saying about those. And this one is prying in just about any context, work or not: > "Are you thinking about getting married, having kids?" But these? > "What did you do this weekend?" > "What'd you think of the $SPORT game?" > "Where are you going for vacation?" > "Don't forget to vote!" Those are just normal ways of making conversation! 99% of the time if someone's asking you this, they're not trying to get inside your brain and invade your privacy... they're just trying to talk to you. Honest question: do you prefer to have zero social interaction with your coworkers? Edit: Also, it's bonkers to me that you think that this "has become" a thing. People have been making idle conversation at work since the dawn of civilization.
    - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
      Thought about it a little more since my original comment does make me sound like a grumpy old geezer. First off: you're right about there being a spectrum here, and some things do fall under the banner of plain ol' smalltalk. I think what's gotten to me is how relentless it is lately. Back in the olden days, before the pandemic, whether you were meeting in a large group or small, remotely or in-person, everyone would just show up to the meeting and get on with it. The socializing would then happen afterward in small, occasional, in-person settings. You'd go for lunch or coffee or drinks or dinner, and you'd end up talking to the 1 or 3 people next to you and having an actual conversation. Nowadays, it feels like the socializing is much more broad and shallow. And it's constant. It feels like nearly every meeting starts with several minutes of this sort of desperate veneer of friendliness. You have to constantly be upbeat and chipper and "on" as you click your way from one virtual meeting room to another, repeating the same bland story about your weekend several times a day. TL;DR: You're right it's always been a thing, but I do think something has shifted in our post-pandemic world. Now, it feels much more like an ever-present demand for constant emotional labor, rather than actual social interaction.
- rexpop 4y ago
  Where else am I to share my feelings on personal or political topics? Work dominates my schedule. I can't reasonably isolate strong feelings to a peripheral milieu. I agree that it is, by the explicit standards of corporate management, "completely inappropriate," but I think in the interest of a stable society, this is a standard we're obligated to violate.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    It’s “completely inappropriate” not because of corporate management but because your coworkers won’t share your views on all of your emotional outbursts.
    - Barrin92 4y ago
      > but because your coworkers won’t share your views on all of your emotional outbursts in a democratic society that's to be expected and a good thing, I'm not exactly sure why anyone would have a discussion if they already share their views. Here in Germany politics is generally present in workplaces and nobody finds that odd because it's not like the place where you spend half of your day ought to be a civil society free zone. Covid workplace mandates and rules were highly contentious, where else is a better place to discuss them than at work, where they matter?
      - zdragnar 4y ago
        You are assuming that people are willing to discuss issues in good faith. That is certainly not always the case - being on the wrong side of the line means getting publicly shamed, insulted, and your career path ended. This happened to a friend of mine who merely suggested that discussions on abortion happen in a chat channel other than the main engineering one. Unlike religion or race, there are no legal protections for political views. If you disagree with your boss, you're risking yourself. If you agree with your boss, you might be alienating a future boss. There's no winning.
    - rexpop 4y ago
      I wasn't aware that only universally held views were appropriate to share but even if that were so, how can one even know what is or isn't shared unless one or the other speaks first? It's funny, because if were is a ban on sharing unshared views, we could never hold any views at all!
- wheybags 4y ago
  Not everyone works in such a formal setting. I talk about whatever the hell I feel like at work with colleagues, and they do the same. I honestly cannot imagine shutting myself down 8 hours a day like you're describing, it sound like hell.
  - derefr 4y ago
    I don't know about "shutting down"; I'm just too busy at work to think about anything but work. (Maybe it's also a bit that I have ADHD, and know that a 15-minute conversation about non-work subjects, that I actually focus on rather than practicing "active listening" toward, would flush 100% of my built-up mental context for what I was doing down the toilet, and so blow an hours-plus hole in my productivity for the day.) I talk to my coworkers about non-work subjects if we head out for drinks. But at work, I work. Or at most talk about "light subjects" that can fit on top of my mental "stack" without having to pop anything.
  - _8j50 4y ago
    I have been in such environments and believe me not everyone you work with shares the sentiment. I strongly disagreed with the vocal people like you and to avoid my voice affecting my career I shut up. You force your personal stuff on others and they have to endure it, imprisoning them basically. People can't just get up and find another job, nor should they have to. Bottle that shit up for 8hrs, do you really need to talk about yourself during all waking hours or can't find other people (even coworkers) to talk to off work? I am not talking about specific political opinions mind you. This has happened to me in both conservative and very liberal leaning environments. On the former I would have to put so much effort into not saying something about very crude sexual,racial,political,etc... jokes and comments (like managers talking about all the fked up ways they will get their guy trump to win,etc... or else) or for the latter people going on and on about their atheism (I am far from one) explicit sexual stuff, illegal drug use (and they weren't just talking, they were trading and using as well, me knowing this and not speaking up to the law/hr made me culpable just by listening) and this is all in tech don't get me started on other environments. I don't say anything which helps me keep my job miserably and helps my career but also many smart people I wanted to get close to, I couldn't and they would feel alienated because I won't engage with them except I do when it is about stuff I am passionate about: the work!! But they only mention work in passing outside of official channels, I mean I can talk about coding,foss, security 16 hours a day! Haha. But it was terrible if you are not very political, can't just switch jobs and just want to work on stuff you are passionate about and go home. I had to bottle shit up in place of people like you so please be considerate. I have strong views on just about anything and honestly I don't have much to give a shit about outside of work and I think it is the opposite extreme end of "you should only hire people with specific appearance,politics, religion,etc..." when you say "hire anyone despite their politics, religion,race,sex,etc... and let them all talk about their opposing views" you are either activly discriminating against workes in both illegal and immoral grounds or you work in a very toxic and harmful environment where only the few that dominate/lead/manage dictate a heavily biased environment that makes only them comfortable are happy. Do you not see the wisdom in "don't shit where you eat"? 8 hours to work, 8 hours to pursue personal life and 8 hours to rest. That's what most adults get, you should be able to focus on work during work and personal stuff during personal time plus weekend, you get 72hrs/wk for personal stuff and only 40 typically for work. Especially wfh workers have no excuse, watch cnn or fox with someone when you are not on a zoom call lol or get on reddit or your favorite social medial and vent off. Anywhere but work!
