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Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room
- lowbloodsugar 1y agoIf you need to hardcode 50 minute meetings so “you can take a piss before the next meeting” then your problem is everyone is in meetings instead of coding.
- realitysballs 1y ago10 minute standup , woof
- OrderlyTiamat 1y agoMy team has 15min standups, in holiday times we regularly stop after 10min. Very focussed on the sprint goal and getting each other unstuck- it's great. Much better than the "let's walk over every issue on the jira board and argue about technical implementations".
- M3L0NM4N 1y agoThis is generally how my team works, but we don't have a hard cap on the time. I just think nobody wants to debate about technical implementations early in the morning.
- nottorp 1y ago> and getting each other unstuck Let me guess, there is no group text chat where people can randomly whine and get unstuck by whoever notices and is an expert on the problem?
- SoftTalker 1y agoThis is the thing I dislike most about chat. It encourage people to be lazy. Don't make any effort, just throw your problem out to the group the moment you don't immediately know what to do next.
- nottorp 1y agoDo you drop everything every time a chat message is posted like it's a life threatening emergency?
- carefulfungi 1y agoThe first standup experience of my career predates “agile” and was run by my first engineering manager, who happened to be an ex-marine. QA was unhappy with the product. (There was QA!) 10m standups were instituted at 8:45a in the QA workspace. Great process hacking: QA could interject and also hear first hand orientation. Everyone started their day knowing the plan. (And everyone started their day at the same time.) Fun to reflect on how much has changed.
- wjamesg 1y agoNothing from my end, thanks
- baxtr 1y agoIn my world stand-ups are mainly status, blockers and other ops/admin updates. No functional/topic discussions. If they’re required you schedule those in the standup and decide who participates. No need to expand beyond 15min in that mode.
- SoftTalker 1y agoNo need for everyone to be in a room together either, to do that.
- baxtr 1y agoIt’s more efficient for us at least. It reduced the number of back and forth on slack/other tools quite a bit.
- exhilaration 1y agoThe root problem, of course, is that no one stands up at anymore at standups.
- shermantanktop 1y agoThis is my problem, but I’m not great at standing, for reasons, but it’s physically not good. 10m is ok but there’s always some bore who wants to blather on. Or “we’re done, can x and y stay back to discuss z” and then everybody stays for some reason.
- vessenes 1y agoI’m prone to this, as is many a manager/leader in a standup. I always designated the spiciest admin to run the meeting and keep us on time; you need someone who can cut off the boss or these take forever.
- bee_rider 1y agoI think they are supposed to be so short you don’t even sit, right?
- malfist 1y agoThat's exactly how I run my standups. Everyone answers 3 questions: * Do I need something? * What is my _top_ priority for the day? * Am I blocked? The answers for the first and third question should always be "No" because you should have raised them before standup, but it's a relief valve if you didn't. What is your top priority should be short and focused. If you let people talk about what they did or didn't do yesterday it becomes a slog with people justifying their progress or non-progress. Ultimately it doesn't matter. Focusing on the top priority he's focus people on their main task for the day.
- n4r9 1y ago> What is my _top_ priority for the day? How do you manage (if you have to) more research-heavy/blue-sky tasks that may take a few days or weeks without linear daily progress? Like, some days may just involve doing some sketches and playing around with code in order to internalise some data structure. Does that person just say "I'm continuing with task X" several days in a row?
- frabcus 1y ago"My top priority today is to internalise data structure B"
- mrguyorama 1y ago>Does that person just say "I'm continuing with task X" several days in a row? Absolutely. If other devs or even a manager or project lead or someone feel they've been doing the "same" task too long, they should be reaching out and checking in. "Hey, running into any problems? How are you doing?"
- malfist 1y agoAbsolutely, you can be more specific about the specific aspect if you want, but it's mainly a forcing tool for focus and not an accountability tool. Although everyone thinks it's accountability
- exhilaration 1y agoThe solution to the "50 minute meetings always stretch to an hour" problem is to start them at, say, 9:10am so there's a clean mental stop at 10am. If you schedule them for 9am of course nobody will stop at 9:50am.
- CogitoCogito 1y agoI presume in that case each meeting would just stretch to 10 over the hour.
- lkirkwood 1y agoWell that's the claim, isn't it. People tend to see an hour tick over and think "well, better wrap up". The impulse is much less strong at ten minutes to the hour. It's a bit like pricing things just below a round number because it doesn't feel quite so expensive. GP's comment makes sense to me.
- singron 1y agoIf "30" minute meetings start 5 minutes late, then you can only go 5 past reliably.
