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Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

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Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#101

Post by buzer »

gwd wrote: post #85

> 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 massi…

In Finland the universities (and I believe in many other European universities have/had this as well) there was "academic quarter" which meant that if something was scheduled for 10am it would actually start at 10:15am. IIRC if they used precise time (10:00) then it would actually start at that time.

I've heard it dates back to when people didn't have easy access to precise time. It would allow students to hear the hourly bells and walk to the class.

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#102

Post by hnthrow90348765 »

nyrikki wrote: post #21

> 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.

Get your other developers in on it and schedule a 2 hour "dev sync" and then just don't meet.

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#103

Post by CommenterPerson »

In 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.

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#104

Post by dr_kretyn »

remram wrote: post #18

This 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.

Ditto. 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.

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#105

Post by bombcar »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #26
exhilaration wrote: post #3

The 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.

>The solution [...] is to start them at, say, 9:10am so there's a clean mental stop at 10am. Unfortunately, I've been in a few meetings scheduled for 9:00 that only really started at 9:10. I think if they were scheduled for 9:10, they would've only started at 9:20...

You can NEVER knowingly trick yourself with clock tricks.

Because all it will do is make you really good at time math.

I've seen it even back when people would set all their clocks in their car and home 5 minutes fast, they just got real good at doing five minute math.

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#106

Post by pixl97 »

metalliqaz wrote: post #75
AStonesThrow wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always felt this was wholly ineffective coming from someone who wasn’t contributing or necessary to any given meeting, but it’s important to establish and hold boundaries like this. Even more points when a participant speaks up at the very beginning, to announce, “I’ve got a hard-stop at 9:50, so I’ll need to leave at that point no matter what.” Then the responsibility for wrap-up is placed squarely on leadership.…

If you're not needed at the meeting, probably best not to be there in the first place.

This is one of those things that's hard to measure.

Quite often I'd have to sit thru meetings that 99% of the time I'm not needed but for one specific minute I keep someone else from making an expensive time wasting mistake. It can be very difficult to determine what you're actually needed for in IT/Operations stuff.

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#107

Post by DonHopkins »

Zigurd wrote: post #88
DonHopkins wrote: post #67

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.co... Sun even produced a TV commercial in which an arrow that presumably had…

A 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.

McNealy'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

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-...

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

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_fundrai...

Michael Tiemann on "The Worst Job in the World":

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-...

>Subject: The Worst Job in the World

>From: Michael Tiemann

>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. [...]

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#108

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

tilne wrote: post #87
jghn wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time? As someone who tries to be prompt to a fault, I can see that yes there are people who get annoyed at promptness. It's not that you're a bad person for being prompt. Rather you're a bad person if you start without them or otherwise push back on their lateness.

I think to some extent some of the pushback is the prompt folks not understanding that sometimes lateness isn’t something they can control (e.g., meeting with important set of stakeholders that you can’t duck out on early ran late)

There are unavoidable life obstacles, but some people are always late to everything.

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#109

Post by layer8 »

gwd wrote: post #85

> 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 massi…

That’s called the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing.... (It usually is 15 minutes.)

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#110

Post by apercu »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #108
tilne wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think to some extent some of the pushback is the prompt folks not understanding that sometimes lateness isn’t something they can control (e.g., meeting with important set of stakeholders that you can’t duck out on early ran late)

There are unavoidable life obstacles, but some people are always late to everything.

Yea, I meant the habitually late.
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