> 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 massive anchoring effect for things on the hour. Still being in the meeting room at 11:01 feels a lot later than still being in the meeting room at 10:51.
buzer · 6h ago
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.
brummm · 1h ago
Same in Germany. Times are usually assumed to be ct (cum tempore) and start XY:15. When something starts sharp, it's specified as st (sine tempore).
Groxx · 4h ago
It also allows you to have "1 hour" classes that are at 10am and 11am, and you aren't forced to leave early or arrive late. A 5m gap isn't enough for huge numbers of classes in many campuses.
reddalo · 5h ago
I confirm, we have it in Italian universities (it's called "quarto d'ora accademico" in Italian).
ketzo · 1h ago
This thread is absolutely fascinating — American, never heard of this practice (esp ct/st), and desperately want it in my life now!
almostnormal · 2h ago
Times are given as "c.t.", cum tempore.
scotty79 · 3h ago
In Poland "academic quarter" has a sense that if the teacher didn't show up and it's 15 minues past, the students can leave. They still need to show up for the class at 00 every time and are scolded to varying degree if they showed up after the teacher started which they do right after they arrive.
immibis · 39m ago
At my university in New Zealand they didn't take attendance for lectures. You attended the lectures so you could learn stuff so you could pass the exams. It's surprising that isn't considered normal.
(There's some nuance to that statement as science courses tende to have labs - I don't remember why first-year physics was a requirement for software engineering, but it was - mathematics courses tended to have weekly assignments, and at least one software course had a very unusual style of putting us in a room one whole day per week for a semester to work on group projects.)
ipdashc · 2h ago
... so the old American high school "if the teacher is 15 minutes late, we're legally allowed to leave" meme has some roots in reality? Huh.
Mountain_Skies · 53m ago
Never heard of that in high school but my university's student handbook explicitly stated that if the professor did not show up within ten minutes of the scheduled start time, the class was officially cancelled for that day. I only remember that happening once, maybe twice, during my academic career. A few times they cancelled a class ahead of time but no-shows were extremely rare.
scotty79 · 2h ago
I guess it was the same in Poland and in America. It was never formally announced. Just sort of unwritten cultural norm.
BurningFrog · 4h ago
Same thing in Sweden in the 1980s
kzrdude · 1h ago
Still is, standard lecture is scheduled for example for 10-12. It starts at 10.15, pause 11.00-11.15, continues until 12.00. So it's neatly split in two 45 minute halves.
skribb · 1h ago
This has also been extended to evening events (dinners, balls, parties) in student towns. There “dk” stands for double quarter, so for example 18dk means that an event starts at 18:30, but you may show up from 18:00. And the time between 18:00-18:30 is used for mingling.
It’s a good convention.
spookie · 4h ago
Still is!
Thankfully
Msurrow · 4h ago
Same in Denmark. Actually often needed to get from one auditorium across campus to another auditorium
cyberax · 4h ago
A bit different in Russia and Ukraine, there's a notion of "academic hour" which is 45 minutes. Same idea though.
dunham · 3h ago
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 prof, and I enjoyed his classes.
bumby · 2h ago
>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 the course!
This is the best/most fun way to bet on the Oscars.
You pick the winner and then assign 1-25 (or whatever) points to it (using each number for only one category) and if you get it right you get that number of points.
It basically prevents ties. It lets you make risky picks without falling out of the running. The downside is a shocking number of people won't be able to follow the rule and end up with 22 used twice or whatever.
gnfargbl · 2h ago
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 would have penalised me for this unknown condition. This isn't behaviour to be celebrated.
bumby · 1h ago
You seem to expect the professor to give you a reasonable accommodation for an affliction you didn’t even realize you had. If you want to hold him accountable for his (unfair?) rules, you need to first hold yourself accountable for getting the disease diagnosed.
shakna · 23m ago
The world we live in, with the people we live with, require accomodations every single day.
Not locking a door allows the students who were delayed on the road by a car accident, as much as the disabled student who took five minutes longer than expected after falling down some stairs.
Every single person makes mistakes at times. If those are not absorbed by flexibility, then they go on to affect everyone else connected to the punished.
If the professor is delayed due to a tire puncture, should they lose their tenure?
DontchaKnowit · 1h ago
Awful take. First, how would you even know you had a condition and werent just a lazy ass?