- bentcorner 1y agoMy team does this, most scheduled meetings are scheduled 5m/10m after the hour. Meetings usually end at the hour or before. Our calendar defaults to start/end on the hour so sometimes one-off meetings will start/end on the hour but those are usually 2-3 people and focused on solving some problem so they don't usually last the full time anyway. For the larger scheduled meetings, if they drag over the hour because of some conversation our culture is that people leave/drop if they're not interested.
- flerchin 1y agoHeh some people are on time, some people are late. It's seemingly a culture thing, and neither side understands the other. You say "of course nobody will stop at 9:50am" and that is exactly what I would do.
- isaacimagine 1y agoAt MIT, lectures must follow MIT time; all lectures are expected to start 5 minutes after the hour, and end 5 minutes before. Funnily this means each lecture is about one microcentury long. Exams are the one exception, they start on the dot. https://oge.mit.edu/mit-time/ https://oge.mit.edu/mit-time/
- saubeidl 1y agoAt most European universities, it is practice to start lectures cum tempore, i.e. with time, meaning 15 minutes after formal calendar time. It'll say 10:00 c.t. on the event, meaning it actually starts at 10:15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing...
- BearOso 1y agoAt a US university, I had an large elective class where the professor refused to start until things had "settled down", and he said he was going to add that time to the end to ensure he got his full 50 minutes. I had a major-related class 10 minutes after, clear across campus, about a mile of walking. This professor was nice about it, but I was the only one coming in late at all. So I made sure to sit in the front row of the earlier lecture, and left precisely when the class was supposed to end, leaving no doubt I had places to go. Some people just think they set the conventions.
- barbazoo 1y agoOdd. Over the course of my education I went to 3 different universities in the EU. Classes/lectures/labs, they all started at the advertised time and I’ve never encountered a concept of “c.t” or “s.t”. Not a formal one anyway. People “talked” about the “academic 15 minutes” but like it was a thing of the past.
- moi2388 1y agoSame. Never encountered this.
- dcre 1y agoThis is not really malicious compliance because it is not aimed at the boss who ordered the policy. It’s more like chaotic neutral compliance.
- jakevoytko 1y agoI did hem and haw over whether it was appropriate, but I eventually went with it because it felt in line with the first 2 sentences of the Wikipedia page defining the phrase as "Malicious compliance (also known as malicious obedience) is the behavior of strictly following the orders of a superior despite knowing that compliance with the orders will have an unintended or negative result. It usually implies following an order in such a way that ignores or otherwise undermines the order's intent, but follows it to the letter."
- marcusb 1y agoIt might have been malicious compliance. It might also have been your coworkers having a reasonable (if incorrect) expectation that their coworkers at a leading tech company understood how to schedule meeting time using the calendar their company produces. Or maybe both.
- ummonk 1y agoI don't see how it undermines the intent here, or has an unintended result. It's actually reinforcing the order by forcing other teams to comply with it.
- Propelloni 1y agoMalicious compliance is one of the great tips from the Simple Sabotage Field Guide. And it is one of the few effective ways to escalate pain in an organization. If you don't get shit done because of rules, and a boss asks you to simply break the rules for efficiency's sake, you can return the favor and just ask to simply abolish the rules for efficiency's sake. It may surprise you how fast stupid rules can be abolished, even in large orgs.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y agoI didn't even see it as that. I saw it as perfectly rational behavior - you only need 10 minutes for a short standup, then squeezing it in between the tail end of meetings makes perfect sense. Perhaps I'm a tad on the spectrum which is why I have zero problem with this, either from the perspective of the people who booked it for 50 mins or those who booked it for 10.
- flerchin 1y agoI thought one of the reasons we call it a standup is because everyone just, stands up, and does a ytb. So you don't need a meeting room. Nice story.
- RankingMember 1y agoWe've thankfully gotten out of the YTB trap at my current org- In my experience there's nothing more energy-draining and pointless than rote statusing and recaps during a standup. We've got tooling to see what each other are working on, and any blockers are brought up in the standup.
- bluGill 1y agoDepending on how your team runs it a room is often useful. In an open office (which is very popular these days with management) you want a room to keep the noise down for others. Sometimes you can keep a dedicated whiteboard in the room for you post-it notes (this beats computers for what developers need to track, but for management needs a computer based tracker is better). I've worked on teams with semi-disabled people - while they could walk a short distance they couldn't stand for that long and so they sat. However if there is one remote person you must never use a meeting location - either a room or just standing around desks. Make even people who are sitting next to each other communicate only by their headset. Otherwise the remote person is a lesser member of the team.
- zem 1y agowhat is a ytb?
- singron 1y agoYesterday, Today, Blockers. I.e. the typical standup update.
