Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Meetings don't work. Or, at least, the majority of staff meetings are time-wasting, productivity-killing, creativity-stifling products of wishful or delusional thinking. Before the pandemic and its mass movement to remote and hybrid work, meetings were already problematic.
We've all seen how meetings fail.
Most meetings in the office result from a policy to hold regular — often weekly — staff "update" meetings. Or they're the result of procrastination. We can't make a decision right now, so let's schedule a meeting. Or some new initiative, problem, or idea inspires action, and scheduling a meeting feels like action.
Once the meeting begins, eyes glaze, and some meeting participants start mentally tuning out the conversation while pretending to pay attention. (Others don't even pretend; it's become increasingly normal or acceptable to stay glued to a laptop or phone screen during meetings.
Meetings are often dominated by attention-seekers, ladder climbers, extroverts, and long-winded speech-makers. In contrast, others mostly remain silent with little to no correlation between saying something and having something to say. Meetings suppress creative thought. Most end in a fog of vagueness, without clear objectives, deadlines, and assignments.
And employees hate them.
[...] Making meeting matters worse, flex work schedules and the globalization of workforces mean that getting everybody into the same meeting simultaneously has become impractical.
[...] So it's time to cancel your meetings, clear your calendar and embrace the available new technology. And you definitely don't need to set up a meeting to decide to do so.
Is there anybody in our community who thinks that the meetings they have to attend are productive and worthwhile? In what way do they differ from those described here. What is your favourite ploy when you have to attend and want to appear interested without actually being so? [JR]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 23 2022, @07:16PM
"take drastic measures to forcibly shoehorn your employees' minds, bodies, and thoughts into a rigid, artificial, rule-based system."
fuck off
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormreaver on Saturday July 23 2022, @07:20PM
Where I work, we have daily remote meetings. Our perspective is that not only is tuning out of the meetings understandable when it doesn't specifically involve us at that moment, but it's expected. We tune back in when the meeting turns our way. While I don't particularly get much out of the meetings most of the time, there is at least that silver lining.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dunetes on Saturday July 23 2022, @07:33PM (3 children)
Many meetings do turn out to be useful and needed. That doesn't mean they are always 100% efficient from start to finish, but neither is my "working alone" time.
These typically are the meetings where you need to discuss something, technical discussion, prioritizing things, ...
Many other meetings, the corporate type, are mostly useless. Typical example is the "company meeting" There are 1 or 2 bits of information everyone wants from those meetings, and they are 2 different bits for everyone. Meeting is clearly the wrong format.
Also, "one company/family" & "synergy between >" pretty much describes every CEO speech ever for all large companies.
A second hurdle for large companies is the IT department. Primarily their focus on finding the "one tool" that can be used by everyone, yes I can do that thing I want discord/mattermost/slack/... for also on teams/... but I don't like jumping through three hoops with my left eye closed while holding my breath.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 23 2022, @09:33PM
UID 17739? Defending meetings? Obviously an ari sock. Spam mod this!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by driverless on Sunday July 24 2022, @08:11AM (1 child)
It really depends on the meeting. Dropping by someone's office and suggesting a visit to the cafeteria for a coffee is typically about, oh, a thousands times more productive than any actual scheduled meeting.
Also, the title of TFA is quite misleading, "don't work any more" implies that they worked just fine at some point.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by aafcac on Sunday July 24 2022, @03:49PM
The issue tends to be how they're run and why they're scheduled. Most of the things that happen in a meeting, like status updates, could more easily be handled via email or the like. Unless there's a need to have discussions about what's going on, or you're expecting it to be complicated enough that people need to ask questions, there's probably no point in having the meeting in the first place.
There are issues with people taking up too much time, or making it about themselves, but if the meeting has a clearly defined goal and you're only involving people that are necessary for the goal, you'll cut down on that a lot. There's stuff you can do to make people shut up more quickly, like that practice of having to stand on one leg while talking and immediately losing the floor the moment that second foot hits, but that's less of an issue if people have a specific point they need to make.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 23 2022, @07:36PM (4 children)
I've been programming since the 1980s, and time-wasting meetings are nothing new. The difference is they are move common than they used to be. We used to have status meetings once a week. Now they are every day "standups".