Second, do you know how fucking difficult it is to navigate the medical system? Something like this could take DECADES to diagnose. First you have to find a doctor that actually pays attention and gives a flying fuck. For example- ive had like 5 primary care doctors over the years and NONE of them until the latest one noticed that I have a heart murmur. Well he kept pressing to diagnose why and turns out I have a genetic heart disorder that will probably kill me eventually. The other 4 docs didnt lay enough attention to notice or didnt care enough to do anything about it.
So yeah, your take sucks.
gnfargbl · 1h ago
I'm 50/50 on this post. Firstly, yes, I had no idea that I had a condition, I really just believed I was a lazy ass. However, in the event, all it took to diagnose was a TSH blood test (the results of which came back with *VERY HIGH* typed at the top in capitals; I remember the printout with the dot-matrix asterisks).
Since this is a cheap and easy test, all it would have taken is for me to go to any doctor and ask for it. But I didn't do that, because I believed I was just a lazy ass.
bumby · 1h ago
First, go read the HN guidelines and understand why your post should be reframed.
>how would you even know you had a condition and werent just a lazy ass?
If you are not able to know, how on Earth do you expect the professor to know you aren’t just lazy or unmotivated?
I’m all for giving people grace. But it strikes me as a weird take to expect people to go around assuming people have some grave condition that they don’t even realize to excuse them from all manner of aberrant behavior.
gnfargbl · 1h ago
> You seem to expect the professor to give you a reasonable accommodation for an affliction you didn’t even realize you had.
No. How could he? Instead, I'm pointing out the value of empathy, tolerance and flexibility.
bumby · 1h ago
I’m all for empathy, tolerance, and flexibility (to a reasonable degree). I also don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a professor to act on an assumption of illness when the person actually experiencing the symptoms does not hold that assumption. Your perspective makes it seem like the prof is privy to information about your health that you don’t have.
No comments yet
DrammBA · 1h ago
> Your Prof Ramsey would have penalised me for this unknown condition. This isn't behaviour to be celebrated.
On the contrary, your anecdote is evidence of how this seemingly arbitrary behaviour can actually uncover real issues and prompt people to question and investigate.
gnfargbl · 1h ago
Not at all; it would simply have discouraged me, as some professors with a similar attitude really did at the time. After all, the problem was (I believed at the time) merely myself.
CrimsonRain · 2h ago
As someone who is _often_ late, your inability to be there in time is not someone else's problem. Unfairly punished...gimme a break.
DontchaKnowit · 1h ago
Its so strange to me that when it comes to college no one has any empathy whatsoever for students. Its so absurd.
recursive · 1h ago
Some people don't have empathy for students regarding this particular subject.
No comments yet
wcunning · 9m ago
That stopped in about 2017, right after I finished my master's degree.
AnotherGoodName · 4h ago
This is also fast becoming the norm in many big tech companies. The internal calendar tools will pretty much always start meetings 5minutes after the hour/half hour by default and end exactly on the hour/half hour by default (you can override if needed).
It's pretty obvious, you can't travel to a meeting instantly and 100% appreciated when you work in such a place. For those senior enough for all day back to back meetings you get toilet breaks!
If you work in a company that doesn't do this take note and if you're senior in a company you should start pushing for this to be implemented. A lot of calendar tools have options for meeting buffers by default and enabling it is all you need to do.
Fifteen minutes late used to be the academic standard in Germany (and other countries): it was noted by “c.t.” in the timetable, meaning “cum tempore”.
When I studied it had already been mostly abolished. Sometimes starting times were explicitly marked “sine tempore”.
raphman · 5h ago
> it had already been mostly abolished
c.t. is still standard at many German universities (and at all Bavarian universities I know).
However, I know at least one university of applied sciences where lectures start at full hours.
thaumasiotes · 5h ago
Those are strange annotations; it looks like at least one word is missing. They mean "with time" and "without time".
shakna · 16m ago
Cum can be translated as 'with', but due to cultural use, it can also be translated as 'in addition'.
Some younger Latin recipes use 'cum sal' as a one-liner at the end, to tell the chef to season to their taste, for example.
spookie · 4h ago
Tempore is in ablative case, and in english there isn't a good substitute. This means it isn't a static set time event, it has some leeway so to speak. German has the ablative case, so I think it works out for them.