- singron 1y agoIn an open office, room-less meetings are quite disruptive. I still remember what the completely unrelated team two rows away was working on 8 years ago since I listened to them talk about it for 10 minutes every day. (I also apologize to everyone else since our team did the same thing)
- morkalork 1y ago>Everybody in a meeting should give input or they shouldn’t be in the meeting. This is wierd and terrible, what does it mean, no interns and juniors get to attend engineering meetings? Tagging along to those meetings is how they learn and it's not expected that they have input at every one, sometimes it's just a question or two.
- barbazoo 1y agoThey’re talking in the context of C level meetings. Not many juniors there.
- morkalork 1y agoI must have been reading sideways, it came off like a blanket policy from top down to everyone
- barbazoo 1y agoI think it could both be true, a decision made from top to bottom _and_ made in the context of someone who's in executive meetings all day. At that point you might not be able to relate anymore to what a day of people looks like that are half a dozen levels down and have decades less work experience.
- vessenes 1y agoIf you imagine a spectrum between a 20 person PowerPoint demonstration that takes an hour, and a 10 minute meeting with say Bezos when you’ll get your next 10 minutes in 90 days and you need him to get behind your project and unlock budget, most corporate meetings would do well to shift closer to Beezy. That’s the intent. Another way to say it, in the 90s workplace studies showed an engineering IC’s job was roughly 35 hours of meetings a week. If you work 40, that leaves 5 hours for coding. If you could get someone back just 5 of those 35 hours, you’d have double the coding output per engineer.
- jollyllama 1y agoYes, it is weird and terrible, and it means that you'll be expected to voice your agreement to what the real decision makers say.
- gwbas1c 1y agoIf I was in the room, I'd be relieved. I always found that meetings at large companies dragged on unless there was a forcing factor (like a doorknock) that got someone to bring it to an end.
- diggan 1y agoSuggestion: Have an agenda, have rules to religiously follow the agendas and help each other follow the agenda. Once completed, meeting over.
- steveBK123 1y agoThis works great except 95% of the places I've been with bad meeting culture, it comes from the top. Long winded execs enjoying open ended meetings without any structure to constrain them. Which is to say, the kind of shops with micromanaging management who keep themselves busy with meetings with their own team.
- barbazoo 1y agoIn my experience, most folks appreciate a gentle hint to stick to the agenda. I don’t hang out with “execs” though.
- apercu 1y agoExecs that have responsibilities appreciate sticking to agendas. But there are a lot of Elon Musks in the world.
- philipallstar 1y agoDidn't Elon Musk have in his companies that thing of if you have no value to add or receive from a meeting, you can leave it?
- matwood 1y ago
- remram 1y agoThis is not "malicious compliance", this is more like "pedantic enforcement". "Malicious compliance" would be if the same team booked a 50min meeting then a 10min meeting in the same room.
- holyfuck 1y ago[flagged]
- dr_kretyn 1y agoDitto. I thought the punchline, i.e. the malicious compliance, will be booking 50 min and then booking 10 min more. Someone using an unreserved spot is that, booking a meeting.
- davio 1y agoMalicious compliance would involve reviewing the action items from the 50 minute meeting at the beginning of the 10 minute meeting
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- caminante 1y agoIt's a clickbait keyword. This wouldn't be a genre if all the stories were this tame. If anything, the company saved money with optimizing meeting room capacity and the CEO's desire to give breaks was enforced. The team pushing back against leaving at 50m was the only "malicious" party, and they weren't compliant.
- krick 1y agoI wouldn't even call it pedantic. I mean, they seem to be the only sane humans in the company. The most faulty is obviously Page, who made the decision that seemed nice and progressive, but was problematic because the subordinates cannot oppose stupid intrusions from above and ignore bad policies. 2nd faulty party is the author of the story, i.e. guys, who use the room when it isn't booked, i.e. after 50 minutes of the meeting. This is natural, of course, because indeed it always happens, it would happen if it was booked for 2 hours too. But the point is that they are in a booked room, and it isn't booked by them.
- nyrikki 1y ago> Everybody in a meeting should give input or they shouldn’t be in the meeting At several companies I was at this rule would have removed the last slack time I had to fix, refactor and maintain systems. I actually asked a manager to add me to a monthly 2 hour 50+ people reoccurring meeting just so I could do some refactoring. I guess that is a form of Malicious compliance.
- marcusb 1y agoI think the better rule is to empower people to remove themselves from meetings they don't need to attend. Inviting anyone and everyone in case they might be needed is a real problem at most big companies I've worked for or with.