(Score: 2) by Mr Big in the Pants on Saturday July 23 2022, @08:29PM (3 children)
To be fair, the weekly status meetings would after be long and boring and full of stale info.
The standups are SUPPOSED to be 10 mins and daily info.
Of course, many due the weekly thing daily and yes, this is an absolute nightmare.
And also, little remembered point, daily dev standups are NOT SUPPOSED TO BE STATUS MEETINGS.
They are SUPPOSED to be devs etc nutting out issues with what they are working on.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 23 2022, @09:40PM (1 child)
My general experience is that it takes more than one day to scrape together enough useful information to be worthy of a meeting. The "standups" I currently get dragged to consist of each developer saying, "I'm (still) working on task 123, and there are no blockers".
It seems that "they" (whoever thought agile was a good idea) has been working to make developing software as mundane and pathetic as possible. At my last job, we wasted an entire standup debating whether every task should be in the form of "As a {someone} I want to be able to {something}". Mind you, we weren't arguing over whether knowing who wanted to do what was worthwhile; we were arguing over the exact phrasing and syntax "As as {someone}...". Utter stupidity.
It would be far more useful if "meetings" (to use the term in its most generic sense) were only called when someone hit a roadblock, and then only invite the people who can actually resolve the problem.
Of course, I'm old enough to remember when we actually had designs to guide us, rather than having everyone vote on what trivial tasks to tackle for that "sprint". We also were able to bite off more than 1 or 2 day tasks, which seems to be beyond the ability of younger programmers.
Now get off my lawn!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Sunday July 24 2022, @02:24PM
Yes, well: agile is just another name for iterative development, which most developers have been doing for decades. Even "waterfall" projects were never implemented all at once - that's simply not possible.
Agile is supposed to help you deal with changing requirements. The thing is: requirements have always changed during development. However, a thorough requirements analysis at the beginning of a project can prevent a lot of that, by asking the hard questions up-front. Agile doesn't even try - as a result, you are always programming to a moving target, and important things get overlooked.
The last agile project I witnessed: The customer stated that the system needed to be multilingual. The developing company saw all of the multilingual data being processed, and designed the system to deal with it. However, they forgot to make the system interface multilingual, which was what the customer actually meant.
If they had taken the time to write the requirements down in a clean specification, or at least a requirements catalog, this mistake would never have happened. But no, it was all informal "user stories". Since the customer interactions always happened in the same language, all of the user stories were also in that language. The end results: two years of development, followed by expensive lawyers. As far as I can tell, the project has been abandoned.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1) by aafcac on Sunday July 24 2022, @03:52PM
We've got those at work and unless there's something substantial to cover, or a bunch of questions, it usually takes longer for everybody to get there than to actually have the meeting. Personally, I don't mind because it's right next to my department, so I can wait until people are there before walking over. But, even at 10 minutes, it's probably still a waste of time most days as much of the information could just as easily be posted in the break-room and anybody that's not available doesn't have to come anyways.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday July 23 2022, @07:39PM (3 children)
The most important aspect of meetings is if everyone is responsible then nobody is responsible.
"Who decided to deploy that to production without a working backup system?" "They decided that at the meeting"
"Who decided to cancel the service contract on the hardware to save money?" "They decided that at the meeting"
All bad decisions generating negative net shareholder value usually come from meetings. If it was a good idea, some bootlicker would have stuck his tongue permanently to it in an attempt to obtain credit, even if its not his idea. Therefore the only decisions made at meetings are bad ones.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 23 2022, @08:41PM (1 child)
They also serve a function of regularly reinforcing who answers to whom.
The "leader" character points to the "worker" characters in turn and has them justify their existence. Without this constant threat, workers might forget who the important person is and who the worthless people are.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Sunday July 24 2022, @06:18AM
Don't forget about how the worker needs to continually ask for permission from the leader to do their job.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Monday July 25 2022, @06:02PM
Boy, did you hit that nail on the head. I'm trying to decide how to handle the people running the meetings where I work right now. Nobody wants to write anything down.
I ask a direct question and I get convoluted answers. Or, if I get direct answers, those answers change two days later. Everything is verbal, of course.
When I point out the obvious ("What do you mean we're doing ABC? I thought we decided to do XYZ. We should do XYZ because it was decided to be that way."), then I get told I'm being argumentative.