AdhemarVandamme · 1h ago
I don’t see why the grammatical cases of Latin and German matter in the interpretation of these abbreviations.
The Latin prepositions cum (with) and sine (without) are always followed by the ablative case. German has grammatical cases too, but no ablative. The German propositions mit (with) and ohne (without) are followed by the accusative case.
So c.t. = cum tempore = mit Zeit = with time (or with some delay), and s.t. = sine tempore = ohne Zeit = without time (or without delay).
filmor · 35m ago
"mit" is followed by dative in German. In Latin, ablative and dative are very close and which is very close, a lot of forms are indistinguishable.
That doesn't change anything else you said, though :)
divbzero · 5h ago
It seems to make sense if you interpret it as:
10am c.t. = 10am with extra time
10am s.t. = 10am without extra time
devmor · 5h ago
They sound like appropriate abbreviations to me. Something like: "With time to get to the location" and "Without time to get to the location"
bsimpson · 4h ago
Our team did the same during the pandemic. They declared that the first 5 minutes of every meeting were for bio breaks.
Now meetings actually start at :05 or :07. The prior meeting will often drag until that time, but you don't feel bad knocking at :00 or :02 and asking for the room to clear.
RandallBrown · 3h ago
I'm sure that's where Larry Page got the idea.
Unfortunately UMich ended "Michigan time" back in 2018. I always thought it was a great solution to the problem.
re · 3h ago
> The 10-minute transition time will move before the hour instead of after the hour. Previously a one-hour class with an official start time of 9:00 a.m. would begin at 9:10 a.m. Under the new policy, class will begin at the official start time but end at 9:50 a.m.
I've been doing this for years with my meetings and I wish Google Calendar had it built in. I have to keep manually adjusting start times and it's a pain.
AStonesThrow · 1h ago
At my schools and workplaces, meetings or classes would begin when they began, and then several people who mattered would be chronically late, and so whatever we did in the first 5-10 minutes was an utter waste and went down the drain, because the leaders would rewind and repeat it all "for the benefit of those who just joined us."
This was the worst part of being a person who is prompt and on-time for all meetings and events. If you're going to always accommodate people who are chronically late, then you don't respect my time or effort. You just slapped me in the face for being prompt when you rewound your lecture or repeated your introduction. You wasted ten minutes of my time to cater to other people who are [habitually] wasting ten minutes of everyone else's time.
It was horrible and reprehensible, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it or mitigate it. What was I going to do, be late on my own?
I learned about 25 years ago never to be late to anything, particularly an appointment or a job/volunteer role where I'm indispensable. I was fired as a volunteer from a very important role because I was late only once. It was a role which was strictly dependent on timing and promptness. I learned at that very moment, never to be late again, and riding public transit as I did, I always built-in at least 30 minutes of lead time so that I was super-early rather than on-time, or God forbid, late.
suzzer99 · 4h ago
Yeah that seems like such an obvious solution to this problem.
remram · 7h ago
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.
caminante · 5h ago
It's a clickbait keyword. This wouldn't be a genre if all the stories were this tame.
If anything, the company saved money with optimizing meeting room capacity and the CEO's desire to give breaks was enforced.
The team pushing back against leaving at 50m was the only "malicious" party, and they weren't compliant.
krick · 2h ago
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.
dr_kretyn · 6h ago
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.
davio · 5h ago
Malicious compliance would involve reviewing the action items from the 50 minute meeting at the beginning of the 10 minute meeting
mandevil · 4h ago
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.
Stratoscope · 3h ago
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.
roland35 · 2h ago
I always love seeing stuff like this on reddit /r/oddlyspecific
I think I even saw a 5.25 mph sign once!
gwbas1c · 7h ago
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.
kabdib · 5h ago
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 clock and installed it on the wall of our single large conference room
it would make whirring noises every 15 minutes. a few clicking sounds before the hour, and then CUCKOO, CUCKOO as many times as necessary. the marketing and sales folks did NOT like it, but:
- meetings got shorter and there were fewer of them
- the CEO of the company loved that clock. if i forgot to wind it, he or our admin did :-)
verall · 2h ago
This is a dadhacker post, including (especially) the "cow-orker".