- xp84 1y agoAgree - and it can come about out of positive intentions -- "I know you care about the XYZ Component and we didn't want to leave you out of the loop about our plans for it"... but if in fact your inclusion was primarily just to keep you apprised, it may have been better to send you the briefly summarized agenda ("We plan to add a reporting feature to the XYZ Component which will store data in ... and be queryable by ... and are discussing how to build that and who should do it") and if you decline because you have no input to provide, just send you an "AI Summary" or transcript after the fact so you know what they ended up settling on. That's what I hope the addition of AI stuff to tools like Zoom will lead to, ultimately.
- nyrikki 1y agoWhile I agree, sometimes working to repair problems is required to get there. Sometimes one has to demonstrate value to counteract the cultural erosion caused by action and outcome bias to enable that empowerment. These big wasteful meetings are typically a product of action and outcome biases, and one needs to have a medium and longer term strategy to address them which is exactly why my manager was willing to sponsor it. My intention was to deliver value when the team thought it was impossible.
- jcalvinowens 1y ago
- xyst 1y agoA 10 min standup would be a dream. Been at companies where they last _45-60 minutes_
- SoftTalker 1y agoThey always trend that way unless you have someone very disciplined leading them.
- dugmartin 1y agoIn the late 90s there was a manager where I worked at the time where you actually felt relieved she they scheduled a meeting for one reason: she scheduled meetings to be 50 minutes long and no matter what she would end them promptly at 50 minutes and then she would stand up and leave the room. I once saw her, politely but firmly, tell a senior exec a few rungs up the ladder from her that time was up when he was in mid-pontification and close the folio thing she always brought to meetings and then exit the room.
- steveBK123 1y agoI've not seen management with a spine like that in a long time.
- Detrytus 1y agoTo be honest, just getting up and leaving is a bad way to end a meeting on time. You should be conscious of the time you have left, and start steering the meeting towards conclusion at 5-10 minutes mark.
- cruffle_duffle 1y agolol. It’s the same way you manage kids time. Give them a warning instead of just up and bail.
- jiehong 1y agoSounds more like a story of change management with people not changing their way.
- lesser23 1y agoThe other form of malicious compliance is my preferred malicious compliance. If the meeting is for 15 minutes I leave at the 15 minute mark after excusing myself. The problem with meetings always falls into one of two camps for me: 1. Some company leader is in the meeting and everyone sits tight while they waste time bikeshedding on whatever they read on LinkedIn today. 2. Two engineers are quarreling over the nuance of a status update. I find meetings that should be short (stand ups) are better done over slack. Submit a quick update and then people can DM if needed. Then you’re not holding people hostage.
- havblue 1y agoI saw a funny DefCon video on elevator hacking where one of the emcees tried to patronizingly lure the lecturers off-stage, with shots! This was presumably because they constantly take too long to get their AV set up and wanted to get a headstart. The response was ice cold. "No, this is our time." (Go ahead and stop us.) So it isn't the problem of the people booking the meetings, it's the problem of the people who formulate and implement the rules.
- jedimastert 1y ago> funny DefCon video on elevator hacking For those wondering, is Deviant Ollam's talk on elevators. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oHf1vD5_b5I https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oHf1vD5_b5I
- grimpy 1y agoBefore I left Google, my org's leadership (recent external hires in the pursuit of ruthless efficiency) instituted a "5 minutes between meetings" rule. The intent was to shorten meetings and have time between them. Well, no one agreed upon which 5 minutes were to be shortened, and like the post, it often wasn't observed anyways. So the result was 10 minutes of confusion every half hour.
- Artoooooor 1y agoOooh, my heroes! I hate when stated policy is treated as "just a paper" and ignored. I understand that sometimes it's temporary/transitional - OK, it happens. But when rule is present for long time and it becomes de facto standard to disregard it - either change the rule or start following it.
- hinkley 1y agoOld civics aphorism: A contemptible law breeds contempt for all laws. Once people get used to bullshit everything turns into bullshit. They don’t get rid of those rules because it’ll hurt someone’s feelings. But our feelings get hurt all the time so clearly it’s whose feelings they care about.
- palmotea 1y ago> But you could never shake the feeling that Larry Page had to make decisions all day long and forgot that sometimes people meet for other reasons. I can empathize. I'm in the middle of an extremely prescriptive re-org (down to the team level) that kinda feels like some leader forgot that the rest of the org isn't some cookie cutter copy of the leader's personal experience. It's so satisfying when the leader describes the results of the re-org as exactly opposite to what actually happened.
