Live data from Hacker News

Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

clientserver.dev

211–220 of 380 posts

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#211
post #95
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> meetings continue, regardless of the wall clock, until the next group of people come and kick you out. The meeting itself might continue, but as an individual, once the meeting passes the scheduled finish time, you stand up and say "sorry, I've got another meeting to get to". The worse your company's excessive meeting culture is, the better this works.

I've worked mostly remotely, and in companies where management insists on having visibility into subordinates' calendars. So I've placed an awful lot of official sounding decoy meetings on my calendar right after meetings that were completely unnecessary (could easily have been an email), hut where management would certainly listen to themselves talk past the buzzer.

My department head made a point once to instruct us that, if you need it, you should schedule time on your calendar as a meeting to just be "heads down" on work.

We have a lot of meetings so he encourages we do basically whatever it takes to keep meetings timeboxed.

I once was in an incident call where one of the execs was brought in and eventually said "We have 20 people in this call who all have good salaries. It will cost $600 to just inform our customer service agents to take care of this. Let's get out of here"

Management has to push that culture downwards, and reinforce it themselves, and continually encourage it as people join and leave and teams change.

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#212

A 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.

Saratoga, 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.

I always love seeing stuff like this on reddit /r/oddlyspecific

I think I even saw a 5.25 mph sign once!

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Haha. I was one of those “set clock fast” people until one day realized that all it did was make the time I was supposed to be somewhere even more ambiguous than before. It never helped me arrive somewhere exactly on time, but certainly contributed to me arriving late because my mind forgot precisely what time my clock was set to relative to real time.

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not seen management with a spine like that in a long time.

To 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.

lol. It’s the same way you manage kids time. Give them a warning instead of just up and bail.

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#215
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Michigan State, I had a math prof (Wade Ramey) who would lock the door after class started. If you were late, you couldn't attend. He also insisted students purchase a stapler and staple their homework. And he would give negative points on assignments. You could say "I don't know how to do X" for a step in a proof (0 pts), but if you put in something wrong, you would get negative points on that part. He was a good…

I have a medical condition (autoimmune hypothyroid, extreme edition) which I wasn't aware of, but was suffering from severely, during my University years. Waking up was extremely difficult for me and as a result I was often late. At the time I couldn't understand why I seemingly had a problem that nobody else did, and presumed I just lacked self control. Nope, I just needed (a lot) of medication. Your Prof Ramsey wou…

As someone who is _often_ late, your inability to be there in time is not someone else's problem. Unfairly punished...gimme a break.

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#216
post #205
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Michigan State, I had a math prof (Wade Ramey) who would lock the door after class started. If you were late, you couldn't attend. He also insisted students purchase a stapler and staple their homework. And he would give negative points on assignments. You could say "I don't know how to do X" for a step in a proof (0 pts), but if you put in something wrong, you would get negative points on that part. He was a good…

> And he would give negative points on assignments. I remember reading (maybe from Nate Silver) of a professor who would use this technique to teach about uncertainty. You could weigh your overall grade with a proclamation about how certain you were about the answer. Right answers with high certainty could really amp up your grade, but conversely if you claimed 100% certainty on a question you got wrong, you’d fail t…

There are a number of variations. You might actually be thinking of https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-favorite-liahtml or possibly https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/prediction/2022-gelman.pdf (if neither of those are it, it might be one of the others I collated in https://gwern.net/fake-journal-club#external-links ).

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#217
post #158
post #14

If 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.

i was at a startup where meetings were stifling. i had code to write, but i was stuck in HOURS long meetings half the week while marketing and sales types droned on and on about stuff that was meaningless unless we had a product to sell. uh, guys? we have code to write walking back from lunch with my cow-orkers one day, i realized we were passing a clock store. i went inside and bought a not-too-expensive cuckoo cloc…

I've been stuck in meetings like that. I'd just walk out saying, "you know where to find me if my input required."

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#218
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.

I 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.

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#219
I'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!

Re: Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

#220
post #40
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.

I 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.

Agree - 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.
Post reply on HN