What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like? • Hacker News Board

Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?

#61

Post by izacus » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:14 PM UTC

PeterStuer wrote: post #28

"Meetings are primarily for two things:" ... "Brainstorming" ..., ... "Making a decision as a group" ... "Secondary" ... "to expand and clarify knowledge" I've said this before, The "engineer's" pov on meetings is that they are an incredibly poor and overused instrument of getting things done and that it is beyond comprehension why "the company" continues to tolerate such expensive nonsense. The manager's (current an…

> You might call this 'cynical', but is it really when you lay out the facts?

It's not only cynical, it's downright sociopathic if that's the sum of your opinion. Yes, even if you lay down the facts.

Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?

#62

Post by theshackleford » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:16 PM UTC

rightbyte wrote: post #22

9dev wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of written notes really adds up over time, though. Once a meeting is over, it's over; a Slack conversation is preserved for new hires or absentees or yourself when you return to it after your vacation. I agree though, for a small team to build a shared understanding and move quickly, just having a chat together is definitely more efficient. I don't think the ideas lined out here apply to that organisation s…

I have never searched old chats for anything but passwords, network folder paths and license keys. Going back to some conversation on some topic and give it to the new guy, does it happen?

> Going back to some conversation on some topic and give it to the new guy, does it happen?

Of course it does. Or do you just assume anything you don't personally do must therefore not actually exist/occur?

Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?

#63

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:17 PM UTC

theideaofcoffee wrote: post #52

People seemed to be brainwashed into thinking that meetings are ... actually necessary. If people can build the Linux kernel without meetings, solely over email, then your $1.99 app, or your project requiring coordinating more than two people can be done the same way. Write it down, debate and argue in text so anyone interested can see what's going on. There's your minutes, your agenda, your invite for future ones ri…

The Linux kernel isn't a business. There's no 2025 revenue numbers they're hoping to hit with some cool new initiative, no high-paying customer threatening to run away to Windows if they don't get suchandsuch new kernel feature by end of quarter. It's a very different problem space, and these kind of business alignment problems are exactly the ones that are harder to resolve through email.

Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?

#64

Post by duxup » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:20 PM UTC

>agenda

I once worked at a company that had something like 3 to 5k employees. Everyone had to take an online class (about 8 hours) about effective meetings. Rule 1 was to have an agenda available in the meeting invite.

I loved this, it made for FAR more productive meetings.

Nobody at the company that I knew of outside myself and one other person had agendas available for our meetings, including leadership.

I think setting the culture for good meetings is set by leadership, and most top leaders make themselves exceptions to every rule and that lack of meeting discipline trickles down and so meetings break down overall.

Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?

#65

Post by skeeter2020 » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:21 PM UTC

pflenker wrote: post #59

I have two separate points to add to this. Point 1. During the pandemic, I learned that meetings also support team cohesion. We experimented with less meetings, but quickly got to a point where we restored at least _some_ meetings to ensure we'd stay functional as a team. This still matters given that we're still working from home 60-80% of the time. Point 2. The meeting host needs to be able to answer the following…

I agree with these, though the pandemic showed us (at least in my scenarios) online meetins really suck for a lot of the softer, agenda-less type activities. Casual, in-person hangs become AA meetings. It felt like we were sitting around a church basement on metal chairs (with the crappy coffee IRL too) waiting for our turn to speak. One of the good things IME was that scrum or dev-sized teams adopted extended pairing and group sessions; I saw (some) people get a lot better at working in public and sharing knowledge at this level.

The OP mentions it at the start, but I will reinforce: meetings suck if you're not prepared; use them to do work (like brain storm or make decisions) not share information. Breaking the "meeting as the big reveal" habit is surprisingly hard, but also solves the "should I attend?" question. To your point #2 a lot of that can be solved without attending if the appropriate prep and follow-up is covered. I don't really like RACI charts, but they do provide some value as a looser guide to thinking through the 2 questions you raise in point 2 above.

Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?