- DonHopkins 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14541220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14541220 DonHopkins on June 12, 2017 | next [–] The old expression "all our wood behind one arrow" was actually "one of President and CEO Scott McNealy's favorite quotes", which Sun used as a marketing campaign slogan and in presskits around 1990. https://web.archive.org/web/20080515194354/http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/presskits/25years/sunpranks.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080515194354/http://www.sun.co... Sun even produced a TV commercial in which an arrow that presumably had all of Sun's wood behind it whooshed through the air and hit the bull's eye of a target. (Nobody at Sun ever knew what the target was, but by golly they all knew which arrow to put their wood behind.) Photo of Scott McNealy in his office at Sun with a huge Cupid's Span style wooden arrow through his window, and a small Steve Martin style wooden arrow through his head: https://findery.com/johnfox/notes/all-the-wood-behind-one-arrow https://findery.com/johnfox/notes/all-the-wood-behind-one-ar... [sorry, link broken, not on archive.org] >Sun's Workstations Still Shine, But Rivals Cloud The Outlook >Daily Gazette - Nov 10, 1991 >Associated Press (Google News Archive) >Sun touts an "all the wood behind one arrow" slogan, meant to describe a company focused on one goal - workstations. As an April Fool's joke in 1990, Sun employees built a 60-foot-long arrow in McNealy's office with the point going out the window. Phrase: more wood behind, all the wood behind one arrow https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2011-September/112132.html https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2011-Septe...
- Zigurd 1y agoA terrible ill-formed neologism, widely adopted by dopes who never had an original thought. It is about as predictive of an empty statement as that guy who who emphasizes his inchoate thoughts by claiming the proof is in the pudding.
- DonHopkins 1y agoMcNealy's other terrible ill-formed neologism was "You're going to have to stop hugging your tree!" Yet now he's hugging the Trump Tree! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39501069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39501069 DonHopkins on Feb 25, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Institutions try to preserve the problem to which ... >exhortation I assumed you were talking about Sun, and I read that as "extortion". It reminds me of the vicious intimidation tactics that Sun executives made their poor sysadmin enforcers perform on their behalf, to ruthlessly coerce other reluctant executives and employees to run Solaris instead of SunOS! http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-job.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-... I remember an all-hands meeting where Scott McNealy told everybody, "You're going to have to stop hugging your tree!" After the meeting I went to my manager and demanded a tree: I never knew about any trees! Why did everybody get a tree but me? I want my tree! I promise I will not hug it. So he gave me an old set of SunOS manuals. ChuckMcM on Feb 25, 2024 [–] One of my mentors was Steve K. at Sun who I consulted with about how badly Sun did changes. It really pissed me off that Sun wouldn't put NIS+ into SunOS because they were allegedly worried it would "reduce the incentive to migrate to Solaris." I would say I was not particularly successful at being a 'change agent' there. DonHopkins on Feb 26, 2024 | parent [–] It's not just changing badly, but changing to the wrong thing. They'd beaten AT&T in the Unix marketplace, then celebrated by getting in bed with them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125284 DonHopkins on Dec 25, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video] You're right, it was Slowlaris that killed Sun, and Java was meant to be a "Microsoft Killer", not a programming language. Sun was a dead man walking long before Java. And Scott McNealy's me-too obsession with Microsoft was extremely unhealthy, leading to him actually naming the division "SunSoft". Never define and even NAME yourself in terms of your enemy. Scott McNealy knew neither himself nor his enemy. “If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle” - Sun Tzu’s “The Art Of War” Sun could never measure up to Microsoft, and McNealy was totally obsessed with fighting them, to the point that Java was not actually a programming language for solving developer's problems per se, but primarily a weapon in his personal vendetta against Microsoft, and Java developers were considered expendable mercenaries in that war, above all else. Everything they did with Java was measured by how much it would harm Microsoft, not help developers. Scott McNealy was pathetically and pathologically obsessed with being and beating Bill Gates and Windows, yet so unfit for the task, just as he has been more recently obsessed with licking Trump's boots, raising money for him and his failed coup attempt, and towing his anti-mask anti-vax anti-science line of bullshit. https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/17/mcnealy_trump_fundraiser/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/17/mcnealy_trump_fundrai... Michael Tiemann on "The Worst Job in the World": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann >Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers." http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-job.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-... >Subject: The Worst Job in the World >From: Michael Tiemann <tiemann@cygnus.com> >I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]
- xivzgrev 1y agowhat the engineers did seems fair to me. The rule is 50 minutes, they booked right after, so yea the meeting room is theirs. The author of this story seems to be just adjusting. Like "really, we mean 60 minutes?" New rule is, book for 60 if you need 60. Leave it at 50 if not. at the same time, do you really need a meeting room for a standup?
- Zigurd 1y agoThey should use a meeting room. Standups are informal, have crosstalk, and should move fast. Unless they have a team room and won't disturb colleagues, they should do standups in a meeting room or office if they can all fit.