I'm groping a rock with my right hand and a hard place with my left. Ugh.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday July 23 2022, @08:27PM (2 children)
Important meeting are rare. But they do exist.
Of course, the question is "Important to who?", but all I can deal with is the ones important to me. Anything beyond that is speculation.
That said, events that establish a consensus reality are important. Lose that and your organization is likely to fall apart. But I'm not sure that meetings really accomplish that.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Opportunist on Sunday July 24 2022, @10:34AM
There are very, very few meetings with people who deem themselves important that could not be done in an email. Since 9 out of 10 times, all that happens is that you get to hear how great they are and what great vision they had this time.
Seriously, if you have visions, get professional help.
(Score: 1) by aafcac on Sunday July 24 2022, @03:55PM
The point of most meetings is to take up time so that the drones don't realize how little work there is to do. Think about it, if there was enough work to cover the week without the meetings, things wouldn't get done without everybody working 60-80 hours a week. When we have them at work, which isn't that often, they're extremely short status updates. This is mostly because we don't need to have meetings to justify our hours, we already have a bunch of other ways of measuring how much work is being used to justify the hours being given.
Really, it would be better for operational efficiency to have regular lunches where people can just talk about whatever they like and get folks in the same room to actually work things out with coworkers. Honestly, it's a bargain in terms of removing friction between different departments.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 23 2022, @08:28PM (2 children)
Volunteer to work night shift. Make it clear that you're not coming in for stupid meetings. Don't come in for meetings. If they want a meeting, they can schedule it during your work day. After a few years, they stop even asking if you'll come to the meeting.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 23 2022, @08:47PM
Yay. Win?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday July 24 2022, @06:10AM
It doesn't work in my case. All the other team mates are 8h and 16h behind my timezone (give or take the daylight saving time)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Saturday July 23 2022, @08:29PM (1 child)
A large portion of the meetings we have, that I'm involved with, are to coordinate activities. These are important so that everyone is in the loop. We do a great job of keeping them to the point, and ending them when no one has any relevant information.
We don't do, "Regular meetings to catch up" as we all talk all of the time anyhow. We specifically don't do daily catchup meetings because we all feel they're a waste of time.
The ones I tune out are the ones the C level and other high level management folks hold to pat each other on the back and tell everyone how, "Things are going to change." Nothing changes because business is business and you can't plan for everything no matter how hard you try. These are a total waste of time.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Opportunist on Sunday July 24 2022, @10:36AM
"Things are going to change!"
"Do I have input in the change?"
"Umm... no, of course not"
"Then an email is sufficient to inform me"
(close Teams)
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Saturday July 23 2022, @09:19PM (4 children)
Not the staff meetings about progress or whatever. But meetings with people that think differently can be useful. It can be revealing to understand what a CEO, or a financial or operational type, expects from software. How they experience and use the things you're trying to build. Most of them live in a different business world and those insights can actually improve your work.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Sunday July 24 2022, @10:38AM (3 children)
Which part of this is impossible to put into an email? Since C-Levels rarely, if ever, want input from their subjects, the whole communication is one sided anyway and can be accomplished in a medium that not only allows me to time the information transfer better to suit my needs, it also allows me to simply and plainly ignore it if I already know the sender is only a narcissistic waste of oxygen and space who only loves to hear himself talk without having anything substantial to say.
(Score: 1) by aafcac on Sunday July 24 2022, @04:01PM
I work at a grocery store and that's more or less what we do. This is mostly because they're too cheap to pay for the extra hours and overtime. The only time I've wanted meetings there was when I was in a department with no overlap between employees. Most of the time, you can take a couple minutes to talk specifically with the other relevant people directly without a formal meeting. In those smaller departments, the leader had better know what they're doing and utilized notes effectively to communicate, but even there, there's a corporate site with major things to check up on regularly.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Sunday July 24 2022, @08:08PM (1 child)
Maybe I'm just lucky to be involved with a young company, of people that don't operate in top down relationships.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Monday July 25 2022, @06:04PM
Starts ups are different. Give it a few years to grow or get bought out. Your company, if it survives the start up stage, will eventually become like this.