- zdragnar 4y ago
  I have quit places that became too politically charged. There are no worse or more toxic environments to work in.
- davesque 4y ago
  This was written in 2010. There was a sea change that took place around the time that Trump was elected after which it became far more fraught to discuss political topics. But the way it is now is not how it's always been. Things really did feel different ten years ago. Discussing politics with strangers was much more doable. For example, I remember watching the 2012 presidential debate between Obama and Romney with my neighbors who I didn't know very well at all. I felt completely comfortable doing this. And the outcome of the debate didn't feel like some sort of life or death moment for the country. Also, it seems possible to me that the author might have been referring to company politics.
  - matwood 4y ago
    This is a good point. Pre-Trump I remember having robust conversations at work about politics that were educational for all involved. Now I have family members who haven't spoken to each other for years because one asked the other why they voted for (Trump|Biden). It is now an impossible topic to navigate at work.
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  > Are people really sharing personal or political topics in work meetings?! Sure! We're a fully remote company and as a result the beginning of every video call is people gossiping about their kids, pets, the weather, and interesting stuff happening in their towns.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    That's not what the poster was talking about. Everything you listed there is pretty tame stuff, politics and religion are not discussed in professional settings specifically because it can cause problems that affect people's abilities to work together.
    - emielm 4y ago
      This sounds very American :). In my (European) country this is not a weird thing to discuss informally among colleagues. Of course you do learn to avoid the topic quickly with certain people, but that goes for more things: vaccinations, choice of school, sports results
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  Political, no. But personal, sure! I've found that all of the major new opportunities for my team have come suddenly and involved collaboration with people that I've spent time with even though I wasn't working very actively with them. Suddenly a problem shows up and one of these other people says "hey, I think UncleMeat's team is well suited to help with this" and boom we are off to the races. Those monthly meetings that were half work and half shooting the shit were critical network-building opportunities that eventually paid off.
deeptote 4y ago
This is biggest crock of shit I've ever read.
- einpoklum 4y ago
  And yet the author was likely paid good money for it.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  Agreed. A better title would be "The Kind of People Who Read the Harvard Business Review Secretly Love Meetings".
- dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
  I think the person who wrote it really believes it - and it probably works in their world. It has nothing to do with developers, though, just usual office politics.
sparrish 4y ago
In 27 years of meetings, I've only been to 5 that couldn't have been replaced by a 3-paragraph email. I hate meetings.
- dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
  I share your feelings. Although I have admit it depends on the industry and position a lot. When working as a programmer, I see meetings as an obstacle to getting my work done, period. If you really want something from me, write to me, and when I finish what I'm doing, I'll get back to you. However, when I'm working in consulting and other fields, meetings are the key. Sometimes it doesn't even matter what you talk about. Sometimes you can spend a lot of time not talking about business at all. Having a lunch together is also good. Having established this kind of relationship makes it easier to do business later. Everything run more smoothly.
- rawgabbit 4y ago
  People who can’t write coherently love meetings. The problem is, during the meeting, they can’t talk coherently either. I would not mind it so much except it literally takes 15 minutes of them unloading their jumbled stream of consciousness before they get to the point.
- hhmc 4y ago
  A surprising number of people can't write an effective 3-para email.
- kortilla 4y ago
  Do people not have discussions and build consensus in any of the meetings you attend? I can see a 3-paragraph email easily summarizing meetings but it’s not like people knew the summary going in or else they wouldn’t have had the meeting.
  - tomjakubowski 4y ago
    what's interesting to me is that, for example, the LKML is able to "build consensus", or at least make decisions, all over text discussion -- email. And yet all teams I've worked on in corporate software development have relied on in-person collaboration or discussion to do that, in one form or another.
booleandilemma 4y ago
I have met people who were able to structure their jobs so that all they did was jump from meeting to meeting throughout the day, without ever contributing anything. If a difficult topic came up and they were asked for their opinion on something, they would conveniently have to drop for another meeting. I suspect corporate America is riddled with such people and everyone here has met at least one. If you think you haven't, you're probably not paying close enough attention. These people definitely secretly love meetings.
lkrubner 4y ago
I've read books about "Agile development" and I've read many, many articles about it, and I've read many conversations here on Hacker News on the subject, and I've engaged in many conversations with co-workers about "How to do Agile right" and yet out of all of that, the only rule I've found that easily transfers to every company, large or small, and which automatically improves team dynamics, is simply: "Prefer small meetings over large meetings and prefer one-on-one meetings most of all." Large meetings will inevitably include some people who don't need to be there, and who are therefore bored and disengaged. By contrast, if you have meeting of just two people, both people are automatically essential to the meeting -- automatic because the meeting would not happen unless one of those people needed to say or ask something of the other person.