- dogleash 1y ago> at the same time, do you really need a meeting room for a standup? We're stuck in the office, the least you could do is not subject everyone within earshot to your meetings. I have struggled very hard to not fill this comment with profanity and insults.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- drewg123 1y agoThe backstop forcing function to end meetings is the conference room being booked for the next slot... One of the things I noticed during COVID when everyone was remote was that meetings would never end on time b/c there was no contention for meeting rooms.
- Aaargh20318 1y agoI wish they added a feature to Teams where it will just automatically disconnect everyone from the meeting at the scheduled end time.
- dmurray 1y agoI've been saved from more than a few Zoom meetings where the free plan ran out after, I think, 40 minutes. Even in at least one organisation that was paying for Zoom - maybe not everyone was set up to host unlimited-length meetings.
- amendegree 1y agoTeams used to have a pop up that said “your meeting is ending in 5 minutes” but it wouldn’t do anything else to actually effectuate the meeting ending. They should add a feature where it starts playing “it’s closing time” music
- benhurmarcel 1y agoI’ve used a system that did this. Everyone created the call by adding 30 minutes to the theoretical end time just so it wouldn’t cut the conversation.
- Verdex 1y agoMy thought was that you handle meetings wasting everyone's time by releasing huntsman spiders (of clock spider meme fame) into the room periodically. If things are running over because of something important like the financial future or your org or the health and safety of your clients then people will deal with the spiders roaming at terrifying speeds. But if everyone is just bikeshedding then the room will empty out pretty quick.
- gwd 1y ago> When 2:50 rolled around and your meeting was supposed to end, do you think people actually ended the meeting? Noooooo. Absolutely not! At U of M, they solved this problem by having classes officially start 10 minutes after the time they were advertised as. That is, a class listed as being 10-11am was actually 10:10-11am; nobody showed up until 10:10. Sure, technically it's the same thing, but there's a pretty massive anchoring effect for things on the hour. Still being in the meeting room at 11:01 feels a lot later than still being in the meeting room at 10:51.
- Tomte 1y agoFifteen minutes late used to be the academic standard in Germany (and other countries): it was noted by “c.t.” in the timetable, meaning “cum tempore”. When I studied it had already been mostly abolished. Sometimes starting times were explicitly marked “sine tempore”.
- thaumasiotes 1y agoThose are strange annotations; it looks like at least one word is missing. They mean "with time" and "without time".
- divbzero 1y agoIt seems to make sense if you interpret it as: 10am c.t. = 10am with extra time 10am s.t. = 10am without extra time
- devmor 1y agoThey sound like appropriate abbreviations to me. Something like: "With time to get to the location" and "Without time to get to the location"
- spookie 1y agoTempore is in ablative case, and in english there isn't a good substitute. This means it isn't a static set time event, it has some leeway so to speak. German has the ablative case, so I think it works out for them.
- CommenterPerson 1y agoIn my previous employer we used to call this "Malicious Obedience". We also used it locally where your direct boss asked for something stupid (especially if they were the nasty kind). We'd implement it and sit back to watch the resulting chaos. Sometimes the change would be quietly rolled back.
- jedimastert 1y ago> I mean, I’d personally tell them that I wasn’t going to leave the room, but surely it worked a lot? Maybe it's because I worked in a different office or whatever, but 25 and 50 minute meetings were pretty common and if somebody else scheduled the room it was 100% respected. It wasn't really considered pedantry or anything, just the basic respect of honoring the commitment of the meeting calendar.
- idontseeppl 1y ago[flagged]
- amendegree 1y agoHa, in my company we start meetings late and blow past the end time, they’re generally on teams though, so aside from wasting everyone time who’s in the meeting we’re not preventing anyone else from getting work done
- bombcar 1y agoYou need meeting rooms like those expensive public toilets. At the allotted time the doors open and it ejects you along with a loud buzzer.
- stkni 1y agoThink I'm with Larry on this one. Someone should chair the meeting and there should be some expected outcome (decision) from it within the alotted time. If we're 45 mins in and no closer to an answer it's time to assign some investigative actions and regroup? Malicious compliance in this context is good, because it creates an environment where meetings end and everyone gets to pee?
- RHSeeger 1y agoNot all meetings have decisions to be made. Some are just discussions of a topic; generally to make sure everyone is on the same page.
- llm_nerd 1y agoIf we're being totally honest, a good percentage of meetings in many workplaces are work surrogates. Lots of people happily meeting and accomplishing nothing for the purposes of having the accomplishment that they attended a variety of meetings.