.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Saturday July 23 2022, @10:02PM (1 child)
I think TFS describes non-technical meetings. Most technical meetings that I have attended consist of:
* worker A presents a subsystem design
* coworkers tug at the design, suggest problems and possible improvements
This is *essential* to the process of designing any technical system:
* required for integration with neighbouring subsystems
* required for validation/cross checking/improvement
* required for training
Technical designs are special in that a *single mistake* can break the entire system. This is different to non-technical things.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 23 2022, @11:05PM
Yes -- same here. Currently part of a team (~20 souls) trying to put together a new university research lab with some expensive (7 or 8 figures) custom designed test rigs. Lots of planning and coordination needed between all the different moving parts. Lots of brainstorming and cross-pollinating because of all the different disciplines involved.
Meetings are critical and interesting. Typically one or two/week, with plenty of time to work up new material to show the team between meetings.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dltaylor on Saturday July 23 2022, @10:36PM
After nearly 40 years, I can only recall a few of the management-driven meetings I attended having any worthwhile content. Most of them were manager at level n needs to show the manager at level n-1 that he's doing something. Activity in place of action.
Every "scrum" that I could not escape amounted to the same thing. The time lost to preparing for the meeting, the meeting itself, and the post-meeting settling back into work, far exceeds the value of anything that the meetings produce. On top of that, the ideas that occur to someone doing the actual work do NOT need to held back until the next meeting.
On the other hand, a coworker asking for a few minutes in front of a whiteboard, or responding to such a request, lead to hundreds of brief, productive meetings. It takes longer to put such a meeting in the schedule than to meet.
(Score: 3, Informative) by YeaWhatevs on Saturday July 23 2022, @10:53PM (2 children)
Most of it is just recycled complaining about meetings. The offered solution is a link to another article about collaborative software, which seems to be an endorsement of microsoft teams. But wait, isn't that what zoom does? I'm not buying it.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 23 2022, @11:29PM (1 child)
MS-Teams does more than Zoom...but it does it poorly (in my experience). It might be better to use Zoom for the meetings and use something else for always-open team chat, live/shared documents and team resources like storage of reference documentation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 24 2022, @06:12AM
chat/IRC/slack
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday July 23 2022, @10:55PM
> dominated by attention-seekers, ladder climbers, extroverts, and long-winded speech-makers
This! Even the most important meetings, about our very survival, the loudmouths and bullies won't stop hogging the floor, trying to push their narratives that absolve them and blame others, trying to take credit for whatever good things were accomplished, if any. Indeed, if jobs are in the balance, they strive all the harder to use up all the oxygen. Nothing short of termination will induce them to shut up. They refuse to admit things are that bad. They certainly don't want to yield the floor to someone who might give the lie to their narratives.
Some of the best meetings I was in were the daily standup meetings that were a feature of Agile Programming. The whole idea of standing up to speak is to pressure the speaker to keep it short. Still not worth much.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday July 23 2022, @10:56PM (1 child)
Any meeting with more then a handful of people is usually not worth attending. Nothing good is ever decided. If there is just information that needs to be shared send a damn email. Small (once again less then or equal to five people) meetings where things are discussed and decided can be fine. The other kind of meeting is usually a waste of time. But since bossman needs to lord over some people they tend to be mandatory.
My favorite meeting ploy? If there is a lot of people and the meeting is clearly bullshit I see if I can get people riled up and argue about something stupid, just take the opposite opinion on something just for the hell of it. If the usual suspects are in the meeting it doesn't take to much to make the puppets dance as they all need to protect their turfs or have their set opinions that can't be argued with. If I am there and they are wasting my time I'll waste some more, certainly if the event is catered.
Or I pretend to take notes in my notebook. It appears more important if you take actual notes with pen and paper. I do take notes. They are just never really about the meeting. They are about important things (ie not the meeting) and such that I should do later. Ideas and possible solutions for projects I'm working on. Notes about things I should do later etc. Or I just draw little figures and such ...
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Sunday July 24 2022, @10:47AM
Unfortunately our most important customers only have time exactly the same time you schedule this meeting, so sorry...
(Score: 2) by legont on Saturday July 23 2022, @11:09PM
The first one is a general problem that active but stupid extroverts are taking over management jobs while productive introverts are suppressed. After all, I took software for the only reason - not to deal with humans. This makes people like me an easy pray for them so stupidity in software management is enormous compared to other fields of engineering.