Are you just reposting or are you the real dadhacker?
Because if you are, I was reading your blog since I was like 14. Sad it's down now. But absolutely great stuff that helped prepare me for today's industry :)
kabdib · 1h ago
i'm dadhacker, yes
i may bring the site back, but it's not a priority, and i'm not sure i can write much at the moment without getting into trouble :-)
neilv · 3h ago
I love this. Not only the reminders that time's a wastin', but also the unattractive aesthetic, making the meeting space a less pleasant place to linger, and maybe even taking people down a notch from their very important people meetings. The bird calling "cuckoo" could even be commentary on the discussion.
bbaron63 · 2h ago
I've been stuck in meetings like that. I'd just walk out saying, "you know where to find me if my input required."
bityard · 5h ago
I noticed years ago that I start to tune out of any meeting that lasts longer than 45 minutes. So whenever I was the one running a meeting, I would always timebox it to 45 minutes. Never could tell if anyone appreciated or resented that. But it worked for me.
Now that I work 100% remote, I have more flexibility to mentally ignore the bits of all meetings that don't apply to me and can instead fill the time writing comments on HN.
ljm · 3h ago
Even remotely I try to get the team to keep meetings short and sweet. If it has to go over 45 minutes I’d book two separate meetings with a 10 minute break in the middle.
Nothing worse than meetings that drag on, where everyone starts to lose focus, and where one or two vocal participants sidetrack it into a 1:1 conversation. Just get shit wrapped up and have your other conversations without demanding the time of people who don’t need to be involved.
rurp · 5h ago
I found myself more on the side of the meeting crashers, even though the article paints them as the villains. I've been in vastly more hour long meetings that were longer than necessary than ones that were too short.
In meeting-heavy orgs it is really annoying to have meetings led by people who regularly run up to or beyond the final minute of the time slot. Those extra few minutes practically never produce anything worthwhile enough to compensate for the rushing between meetings and having to choose between being more late to the next one or taking care of a quick bathroom/water/snack break.
kemayo · 4h ago
I don't mind if a meeting is an hour, but I'm genuinely a bit peeved every time I'm in a 50 minute meeting that just automatically rolls over. If you want to do an hour, book an hour.
(All I actually do about this is be the person who pops up in meeting-chat at XX:51 with a "time-check: we've gone over".)
diggan · 7h ago
Suggestion: Have an agenda, have rules to religiously follow the agendas and help each other follow the agenda. Once completed, meeting over.
leviathant · 6h ago
I started replying "No agenda, no attenda" after being in a few too many meetings where things dragged on, or where I clearly was not needed. Didn't matter if I was telling this to someone at the same level as me, or someone at the head of the department: the humor in the wording lessens the sting of the implied "stop being disorganized" message. I made it clear that if there was not a clear agenda in the meeting invite, I would not be attending.
Following this with "What outcome should we expect at the end of this meeting? If there are next steps, what would we like them to be?" helps cut to the chase, and in my experience, things got better across the board. Sure, there were one or two folks who still struggled to create agendas for meetings - but it wasn't long before they were updating their LinkedIn profiles. Accountability can do that sometimes.
lazyasciiart · 47m ago
I tried this once and my manager and skip level explained to me that sometimes it's necessary to make people get together in case anyone wanted to talk about something, not every meeting needs an agenda. Unsurprisingly, I was not a good fit for that team.
steveBK123 · 7h ago
This works great except 95% of the places I've been with bad meeting culture, it comes from the top.
Long winded execs enjoying open ended meetings without any structure to constrain them. Which is to say, the kind of shops with micromanaging management who keep themselves busy with meetings with their own team.
barbazoo · 7h ago
In my experience, most folks appreciate a gentle hint to stick to the agenda. I don’t hang out with “execs” though.
apercu · 7h ago
Execs that have responsibilities appreciate sticking to agendas. But there are a lot of Elon Musks in the world.
philipallstar · 6h ago
Didn't Elon Musk have in his companies that thing of if you have no value to add or receive from a meeting, you can leave it?
apercu · 6h ago
No idea but someone who claims to work harder than just about everyone else while managing to be on social media all day is hilarious.
burningChrome · 4h ago
This goes way back further then Musk. I remember working at a large corporation in early 2000 before the first dot com crash that had severe meeting issues. At one point, I was having two or three hour long meetings during the week on what another meeting later in the week was supposed to cover.