- MetaWhirledPeas 1y ago> generally to make sure everyone is on the same page If everyone is on the same page then there should be a 'page' resulting from the meeting; something to look back at to represent what everyone agreed on. Those are the 'decisions' being made. The worst meetings are ones where people share ideas, nod their head in agreement, then write nothing down. Inevitably this leads to an identical meeting later down the road, after people have forgotten key details and the game of telephone has distorted others. Then later it leads to upset people when they find, often close to delivery time, that their understanding conflicts with others on the team. If there's no desire to have updated plans or documentation after the meeting has concluded, then I question the true intent of the meeting. Was it because the person calling the meeting felt out of the loop? Why was that allowed to happen in the first place? Why were the requirements and the team's progress not easy to observe at a glance?
- chairmansteve 1y ago
- joostdecock 1y agoWhen it's a meeting I run/control my rule is that I will wait 150 seconds for people who are late, after which I start the meeting. You can join later, that's fine, but I'm not waiting longer than 150 seconds. Waiting 150 seconds feels like waiting a long time. Whereas being 2.5 minutes late feels like being on time. So I find that phrasing it this way is more impactful. (by now you probably figured out that I am not very popular ar work)
- divbzero 1y ago> (by now you probably figured out that I am not very popular ar work) I bet your colleagues appreciate it if you’re similarly strict about ending meetings on time.
- bityard 1y agoTFA's author is ascribing malice to the team booking the room during the last 10-minute slice of the hour, but I think there is a simpler and more charitable explanation based on having been in a similar situation: The team might prefer that particular room for a specific reason, frequently have to adjust their stand-up times for various reasons, and just took the only available slot.
- pawanjswal 1y agoPetty? Maybe. Brilliant? Absolutely.
- fitsumbelay 1y agothis was genuinely fun to read. thanks to the author/OP
- IIAOPSW 1y agoThe real problem is that its possible to book meeting rooms back to back when there's supposed to be decompression time in between.
- avg_dev 1y agotbh i don't feel like the people who scheduled a 10 min meeting did anything wrong. the room is marked as free during that time; they know they will be done in 10 mins; it's a shared resource... what's the point of a schedule for a shared resource if people don't respect it?
- thomascountz 1y agoI scrolled too far down to find this... Perhaps it's selection bias, but surely there are others that see it this way? I do have empathy for the people in the room who expected to have 10 more minutes for there meeting, and I'm not a pedantic rule follower, but I expect some grace and self awareness here. Yes, your meeting was unexpectedly interrupted, but my meeting was unexpectedly delayed. Your problem was caused by a system that—however unfair or inscrutable—we all have to conform to. My problem was caused by ignorance, accident, or malfeasance on your part. If I show respect and empathy in this situation, I expect you show some respect and humility.
- mrcartmeneses 1y ago“I wish I knew the identities of these brave meeting crashers. I saw them pull this stunt twice and then ride off into the sunset, and I never got to learn what team they were on. I wish Were they true believers in the 50-minute policy? Were they bored pedants? Were they wraiths, cursed to hunt the office for available meeting rooms?” No, they were software developers
- ZpJuUuNaQ5 1y agoAn enthusiastic writing but the ending was such a letdown. I feel cheated.
- habitue 1y agoI was really hoping this was going to explain some big issue with Larry's seemingly reasonable meeting policies. Turns out a few people kinda messed with it a few times?
- eCa 1y agoThere's zero real difference between a meeting ending at :50 dragging over and a meeting ending :00 dragging over. If anything, a group booking a meeting in the ten minutes in between increases meeting room usage, since the next meeting can now start at :00.
- mandevil 1y agoA scoutmaster of mine had a theory. Everyone has their own different version of what "9:30" means- to some it's 9:25, to others 9:45. But there is only one 9:32. So he would use weird times like that, we're meeting at 6:07 today.
- Stratoscope 1y agoSaratoga, CA does something similar. The twisty part of Quito Road, between Bicknell Road and Pollard road, has a speed limit of 25 mph. But the sharper turns have advisory speed signs (the yellow diamond kind) with numbers like 17, 19, 21, and 22 mph to catch drivers' attention and get them to slow down on these turns.
- roland35 1y agoI always love seeing stuff like this on reddit /r/oddlyspecific I think I even saw a 5.25 mph sign once!
- hammock 1y agoThen there’s an aggressive driver who sees that and realizes it hammers home the point that the yellow speed signs (vs the white ones) are not enforceable. And an enforceable sign could never be a weird number because speedos don’t have ticks but every 5mph.
- jedberg 1y ago> And an enforceable sign could never be a weird number because speedos don’t have ticks but every 5mph. Disneyland famously has a 14mph speed limit for their property. They do this both to get your attention, and because the tram moves at 14mph (because 15mph requires seatbelts).
- hammock 1y agoNot a legally enforceable speed limit.