- blowski 4y ago
  Similarly, one of my rules is "never set up a recurring meeting". The effort of recreating it every week forces you to consider whether you need it every week.
  - ThePadawan 4y ago
    This really depends on how busy the participants' schedules are. I've had to explicitly set up a recurring weekly meeting 4 weeks in advance to meet a higher-up at least once per week, because otherwise finding 30 minutes of their free time would take ~3 weeks.
    - blowski 4y ago
      In that case, I'd book it in 3 weeks in advance.
      - ThePadawan 4y ago
        Glad that works for you! I can't imagine my manager would find it very amusing if I had to tell them that I had to delay a bugfix or feature by 3 weeks because I did not schedule my meetings with enough foresight.
boredemployee 4y ago
Idk, meetings are not the problem, 9/5 is. I like my job, but 9/5 is just too much and life is short.
chrismcb 4y ago
No. No we don't. I'm sure sure people love them. But not everyone does.
tombert 4y ago
Yeah, no, we secretly don't. One of these articles pops up every now and then talking about all these supposed social benefits of meetings, but that fundamentally has not been my experience with meetings. As many people have pointed out, a good many meetings could simply be replaced by a decent email. In my experience, the only people who seem to "get" something more than the pure nominal reasons that the meetings were called for are managers who really like talking about themselves. I worked for a distributed team for a large company [1] in the past, where about 10% of the team was in NYC (where I was located), about 70% of the team was in California, and the remainder were in Singapore. The team leader had the astonishingly brilliant idea to hold meetings at 8:30pm NYC time, because that was the time that "worked best for everyone". This was bad, but one could argue it was necessary if the meetings were necessary. However, this genius thought it would be a good idea to routinely spend the first fifteen minutes blathering on about his opinions on various tech non-work-related things, or his kids, or some other such nonsense in most other meetings, and the rest of the meeting could be, you guessed it, summarized in an email. You know what I would "love" a lot more than having intimate conversations with my coworkers? Spending time with my wife, or my friends, or doing nearly anything else. [1] No doubt that you can find out which large company I'm talking about given my work history, but I politely ask that you don't post it here directly.
fmajid 4y ago
Ah, meetings. The socially acceptable alternative to work.
gampleman 4y ago
I've worked in a fully remote company that by policy had a single 10 minute meeting a week. This meeting was essentially an all-hands style update on the business. This was certainly a fairly different approach. 1. Forming relationships with your colleagues becomes rather tricky. You don't really get to know how your colleagues work/think over text based communication. 2. Work does feel a bit more lonely. 3. I missed talking through problems. Writing about stuff is a different, more filtered way of processing information. I like to do both as part of my problem solving toolkit. 4. It's so efficient - you have all this time to actually do whatever you want...
- kstenerud 4y ago
  > You don't really get to know how your colleagues work/think over text based communication. I've found the opposite: You don't really know how your colleagues work/think until you read something they commit to paper. > Work does feel a bit more lonely. Haven't felt that, but it depends on the person I think. > I missed talking through problems. Writing about stuff is a different, more filtered way of processing information. I like to do both as part of my problem solving toolkit. I prefer thinking through problems, and bouncing carefully crafted questions at times over email or slack. Maybe over zoom on occasion if it's a particularly messy problem. At the end of the day, different people have different ways to solve the same problems, which is why I love the remote work revolution so much - it gives more choice, and allows people to seek out companies that better match their work style.
zmmmmm 4y ago
Honestly, i think the main reason a lot of managers love meetings is that they are extroverts and mainly exert influence through their social skills which gives them a huge leg up in face to face encounters (whether virtual or in person). Meanwhile most of the "workers" are introverted or less socially skilled so much less able to or likely to argue against whatever dumb proposition is on the table. Managers repeatedly experience this as "when I talk directly with people I get what I want more easily" and conclude that meetings are very productive. Meanwhile technical people repeatedly experience utterly moronic outcomes happening in meetings (usually which they end up committed to and having to clean up) and learn to despise them.
- xwolfi 4y ago
  I disagree with this simplification, and I m a ticket churner who hates meetings. Usually the requests presented at meetings come from a need to solve for a paying customer. What we re all struggling with, and I did a lot of work on myself to embrace it, is that there s no beautiful elegant scalable flexible solution to 20 client variations of the same problem which change every year. There simply is not. So we get sent "completely ridiculous" requests or change in design, but what s the alternative ? Only do the right thing and disappear in uselessness ?
- charcircuit 4y ago
  >and learn to despise them. If they hate them that much they must be useful else they wouldn't attend the meeting.
  - saurik 4y ago
    As someone with the privilege to be at a company where no one expects I will ever be at a meeting under almost any circumstance, I will note that most engineers--including myself!! (though I've managed to negotiate everyone down to one meeting per QUARTER, which maybe honestly does feel like an acceptable balance? I still have to attend meetings once in a while, and have a big one scheduled tomorrow)--aren't in a position to simply NOT attend meetings without being seen as an uncommunicative obstacle who needs to be replaced/fired.
- 4y ago
danwee 4y ago
I don't mind meetings. For me it's worktime. If I spent the entire days in meetings, I won't spend my free time coding features (I don't think anyone would expect that), and in the next morning standup I say "I spent the day in meetings X, Y and Z discussing A, B and C. We agreed on T."
synu 4y ago
I don't know about secretly loving meetings, but if you make all meetings optional (https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/meetings/#1-make-meeting-attendance-optional https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/meetings...) you'll quickly figure out which are the important ones, if any.
huetius 4y ago
I openly love meetings. With a good, well-planned and thoughtful meeting, I can save myself and my team weeks of engineering work. Just last week, by asking a simple question to the right person, we canned a heavy, ~2dev*sprint story for something a developer was able to achieve after the meeting with no code changes. The customer was thrilled.