The second one is... meetings are actually useful especially when we work from home. We - introvert software developers - need allocated time when we are expected to say what's going on, what we need, and who the fuck does not let us do our jobs. 15-30 minutes every morning is usually all that is for a typical team. It only works though if management reacts positively. Any push back and the routine is dead.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Sunday July 24 2022, @10:25AM
It only becomes far more noticeable now that people don't even have to pretend to be able to sleep with their eyes open because they can actually do some meaningful work while pretending to listen to the narcissist drone on about crap nobody cares about.
One of the key reasons productivity soared during lockdown was that people actually could continue working during meetings. We now just get to see the other side of that effect.
The only thing that changed with remote working is that people actually work during meetings instead of goofing off and undressing that intern bringing coffee with their eyes. Nothing else changed.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Snospar on Sunday July 24 2022, @11:21AM (4 children)
I have a Dilbert book on my shelf titled "Always Postpone Meetings With Time Wasting Morons" and it was published in 2000 so we've known about this for a long, long time. Personally I have to attend a lot of meetings and I spend most of the time working on other things. I guess you'd label me a passive listener although I do chip in to the conversation when required or when I hear something that is just plain wrong.
Just last week I was on a call where the Project Manager (a bit of a gas bag) failed to turn up. Everyone on the call took their turn to give their update and we discussed a couple of issues. The meeting took just over 10 minutes rather than the normal 30 and we all agreed it was one of the most productive we'd had. Maybe we've discovered the source of the problem.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Opportunist on Sunday July 24 2022, @12:49PM (2 children)
Yes, some people add a lot of value to the project by subtracting themselves from it.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday July 24 2022, @07:43PM (1 child)
Is there a way to identify these people and objectively describe what they're doing that's subtracting value? I mean, everyone should participate, but if they actually think they're contributing but aren't, there's a 50-50 chance everyone would benefit from that person responding to any feedback they might get.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Sunday July 24 2022, @10:08PM
It's a bit like in a poker game: If you don't know who's the cash cow, it's you.
If you don't know who subtracts value by adding himself, it's probably also you.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday July 24 2022, @07:48PM
That *is* a way to improve your productivity [dilbert.com].
(Score: 3, Informative) by bradley13 on Sunday July 24 2022, @02:12PM
My employer (a teaching college) has an annual week of organizational-level meetings. It starts with an entire day of the the higher-ups tell the rest of us about their strategy. The second day is occupied with workshops revolving around the themes of the first day.
Those first two days are useless. They give upper management a chance to pat themselves on their collective back in front of a captive audience, while the rest of us marvel at how out-of-touch upper management is with the actual business of teaching students. We're a school, you'd producing high-quality educational results would be management's top priority. It isn't. Strange, how many poeple have unavoidable scheduling conflicts. So sad, not being able to attend those first two days.
The rest of the week is used for departmental meetings. If you are only involved with one department, only one of those three days will be relevant. The departmental meetings are useful, because they are operational: Here's what happened in the past year, here's what's coming up next year. A bit of brainstorming and idea exchange once a year is a good thing. At least, it works well in my department, which is run by a very practical guy.
The rest of the year, there are no meetings. Sure, people will discuss common issues, or to coordinate their work, but that's informal and ad hoc. Communication is almost exclusively by email.
tl;dr: Even in an organization that holds few formal meetings, two-thirds of those meetings are unneeded, driven only by management's need to hold meetings.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1) by SomeRandomGeek on Monday July 25 2022, @03:48PM
Coordinating with other people to get something done is extremely difficult. Certainly every way I've ever seen to do it involves a great deal of overhead and waste. Of course, getting something done without coordinating with other people is also extremely difficult. So much time goes into solving problems that you don't know have already been solved. And then there is the waste associated with doing work that no one actually needs. And the waste due to incompatible solutions.
As a general rule, meetings suck. But what is the alternative? Training can help improve meeting quality, but it only goes so far.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2022, @07:30PM
Ugh, Agile, and its stupid, daily "scrums" because these young guys can't go one day without direction or bragging about their minor achievements.
(Score: 2) by Snort on Monday July 25 2022, @07:35PM
It is that so many people do not know how to run a meeting efficiently. This has been an issue as long as there have been meetings.
John Cleese produced this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff9V0mISmtk [youtube.com] back in 1976. And the rules are still the same.