The CEO of the company got caught fooling around with a co-worker and abruptly resigned. The new CEO came in and found out what a mess meetings had become and issued the same proclamation - if a meeting isn't productive and produce some actionable items, then it shouldn't be scheduled. If you're not 100% required in a meeting, don't go. If you're in a meeting and feel its a waste of time, then leave.
Just those simple rules got rid of half of my meetings and the several teams I was on suddenly were cranking through sprints, building some amazing apps and products and killing our delivery times. The entire company suddenly was cooking along. It was a real eye opener how you can really bog a Fortune 500 company down just by clogging people's time up with useless meetings.
matwood · 6h ago
How many people do you think skip his meeting?
ljm · 3h ago
I’ve seen it come mostly from participants who are more dominant or verbose in the conversation than others, often leading to the meeting being a lengthy back and forth between two people because nobody else can get a word in and the person running or facilitating it isn’t keeping it in check.
reaperducer · 5h ago
Long winded execs enjoying open ended meetings without any structure to constrain them.
I've been through too many of these. They like to sit at the head of the table and bask in the glow of their underlings like they're king for an hour.
ctkhn · 6h ago
I've been in 90 minute standups, the 10 minute standup pedants would be my heroes.
khedoros1 · 5h ago
With my current team lead, 90-minute standups aren't common, but they've happened. 30 minutes is "short", and most take 45 minutes. The previous lead kept things to about 10-15 minutes. The new guy has apparently never in his life said "OK, let's discuss this after standup".
ctkhn · 5h ago
I get why people hate scrum/agile and random standards from above but this is the kind of guy that needs enforcement from his manager. Unfortunately I have never seen that happen and have had to just move on from teams where it gets poisoned like this.
delecti · 3h ago
Interject. When things are getting off topic (which is to say, as soon as one person interrupts another person's update with a question) just say "this might be better for post standup", or even just "post standup?" with a questioning inflection.
Most of the people who will mind are exactly the kind of person that you're trying to keep from wasting everyone's time.
pavel_lishin · 4h ago
Any and every team member should be empowered to do this.
ab71e5 · 6h ago
Wow, was it actually 90 minutes of standing?
ctkhn · 5h ago
For me, yes. I was working remote from a surprisingly loud coffee shop so I had to pop out in the back alley. The rest of the team (even those in office) was all connecting on zoom so I doubt it.
rightbyte · 5h ago
Did anyone faint?
ctkhn · 5h ago
I think some of my swe friends might have when I told them about it later.
hinkley · 6h ago
I’ve worked at a couple places where someone had the balls to just get up and leave the meeting room at around 70-80 minutes to force a break. If we are going to be stuck in here I’m going to the bathroom and to get more coffee.
Usually by this point the stuffy room and long meeting have people going in circles. Getting up, opening the door, getting the blood moving while one or two groups have a little sidebar, usually causes the rest of the meeting to wrap up fast.
bityard · 5h ago
I do this at 60 minutes, even though my meetings are all over zoom these days. "Sorry, I need to step away to get some water. I'll be back in a few minutes."
FuriouslyAdrift · 20m ago
I used to love pomodoro style meetings... it became a test of will and stamina at some point.
zorked · 6h ago
Oh how many times I ended a meeting over VC by pretending that someone was knocking on the door...
exhilaration · 8h ago
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.
flerchin · 7h ago
Heh some people are on time, some people are late. It's seemingly a culture thing, and neither side understands the other. You say "of course nobody will stop at 9:50am" and that is exactly what I would do.
apercu · 7h ago
> neither side understands the other.
Being late is viewed as rude or lacking respect for others by a lot of people.
Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?
jghn · 7h ago
> 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.
tilne · 6h ago
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)
0cf8612b2e1e · 6h ago
There are unavoidable life obstacles, but some people are always late to everything.
apercu · 6h ago
Yea, I meant the habitually late.
kelnos · 3h ago
I think people on both sides need to have more empathy, then. I'm generally one of the prompt people, and I'll try to start on time. If people are late, they'll arrive after we start, but that's fine.