I find we like _our_ own meetings. The ones we initiate or run, but we but dislike _others_ meetings. Schedules fill with meetings because each meeting-initiator doesn’t want to let go of their meeting - and more deeply the status or control it represents. So you can easily get a lot of meetings on your calendar and the inertia is not to burst the bubble of other folks status/whatever by questioning the need for their meeting. Moreover the people who have the most authority to reduce meetings - managers - don’t really directly feel the pain as they’re already in a bunch of meetings. Losing this one meeting would just mean a time slot with another meeting. It’s the heads-down ICs who experiences the downside from a random meeting that interrupts their flow. And sadly they have the least amount of formal authority to challenge the number of meetings.

irrational 4y ago

> give them an outlet for sharing their personal feelings and opinions, not only on work issues but also on personal or political topics Holy cow! Are people really sharing personal or political topics in work meetings?! I’ve worked with people for more than a decade whom I meet with nearly every day in stand ups and other meetings and I know nothing about their political, religious, personal beliefs and life. I would never share that kind of stuff in a business setting. It is completely inappropriate. Separately, we have a company rule of no meeting Fridays. By far and away this is my favorite day of the week.

gherkinnn 4y ago
How is that inappropriate? Within reason I’d even expect to. Even the Finns I work with mention this and that in passing.
- hunterb123 4y ago
  Don't talk money, politics, or religion. It's basic etiquette.
  - Enginerrrd 4y ago
    To strangers, and in the most formal contexts... MAYBE, but teams of coworkers are most effective when more traditional human bonds form between them and that won't happen without being somewhat informal with them.
    - hunterb123 4y ago
      Working is one of the most formal contexts. Politics and the workplace don't mix. Don't be that annoying activist bothering your coworkers and making people feel uncomfortable with incoherent political rants. -- edit @ cutemonster -- > GP mentions how to create a more trusting and closely bonded team Yes my counter is that you aren't bonding, you're most likely isolating others. You can rarely change someone's core religious or political beliefs, especially with the weak arguments of today. The workplace is not a place to try to do so. Talk politics with your friends, not with your coworkers, they are too nice to say they don't want to hear it. -- edit @ blowski -- > Quite a lot of overgeneralisation there I'm not generalizing, I'm saying if you're amongst friends and know they're okay with talking politics go ahead. If you're amongst coworkers and don't know then shut your mouth so we can all work in peace. > In some cultures your comment woud be 100% true, but in others, your refusal to discuss such topics would look aloof. Oh, which cultures? That's kind of my point though, don't force people to talk politics. They shouldn't have to worry about their refusal to discuss a topic or looking "aloof".
      - cutemonster 4y ago
        GP mentions how to create a more trusting and closely bonded team, and you reply "annoying activist bothering your coworkers"?
      - blowski 4y ago
        Quite a lot of overgeneralisation there, I suspect you're projecting your own personal preferences onto everyone else. In some cultures your comment woud be 100% true, but in others, your refusal to discuss such topics would look aloof. Choose to work in a culture you like, rather than trying to impose a culture you like on one you don't.
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
Yes, it's become really common. (Between a few different gigs and hearing from friends, I've gotten to see inside lots of companies' product teams over the last few years.) There's a constant drumbeat of forced intimacy and incessant prying into your personal life. "What did you do this weekend?" "Tell two truths and a lie!" "What'd you think of the $SPORT game?" "Where are you going for vacation?" "Are you thinking about moving, getting married, having kids?" "Don't forget to vote!" "Don't forget to donate!" Combine that with the endless oversharing that's used as a mock-facade for true psychological safety, and the net result is very little time spent on actual work. I know way too much about which engineers are on which antidepressants, who's having weddings/babies/whatever, how they're voting, and what race/gender/etc they identify with... but simple conversations about schema-design or even code-review still veer into awkward, passive-aggressive intensity within a matter of minutes. It's honestly absolutely exhausting. I do my best to duck out for the few minutes (or 20 minutes) of the meeting that gets frittered away on it. But it's inescapable, sooner or later. I've learned to have some bland nonsense ready to answer this sort of thing.
- kdmccormick 4y ago
