Start your meetings at 5 minutes past • Hacker News Board

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#231

Post by criley2 » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

ljf wrote: post #229

criley2 wrote: post #145

Earlier 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.

I agree that technologists are SME of their field (so we still call them SME in my Corp)

That's fine to do that, but kind of pointless. Everyone is then a "SME" in their own job space and thus the term is kind of useless. So, just replace every mention of SME outside of your company to "Business SME" instead of "Technology SME" and you'll understand what we're talking about.

Or, if you truly do not need anyone but a "technologist" to deliver product, you must work in a pretty simple business space! I work in healthcare and our PhD's and MD's have a very, very different knowledge space than I do, I and I deeply respect their contributions.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#232

Post by refulgentis » Sun, Jan 11, 2026, 4:11 PM UTC

criley2 wrote: post #230

refulgentis wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cl…

My PM SME validated my workflows and I found Jesus in them then my MBA TL PhD…bla bla bla.

A human being who avoided corporate brainrot just writes “I worked with John and he was indispensable because (insert reasons you wrote here)”

I’m 37 and never heard of this acronym. That’s the entry-level version of my point. Not that other people hurt me or people knowing things is actually bad.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#233

Post by Timwi » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 12:40 PM UTC

> They arrive by 1:05pm, ready to work.

You can tell this is written by a manager who has never written a line of code in their life. For me as an actual programmer, meetings were always the time where I had to stop working. It's staggering to me that managers still think real work happens in meetings.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#234

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 12, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

kcplate wrote: post #227

recursive wrote: post #10

> 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 meet…

[deleted]

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#235

Post by tanvach » Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 11:34 PM UTC

earino wrote: post #160

tanvach wrote: post #75

During 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…

What joy to bump into you in the comments section! I definitely preferred 5 minutes past, but my calendar was pretty awful. What was really awful, however, was when your calendar was a random mishmash of starts at :00, :05, :30 and :35 :-)

Indeed :) Ah yes I agree! That was awful to everyone (and to analyze!).