Better idea: write code. Don't waste your teams' time with back-to-back hour-long meetings.
Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
221–230 of 235 posts
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#222I've always wondered at the company cultures between Google and Microsoft - Gcal supports ending meetings five minutes early while Outlook supports starting five minutes late. At Microsoft it was obvious how five minutes late was optimal - meetings usually dragged on past their end time anyhow, but never started early so it gave folks time to eg get to their next meeting (in person), coffee, bio break, etc. Does Goog…
> while Outlook supports starting five minutes late This contrast is an incorrect assumption. Outlook does allow starting meetings late as well as ending meetings early, with somewhat arbitrary durations. [1] I have definitely seen these options in Outlook settings (on web, since I hate Outlook). However, I haven’t used it because the teams one works with need to be alerted and reminded of it before it sticks in thei…
Yes, outlook supports both. At Microsoft though we only ever used "start five late".
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#223During the pandemic, we had a natural experiment at my previous company. Our org had started an org wise auto ‘meeting starts 5 minute past’ while others had the traditional meetings start on the hour. Also conveniently, we also had the calendar data for internal meetings, internal VC software (not zoom) db that logs the participants when they join and leave meetings and employee function db. I was serendipitously th…
>ICs tend to stick around and over run meetings, while managers tend to leave meetings on time. That makes 200% sense. A couple or more ICs tend to want to stick around to go off topic or drill down on some thing if they don't have a conflict. People who aren't expressly relevant to that or have a conflict drop at that time. You're basically seeing the post-meeting hall conversation of the ICs in your data.
Not to mention that managers are way more likely to have back-to-back meetings.
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#224During the pandemic, we had a natural experiment at my previous company. Our org had started an org wise auto ‘meeting starts 5 minute past’ while others had the traditional meetings start on the hour. Also conveniently, we also had the calendar data for internal meetings, internal VC software (not zoom) db that logs the participants when they join and leave meetings and employee function db. I was serendipitously th…
> The biggest predictor for people who prefer starting late is how crowded their schedules are. Managers tend to have very crowded schedules which means they want a break between meetings, while ICs prefer not having to waste time waiting.
Dunno if people here know this Paul guy, but he wrote about this: https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html =)
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't understand. If I arrange everything into written words and send out an email with a link to the document, noone will read it. Instead, I must invite 10 people to do other things while I talk on a zoom call! "Sorry, I was multitasking"
We meet in person and have a culture where closing your laptop is followed pretty well.
TBH, if everyone involved is invested in what is being said, you don't need to be in person and you don't need to shut laptops.
If that is the majority of your meetings, you are in a good place.
The mistake is to think the rules are what makes the meeting useful. Having the right audience, an agenda, and appropriate expectations for the outcomes are the useful things.
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like it - though we use SME- Subject Matter Expert. E.g. If you aren't an SME or a Manager, then why are you in the meeting? (SME encompasses PM and BA roles, as they too should be experts in their domain and ideally on the domain we are working on.)
SME and IC are functionally different. SME informs, IC creates. Often, IC aren't SME in the space they're developing in, because they're SME of the technology instead of the business.
This whole thing reminds me why I never wanna work for someone again. From what I saw at Google it all just ends up being classist top-down BS of who isn't allowed at the big kids table, or bottom-up BS by insisting they aren't the SME just the IC and we can't do anything until the XYZ PM SME TL and/or manager approve.
It is unparsable Dilbert nonsense to anyone outside of specific scenarios. And it causes interminable discontent. Because what if the SME is the PM because they know business and tech but the SME is actually the IC because they know the tech and its tech but what if the manager is actually the SME because they're running the tech and may need to redelegate if the IC needs vacation, blah blah blah.
(job history: college dropout waiter => my own startup, sold => Google for 8 years => my own startup)
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#227> there is social pressure not to allow meetings to run much past the top of the hour. I've never seen this pressure. > meetings rarely started on the dot anyway before this change. It's like I live in an entirely different world. Start meetings when they say they're going to start. People will learn to show up quickly. I think that works better than trying to psychologically game people into cooperation. That just s…
In the early 90s I had a new department director who would bring a kitchen timer to every meeting. Meetings started on precisely on time and the timer was set to 22 minutes. When that bell rung, you could finish the thought, but the meeting would break at the 25 minute mark. If you didn’t accomplish the agenda, another meeting could be set, but it needed to be at least 2 hours after the one that just broke. Even meetings without him had to follow the rule. He also had a request that were were supposed to follow if we could, which was to allow ourselves to only schedule one meeting in an hour.
Obviously it was pretty chaotic at first and I recall us being pretty brutal in our assessment of his “crazy meeting quirk”. However after a few weeks something pretty interesting happened:
- Brevity and productive discussion became common. People usually went with their best opinion
- we usually finished the agenda (probably because we set reasonable agendas for 22 mis) and rarely needed that rollover meeting
- we spent more time at our desks actually doing instead of just talking about doing. I recall that team being really productive overall.
Later when I moved into leadership roles I attempted to bring this methodology but my own leadership generally was not supportive enough to allow me to be as rigid and I didn’t see the same success with the method…but to this day 32+ years later I still think it had merit.
I had asked him where he had learned it. My recollection is that he formulated it after reading that the average person’s attention span in a meeting was 27 minutes and he figured no one was productive after that, so he decided it was pointless to go longer.
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#228start at 1pm. end at 1:45 or 1:55pm. known wise pattern for a long time
honor end times so everyone has a few minutes to take a bathroom break or move to a diffrrent room, or prep mentally, etc
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like it - though we use SME- Subject Matter Expert. E.g. If you aren't an SME or a Manager, then why are you in the meeting? (SME encompasses PM and BA roles, as they too should be experts in their domain and ideally on the domain we are working on.)
SME and IC are functionally different. SME informs, IC creates. Often, IC aren't SME in the space they're developing in, because they're SME of the technology instead of the business.
I agree that technologists are SME of their field (so we still call them SME in my Corp)
Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
SME and IC are functionally different. SME informs, IC creates. Often, IC aren't SME in the space they're developing in, because they're SME of the technology instead of the business.
This whole thing reminds me why I never wanna work for someone again. From what I saw at Google it all just ends up being classist top-down BS of who isn't allowed at the big kids table, or bottom-up BS by insisting they aren't the SME just the IC and we can't do anything until the XYZ PM SME TL and/or manager approve. It is unparsable Dilbert nonsense to anyone outside of specific scenarios. And it causes interminab…
I'm sorry you've had bad experience working with other people, but in my experience as a developer, having multiple SME's available is indispensable to real alignment and fast development. I've primarily worked in startups, not big companies, and have often worked in healthcare. In healthcare, you get beyond your "I'm a big smart engineer" ego BS and you are willing to listen to the PhD's and MD's that help inform clinical workflows. From my perspective, I would never ask a clinical researcher or a doctor to understand our react app, and they aren't going to ask me to have deep understanding on medical details and clinical workflows. We work together to deliver high quality useful software quickly.