  > "Tell two truths and a lie!" > "Don't forget to donate!" Sure, I get what you're saying about those. And this one is prying in just about any context, work or not: > "Are you thinking about getting married, having kids?" But these? > "What did you do this weekend?" > "What'd you think of the $SPORT game?" > "Where are you going for vacation?" > "Don't forget to vote!" Those are just normal ways of making conversation! 99% of the time if someone's asking you this, they're not trying to get inside your brain and invade your privacy... they're just trying to talk to you. Honest question: do you prefer to have zero social interaction with your coworkers? Edit: Also, it's bonkers to me that you think that this "has become" a thing. People have been making idle conversation at work since the dawn of civilization.
  - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
    Thought about it a little more since my original comment does make me sound like a grumpy old geezer. First off: you're right about there being a spectrum here, and some things do fall under the banner of plain ol' smalltalk. I think what's gotten to me is how relentless it is lately. Back in the olden days, before the pandemic, whether you were meeting in a large group or small, remotely or in-person, everyone would just show up to the meeting and get on with it. The socializing would then happen afterward in small, occasional, in-person settings. You'd go for lunch or coffee or drinks or dinner, and you'd end up talking to the 1 or 3 people next to you and having an actual conversation. Nowadays, it feels like the socializing is much more broad and shallow. And it's constant. It feels like nearly every meeting starts with several minutes of this sort of desperate veneer of friendliness. You have to constantly be upbeat and chipper and "on" as you click your way from one virtual meeting room to another, repeating the same bland story about your weekend several times a day. TL;DR: You're right it's always been a thing, but I do think something has shifted in our post-pandemic world. Now, it feels much more like an ever-present demand for constant emotional labor, rather than actual social interaction.
rexpop 4y ago
Where else am I to share my feelings on personal or political topics? Work dominates my schedule. I can't reasonably isolate strong feelings to a peripheral milieu. I agree that it is, by the explicit standards of corporate management, "completely inappropriate," but I think in the interest of a stable society, this is a standard we're obligated to violate.
- kortilla 4y ago
  It’s “completely inappropriate” not because of corporate management but because your coworkers won’t share your views on all of your emotional outbursts.
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    > but because your coworkers won’t share your views on all of your emotional outbursts in a democratic society that's to be expected and a good thing, I'm not exactly sure why anyone would have a discussion if they already share their views. Here in Germany politics is generally present in workplaces and nobody finds that odd because it's not like the place where you spend half of your day ought to be a civil society free zone. Covid workplace mandates and rules were highly contentious, where else is a better place to discuss them than at work, where they matter?
    - zdragnar 4y ago
      You are assuming that people are willing to discuss issues in good faith. That is certainly not always the case - being on the wrong side of the line means getting publicly shamed, insulted, and your career path ended. This happened to a friend of mine who merely suggested that discussions on abortion happen in a chat channel other than the main engineering one. Unlike religion or race, there are no legal protections for political views. If you disagree with your boss, you're risking yourself. If you agree with your boss, you might be alienating a future boss. There's no winning.
  - rexpop 4y ago
    I wasn't aware that only universally held views were appropriate to share but even if that were so, how can one even know what is or isn't shared unless one or the other speaks first? It's funny, because if were is a ban on sharing unshared views, we could never hold any views at all!
wheybags 4y ago
Not everyone works in such a formal setting. I talk about whatever the hell I feel like at work with colleagues, and they do the same. I honestly cannot imagine shutting myself down 8 hours a day like you're describing, it sound like hell.
- derefr 4y ago
  I don't know about "shutting down"; I'm just too busy at work to think about anything but work. (Maybe it's also a bit that I have ADHD, and know that a 15-minute conversation about non-work subjects, that I actually focus on rather than practicing "active listening" toward, would flush 100% of my built-up mental context for what I was doing down the toilet, and so blow an hours-plus hole in my productivity for the day.) I talk to my coworkers about non-work subjects if we head out for drinks. But at work, I work. Or at most talk about "light subjects" that can fit on top of my mental "stack" without having to pop anything.
- _8j50 4y ago