#66

Post by skeeter2020 » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:25 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #23

Agenda + minutes, in however minimal a form, is crucial. A meeting with no minutes and no agenda and a warm drink is just a tea party. Not that that doesn't have a role in organizations, but it shouldn't dominate your time. Most standups are therefore tea parties. A previous boss of mine even used to bring biscuits, which was nice. It serves the role of reminding everyone that each other exists and are collaborating…

>> "meeting without biscuits"

I like that (biscuits not the idea of being reprimanded), A former co-worker used to respond in a friendly (but he meant it!) way "no agenda; no attenda"

Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?

#67

Post by skeeter2020 » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:28 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #42

pjc50 wrote: post #23

Agenda + minutes, in however minimal a form, is crucial. A meeting with no minutes and no agenda and a warm drink is just a tea party. Not that that doesn't have a role in organizations, but it shouldn't dominate your time. Most standups are therefore tea parties. A previous boss of mine even used to bring biscuits, which was nice. It serves the role of reminding everyone that each other exists and are collaborating…

That's a good analogy / way to think about it, the stand-up should be more of a social call anyway (especially for remote work) to check in with each other and whatever they're working on, but anything in-depth should be done outside of it.

There's a lot of team culture going on here. I manage 6 scrum teams and attend each standup a few times a week. Some are very short and to the point; that's what the team wants. A few start with movie trivia or a silly question which takes ~5 minutes. One team spends 30 minutes and it's their daily social time for the ~22 minutes after updates.

I do like having an adult (rarely me!) in the room who shuts down OT rabbit holes and redirect to appropriate time & place.

These are all remote, geo-distributed teams who only see each other in person about once per year.

Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?

#68

Post by skeeter2020 » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:31 PM UTC

rightbyte wrote: post #22

9dev wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of written notes really adds up over time, though. Once a meeting is over, it's over; a Slack conversation is preserved for new hires or absentees or yourself when you return to it after your vacation. I agree though, for a small team to build a shared understanding and move quickly, just having a chat together is definitely more efficient. I don't think the ideas lined out here apply to that organisation s…

I have never searched old chats for anything but passwords, network folder paths and license keys. Going back to some conversation on some topic and give it to the new guy, does it happen?

I have to do it sometimes (as the not new guy) and it is very painful. It's too easy for people to throw stuff over the fence with a cold redirect if you have a culture of Slack/Teams is the source of truth

Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?

#69

Post by ianmcgowan » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:34 PM UTC

judge123 wrote: post #6

this feels like advice for the person running the meeting, not the one being dragged into it. I'm just picturing myself telling my boss "Sorry, this meeting doesn't have a clear goal, so I'm dropping off." Anyone actually have the guts to do this when you're not the senior person in the room?

This is where defensively blocking off your calendar comes in!

Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?

#70

Post by skeeter2020 » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

allan_s wrote: post #27

rightbyte wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never searched old chats for anything but passwords, network folder paths and license keys. Going back to some conversation on some topic and give it to the new guy, does it happen?

in my company we do this a LOT, what helps if having a LOT of slack channels with explicit topic name like * "incident-2025-07-28-CI-not-deploying-disk-full" * "feature-stripe-integration" * "exploration-datadog-or-sentry" and channel comes and go and people are quite "agressive" about routing discussion to the right channel or converting 10+ message thread into dedicated channel.

>> and channel comes and go and people are quite "agressive" about routing discussion to the right channel or converting 10+ message thread into dedicated channel.

THIS. I had this at my last gig and it was very successful, but have not been able to replicate at the newer place, because the house keeping is not done, so people end up with the logical conclusion, wrong question that living with a few messy channels is better than living with a bunch of messy channels.

I like lighter weight tools that integrate & help like incident management bots, but the vendors will no longer sell you a cheap, useful & focused tool so instead you're faced with convincing your boss to spend a lot of money on an "enterprise-grade", AI-enabled do everything incident/schedule/status/issue/project management system.