And the late people need to understand that sometimes they will miss the beginnings of things, but that's ok too; their inability to be on time (for whatever reason) should not waste the time of those who get there on time.
jghn · 4h ago
Yes. And even as someone who tries to live by the ethos "if you're on time, you're late", I wind up late sometimes. It stresses me out, but hey sometimes shit happens.
But there are people where shit seems to happen more than for others. Late once in a blue moon? No worries. Repeat offender? That's a you problem.
Non-punctual cultures can view on-time people as clueless, over-eager, and annoying.
SoftTalker · 7h ago
In my experience the people who are late are usually senior or exec types who arrive late with a lot of bluster and comments about how busy they are and then "Ok where are we?" like they are taking over the meeting.
rdtsc · 52m ago
> Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?
No. Not for meetings. What is perceived rude is making a big deal about it. You think it's a major social faux-pas, they think it's a "meh", and if you make a big deal about it and get offended now you're just being rude for no reason at all.
For personal and informal meetings, yes, being "on time" may mean annoying the host a bit. Why? Because when they say the party starts at 6pm, everyone should understand it as they should start showing up no earlier than 6:30pm etc.
I am not saying I agree or take side with any of these, just presenting it as both sides see it.
franciscop · 6h ago
I love how true this article resonated to me, since it's very similar to Spain (but now I live in the polar opposite, Japan, where I am supposed to be at least 15 mins early):
It's considered at least weird to show up to some parties exactly on time, yes.
buildsjets · 6h ago
I view people who show up too early as rude, as do many others.
jghn · 4h ago
The beautiful thing about being an early bird is you don't need to "show up too early". You just hang out until you're exactly on time and then show up. There is no analogue for the late person.
jxjxn · 6h ago
I don't get why you are getting downvoted
If an interviewee is half an hour early to a meeting that is rude if they actually expect to start now instead of the scheduled time
kstrauser · 3h ago
> if they actually expect to start now
That's the meat of it. If I'm going to a meeting where consequences of lateness would suck, like a job interview or something else where it would be highly rude to be late, I'll get there early. Then I'll hang out and play with my phone or something until the person's ready to meet with me at our scheduled time.
I also make it clear that I know I'm early and don't expect the other person to be ready for me. I might use a friendly, stock phrase like "I'd rather wait for them than have them waiting for me" to emphasize that I'm perfectly fine entertaining myself while they're getting ready to see me.
But ultimately, I treat it like getting to my gate at an airport. If I'm there early with time to kill, then so be it. That's infinitely preferable to arriving late and suffering the consequences.
genewitch · 5h ago
What does being early have to do with the other? Just because I don't know trafficor other unknowns, and leave my house early, and go into the building to get some water or something; that does not mean I expect anything except the appointment to be on time.
apercu · 5h ago
That's a tough one. I lived in Toronto for many years and traffic and public transportation are unpredictably - it could take me an hour or it could take me three hours. Sure, if I was early a there was coffee shop near by that's an option. So I like to have a little compassion for people, especially working people.
thaumasiotes · 5h ago
In my experience, being on time isn't viewed as rude, but it is viewed as a nuisance, reflecting poorly on other people.
I had a Chinese tutor who got pretty upset that I would show up to lessons before she got there. Her first approach was to assure me that it was ok if I showed up later. Eventually she responded by showing up very, very early.
In a different case, I had an appointment to meet a friend, and she texted me beforehand to ask whether I'd left home yet. Since the appointment was quite some distance from my home, and I couldn't predict the travel time, I had already arrived, but upon learning that my friend dropped everything to show up early... and asked me why I was so early. I don't see a problem with waiting for a scheduled appointment if I show up early! But apparently other people do?
0cf8612b2e1e · 5h ago
Presumably the tutor was being paid. If you arrive late, you are cheating yourself of your full time slot. Unless the tutor operated on a model of, “45 minutes starting whenever we are both here”.
franktankbank · 6h ago
Probably not, but they'll roll their eyes at ya when they show up.
neilpa · 6h ago
This was the de-facto practice for courses at U of M and I loved it. Although it appears they may have ended that practice in 2018
Our team collectively decided all meetings should start 5 min late and end at the half hour boundary (we do 55min instead of 50min).