  I have been in such environments and believe me not everyone you work with shares the sentiment. I strongly disagreed with the vocal people like you and to avoid my voice affecting my career I shut up. You force your personal stuff on others and they have to endure it, imprisoning them basically. People can't just get up and find another job, nor should they have to. Bottle that shit up for 8hrs, do you really need to talk about yourself during all waking hours or can't find other people (even coworkers) to talk to off work? I am not talking about specific political opinions mind you. This has happened to me in both conservative and very liberal leaning environments. On the former I would have to put so much effort into not saying something about very crude sexual,racial,political,etc... jokes and comments (like managers talking about all the fked up ways they will get their guy trump to win,etc... or else) or for the latter people going on and on about their atheism (I am far from one) explicit sexual stuff, illegal drug use (and they weren't just talking, they were trading and using as well, me knowing this and not speaking up to the law/hr made me culpable just by listening) and this is all in tech don't get me started on other environments. I don't say anything which helps me keep my job miserably and helps my career but also many smart people I wanted to get close to, I couldn't and they would feel alienated because I won't engage with them except I do when it is about stuff I am passionate about: the work!! But they only mention work in passing outside of official channels, I mean I can talk about coding,foss, security 16 hours a day! Haha. But it was terrible if you are not very political, can't just switch jobs and just want to work on stuff you are passionate about and go home. I had to bottle shit up in place of people like you so please be considerate. I have strong views on just about anything and honestly I don't have much to give a shit about outside of work and I think it is the opposite extreme end of "you should only hire people with specific appearance,politics, religion,etc..." when you say "hire anyone despite their politics, religion,race,sex,etc... and let them all talk about their opposing views" you are either activly discriminating against workes in both illegal and immoral grounds or you work in a very toxic and harmful environment where only the few that dominate/lead/manage dictate a heavily biased environment that makes only them comfortable are happy. Do you not see the wisdom in "don't shit where you eat"? 8 hours to work, 8 hours to pursue personal life and 8 hours to rest. That's what most adults get, you should be able to focus on work during work and personal stuff during personal time plus weekend, you get 72hrs/wk for personal stuff and only 40 typically for work. Especially wfh workers have no excuse, watch cnn or fox with someone when you are not on a zoom call lol or get on reddit or your favorite social medial and vent off. Anywhere but work!
zdragnar 4y ago
I have quit places that became too politically charged. There are no worse or more toxic environments to work in.
davesque 4y ago
This was written in 2010. There was a sea change that took place around the time that Trump was elected after which it became far more fraught to discuss political topics. But the way it is now is not how it's always been. Things really did feel different ten years ago. Discussing politics with strangers was much more doable. For example, I remember watching the 2012 presidential debate between Obama and Romney with my neighbors who I didn't know very well at all. I felt completely comfortable doing this. And the outcome of the debate didn't feel like some sort of life or death moment for the country. Also, it seems possible to me that the author might have been referring to company politics.
- matwood 4y ago
  This is a good point. Pre-Trump I remember having robust conversations at work about politics that were educational for all involved. Now I have family members who haven't spoken to each other for years because one asked the other why they voted for (Trump|Biden). It is now an impossible topic to navigate at work.
fxtentacle 4y ago
> Are people really sharing personal or political topics in work meetings?! Sure! We're a fully remote company and as a result the beginning of every video call is people gossiping about their kids, pets, the weather, and interesting stuff happening in their towns.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  That's not what the poster was talking about. Everything you listed there is pretty tame stuff, politics and religion are not discussed in professional settings specifically because it can cause problems that affect people's abilities to work together.
  - emielm 4y ago
    This sounds very American :). In my (European) country this is not a weird thing to discuss informally among colleagues. Of course you do learn to avoid the topic quickly with certain people, but that goes for more things: vaccinations, choice of school, sports results
UncleMeat 4y ago
Political, no. But personal, sure! I've found that all of the major new opportunities for my team have come suddenly and involved collaboration with people that I've spent time with even though I wasn't working very actively with them. Suddenly a problem shows up and one of these other people says "hey, I think UncleMeat's team is well suited to help with this" and boom we are off to the races. Those monthly meetings that were half work and half shooting the shit were critical network-building opportunities that eventually paid off.