- energywut 1y agoThis isn't malicious compliance. The room wasn't booked, a team booked it. They have a right to expect others to exit. If you want to book an hour, book an hour.
- ashurbanipal 1y agoGood story thanks
- Simon_O_Rourke 1y agoThis really does make you further loathe the types of exasperating clowns working for big G.
- kelnos 1y ago> I’d personally tell them that I wasn’t going to leave the room, but surely it worked a lot? What? I can't really imagine that. If I'd booked a room until X:50, and someone came in at X:50 saying they had the room, I would leave, because that's the right thing to do. If I really wanted the room until (X+1):00, then that's what I'd book it for, regardless of what the defaults are in GCal.
- jzb 1y agoWhat's "fun" is when companies try to be different and schedule meetings at :05 or :10 past the hour, so if you have any regular meetings with people outside the company that do the :50 or :55 thing, it's complete chaos. FWIW I've never seen top-down efforts to make meetings more efficient stick. Humans are humans, not automatons. They're chatty. They're messy and unorganized. And attempts to build "culture" that curbs those things isn't going to stick when people constantly change jobs because it no longer pays to stay at the same company for decades. (You know, assuming they don't just lay people off because that's the way the wind is blowing...)
- sequoia 1y agoI've tried to suggest what people are suggesting here to google (start 10 min late). I'll post it here in case google cal eng are present. Speedy Meetings, meet Tardy Meetings. I want 50 minute meetings & time to transition, but our culture of "let's wait a few minutes for people to arrive" is way too deeply engrained at my company to shift it. Solution: Speedy Meetings, but instead of end 5/10m early, start 5/10m late. We could turn this on company wide without a revolt. Alright google cal eng: Go get that promo!
- cadamsdotcom 1y ago"Meetings" should've never been the term. There are team updates & all-hands that are one-to-many. They are often basically a seminar so can be recorded, sent out online, and Q&A delivered in a follow up 24-72 hours later after everyone has submitted & voted on questions. any interactive bits the only bits left. There are 1:1s. These can be in person in a meeting room, online, or taken on-the-go. Then there are decision & planning meetings; these are what was being optimized. But if the other types of meetings were changed as above there’d have been no need.
- baruz 1y agoI wonder whether TFA author never saw it again because the fifty-minute bookers wised up and started booking the extra ten minutes or whether the ten-minute stand-up pirates finally got a talking-to.
- coolcase 1y agoThat's not malicious compliance. That's malicious to non-compliance! Obviously the solution is to have buffer where rooms can't be booked rather like hotel checkout and check-in times. I also think psychologically that a 9:10am start and 10am end would make people stick to their slot better. I'm glad I work remote and this is a distant memory: > Meetings continue until the participants of the next meeting are clawing on your door like a pack of zombies. This made me laugh! By the way I can't think of how you can do malicious compliance here. You can annoy your boss by refusing a meeting if you have nothing to say... but while annoying this is the point of the edict.
- that_guy_iain 1y ago> I mean, I’d personally tell them that I wasn’t going to leave the room, but surely it worked a lot? I'm not sure if this is they told them or he thinks he would tell them that he wouldn't give up a meeting room they had booked. If I had a meeting room booked and it was just an internal team they wouldn't leave they would quickly be learning what me and my team did the day before and what we plan to do today.
- aag 1y agoI once kicked Larry Page himself out of a meeting room because he had run over. I admired him for not making a special case for himself.
- innomatics 1y agoGood on you. I've always thought that the preparedness of employees to boot seniors out of their booked meeting rooms was a bellwether of good corporate culture. Places that values everyone's time and leaders follow process by example.
- bartread 1y agoPfft. If I’ve booked the room and you’re loitering in there I don’t care what your perception of defaults or the meaning of the minute hand’s position on the clock face is. That room is mine for the time I’ve booked it. Be off with you!
- pawanjswal 1y agoPeak engineer energy: weaponizing calendar defaults for 10-minute standups.
- mahirsaid 1y agoWhat did i learn from this post. meetings are unmanageable in the early years at Google?
- nailer 1y agoThe author doesn’t seem to understand what malicious compliance is. The people booking the available meeting room are complying with the policy. The people not getting out are not complying but not doing so maliciously. They’re not attempting to subvert the policy. They’re just not getting out of the meeting room when they need to.
- SwtCyber 1y agoThere's something deeply satisfying (and painful) about watching well-meaning productivity policies spiral into a kind of bureaucratic performance art
- bambax 1y ago> When 2:50 rolled around and your meeting was supposed to end, do you think people actually ended the meeting? Noooooo. Absolutely not! Why the hell not? Do people like meetings? I would want to get out as soon as the time is up. In high school when the bell rang everybody ran out of the door. Maybe meetings need a bell too.