deeptote 4y ago

This is biggest crock of shit I've ever read.

einpoklum 4y ago
And yet the author was likely paid good money for it.
Turing_Machine 4y ago
Agreed. A better title would be "The Kind of People Who Read the Harvard Business Review Secretly Love Meetings".
dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
I think the person who wrote it really believes it - and it probably works in their world. It has nothing to do with developers, though, just usual office politics.

sparrish 4y ago

In 27 years of meetings, I've only been to 5 that couldn't have been replaced by a 3-paragraph email. I hate meetings.

dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
I share your feelings. Although I have admit it depends on the industry and position a lot. When working as a programmer, I see meetings as an obstacle to getting my work done, period. If you really want something from me, write to me, and when I finish what I'm doing, I'll get back to you. However, when I'm working in consulting and other fields, meetings are the key. Sometimes it doesn't even matter what you talk about. Sometimes you can spend a lot of time not talking about business at all. Having a lunch together is also good. Having established this kind of relationship makes it easier to do business later. Everything run more smoothly.
rawgabbit 4y ago
People who can’t write coherently love meetings. The problem is, during the meeting, they can’t talk coherently either. I would not mind it so much except it literally takes 15 minutes of them unloading their jumbled stream of consciousness before they get to the point.
hhmc 4y ago
A surprising number of people can't write an effective 3-para email.
kortilla 4y ago
Do people not have discussions and build consensus in any of the meetings you attend? I can see a 3-paragraph email easily summarizing meetings but it’s not like people knew the summary going in or else they wouldn’t have had the meeting.
- tomjakubowski 4y ago
  what's interesting to me is that, for example, the LKML is able to "build consensus", or at least make decisions, all over text discussion -- email. And yet all teams I've worked on in corporate software development have relied on in-person collaboration or discussion to do that, in one form or another.

booleandilemma 4y ago

I have met people who were able to structure their jobs so that all they did was jump from meeting to meeting throughout the day, without ever contributing anything. If a difficult topic came up and they were asked for their opinion on something, they would conveniently have to drop for another meeting. I suspect corporate America is riddled with such people and everyone here has met at least one. If you think you haven't, you're probably not paying close enough attention. These people definitely secretly love meetings.

lkrubner 4y ago

I've read books about "Agile development" and I've read many, many articles about it, and I've read many conversations here on Hacker News on the subject, and I've engaged in many conversations with co-workers about "How to do Agile right" and yet out of all of that, the only rule I've found that easily transfers to every company, large or small, and which automatically improves team dynamics, is simply: "Prefer small meetings over large meetings and prefer one-on-one meetings most of all." Large meetings will inevitably include some people who don't need to be there, and who are therefore bored and disengaged. By contrast, if you have meeting of just two people, both people are automatically essential to the meeting -- automatic because the meeting would not happen unless one of those people needed to say or ask something of the other person.

blowski 4y ago
Similarly, one of my rules is "never set up a recurring meeting". The effort of recreating it every week forces you to consider whether you need it every week.
- ThePadawan 4y ago
  This really depends on how busy the participants' schedules are. I've had to explicitly set up a recurring weekly meeting 4 weeks in advance to meet a higher-up at least once per week, because otherwise finding 30 minutes of their free time would take ~3 weeks.
  - blowski 4y ago
    In that case, I'd book it in 3 weeks in advance.
    - ThePadawan 4y ago
      Glad that works for you! I can't imagine my manager would find it very amusing if I had to tell them that I had to delay a bugfix or feature by 3 weeks because I did not schedule my meetings with enough foresight.

boredemployee 4y ago

Idk, meetings are not the problem, 9/5 is. I like my job, but 9/5 is just too much and life is short.

chrismcb 4y ago

No. No we don't. I'm sure sure people love them. But not everyone does.

tombert 4y ago

Yeah, no, we secretly don't. One of these articles pops up every now and then talking about all these supposed social benefits of meetings, but that fundamentally has not been my experience with meetings. As many people have pointed out, a good many meetings could simply be replaced by a decent email. In my experience, the only people who seem to "get" something more than the pure nominal reasons that the meetings were called for are managers who really like talking about themselves. I worked for a distributed team for a large company [1] in the past, where about 10% of the team was in NYC (where I was located), about 70% of the team was in California, and the remainder were in Singapore. The team leader had the astonishingly brilliant idea to hold meetings at 8:30pm NYC time, because that was the time that "worked best for everyone". This was bad, but one could argue it was necessary if the meetings were necessary. However, this genius thought it would be a good idea to routinely spend the first fifteen minutes blathering on about his opinions on various tech non-work-related things, or his kids, or some other such nonsense in most other meetings, and the rest of the meeting could be, you guessed it, summarized in an email. You know what I would "love" a lot more than having intimate conversations with my coworkers? Spending time with my wife, or my friends, or doing nearly anything else. [1] No doubt that you can find out which large company I'm talking about given my work history, but I politely ask that you don't post it here directly.

fmajid 4y ago

Ah, meetings. The socially acceptable alternative to work.

gampleman 4y ago

I've worked in a fully remote company that by policy had a single 10 minute meeting a week. This meeting was essentially an all-hands style update on the business. This was certainly a fairly different approach. 1. Forming relationships with your colleagues becomes rather tricky. You don't really get to know how your colleagues work/think over text based communication. 2. Work does feel a bit more lonely. 3. I missed talking through problems. Writing about stuff is a different, more filtered way of processing information. I like to do both as part of my problem solving toolkit. 4. It's so efficient - you have all this time to actually do whatever you want...

kstenerud 4y ago
> You don't really get to know how your colleagues work/think over text based communication. I've found the opposite: You don't really know how your colleagues work/think until you read something they commit to paper. > Work does feel a bit more lonely. Haven't felt that, but it depends on the person I think. > I missed talking through problems. Writing about stuff is a different, more filtered way of processing information. I like to do both as part of my problem solving toolkit. I prefer thinking through problems, and bouncing carefully crafted questions at times over email or slack. Maybe over zoom on occasion if it's a particularly messy problem. At the end of the day, different people have different ways to solve the same problems, which is why I love the remote work revolution so much - it gives more choice, and allows people to seek out companies that better match their work style.

zmmmmm 4y ago

Honestly, i think the main reason a lot of managers love meetings is that they are extroverts and mainly exert influence through their social skills which gives them a huge leg up in face to face encounters (whether virtual or in person). Meanwhile most of the "workers" are introverted or less socially skilled so much less able to or likely to argue against whatever dumb proposition is on the table. Managers repeatedly experience this as "when I talk directly with people I get what I want more easily" and conclude that meetings are very productive. Meanwhile technical people repeatedly experience utterly moronic outcomes happening in meetings (usually which they end up committed to and having to clean up) and learn to despise them.

xwolfi 4y ago
I disagree with this simplification, and I m a ticket churner who hates meetings. Usually the requests presented at meetings come from a need to solve for a paying customer. What we re all struggling with, and I did a lot of work on myself to embrace it, is that there s no beautiful elegant scalable flexible solution to 20 client variations of the same problem which change every year. There simply is not. So we get sent "completely ridiculous" requests or change in design, but what s the alternative ? Only do the right thing and disappear in uselessness ?
charcircuit 4y ago
>and learn to despise them. If they hate them that much they must be useful else they wouldn't attend the meeting.
- saurik 4y ago
  As someone with the privilege to be at a company where no one expects I will ever be at a meeting under almost any circumstance, I will note that most engineers--including myself!! (though I've managed to negotiate everyone down to one meeting per QUARTER, which maybe honestly does feel like an acceptable balance? I still have to attend meetings once in a while, and have a big one scheduled tomorrow)--aren't in a position to simply NOT attend meetings without being seen as an uncommunicative obstacle who needs to be replaced/fired.
4y ago

danwee 4y ago

I don't mind meetings. For me it's worktime. If I spent the entire days in meetings, I won't spend my free time coding features (I don't think anyone would expect that), and in the next morning standup I say "I spent the day in meetings X, Y and Z discussing A, B and C. We agreed on T."

synu 4y ago

I don't know about secretly loving meetings, but if you make all meetings optional (https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/meetings/#1-make-meeting-attendance-optional https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/meetings...) you'll quickly figure out which are the important ones, if any.

huetius 4y ago

I openly love meetings. With a good, well-planned and thoughtful meeting, I can save myself and my team weeks of engineering work. Just last week, by asking a simple question to the right person, we canned a heavy, ~2dev*sprint story for something a developer was able to achieve after the meeting with no code changes. The customer was thrilled.