This can be easily enforced because other neighboring teams would knock the door at the half hour mark and you can't really blame them or be grumpy about it.
metalliqaz · 7h ago
Unfortunately that isn't the solution. As the article correctly notes, meetings continue, regardless of the wall clock, until the next group of people come and kick you out. This is a universal truth in office buildings.
kibwen · 7h ago
> 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.
smeej · 6h ago
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.
mrguyorama · 2h ago
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.
AStonesThrow · 7h ago
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.
Unfortunately I’ve also found that a poorly-run meeting won't get around to the wrap-up on time, and so leaving early may only hurt that participant, by missing something important.
metalliqaz · 6h ago
If you're not needed at the meeting, probably best not to be there in the first place.
pixl97 · 6h ago
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.
AStonesThrow · 6h ago
Someone who is neither contributing nor necessary to a meeting may still be required to attend the meeting. For example, a mandatory training meeting includes people who are being trained, who are in this category.
If the meeting fails to accomplish its objectives in 50 minutes, then participants may excuse themselves with a clear conscience, but they may find themselves less-informed than coworkers who chose to stay for the entire session. Especially if there is "Q&A" for clarifications at the end of it.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 7h ago
>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...
bombcar · 6h ago
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.
cruffle_duffle · 2h ago
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.
CogitoCogito · 8h ago
I presume in that case each meeting would just stretch to 10 over the hour.
lkirkwood · 7h ago
Well that's the claim, isn't it. People tend to see an hour tick over and think "well, better wrap up". The impulse is much less strong at ten minutes to the hour. It's a bit like pricing things just below a round number because it doesn't feel quite so expensive. GP's comment makes sense to me.
bentcorner · 6h ago
My team does this, most scheduled meetings are scheduled 5m/10m after the hour. Meetings usually end at the hour or before. Our calendar defaults to start/end on the hour so sometimes one-off meetings will start/end on the hour but those are usually 2-3 people and focused on solving some problem so they don't usually last the full time anyway.
For the larger scheduled meetings, if they drag over the hour because of some conversation our culture is that people leave/drop if they're not interested.
singron · 7h ago
If "30" minute meetings start 5 minutes late, then you can only go 5 past reliably.
coolcase · 18m ago
That's not malicious compliance. That's malicious to non-compliance!
Obviously the solution is to have buffer where rooms can't be booked rather like hotel checkout and check-in times. I also think psychologically that a 9:10am start and 10am end would make people stick to their slot better.
I'm glad I work remote and this is a distant memory:
> Meetings continue until the participants of the next meeting are clawing on your door like a pack of zombies.
This made me laugh!
By the way I can't think of how you can do malicious compliance here. You can annoy your boss by refusing a meeting if you have nothing to say... but while annoying this is the point of the edict.
Artoooooor · 7h ago
Oooh, my heroes! I hate when stated policy is treated as "just a paper" and ignored. I understand that sometimes it's temporary/transitional - OK, it happens. But when rule is present for long time and it becomes de facto standard to disregard it - either change the rule or start following it.
hinkley · 6h ago
Old civics aphorism:
A contemptible law breeds contempt for all laws.
Once people get used to bullshit everything turns into bullshit. They don’t get rid of those rules because it’ll hurt someone’s feelings. But our feelings get hurt all the time so clearly it’s whose feelings they care about.
stkni · 5h ago
Think I'm with Larry on this one. Someone should chair the meeting and there should be some expected outcome (decision) from it within the alotted time. If we're 45 mins in and no closer to an answer it's time to assign some investigative actions and regroup? Malicious compliance in this context is good, because it creates an environment where meetings end and everyone gets to pee?
dsr_ · 5h ago
You're going to have to pick a word which means "a specific group of people get together for a specific period in order to do something which does not result in a specific decision", and be able to allocate time and space for those things, too.
Some examples:
- a class
- a briefing
- a classic "all-hands meeting"
- standup (if you haven't had a standup which ended in 45 seconds because everyone reported "no obstacles, no requests", your standups have too many people in them or your organization is under too much stress)
- lunch-and-learn
noworriesnate · 4h ago
Long ago when I was a newb fresh out of college, I worked at a company that religiously enforced the standup rule “If it’s not relevant to EVERYONE in the standup, don’t discuss it in standup.” Then an exec walked in and started taking over the meeting and for some idiotic reason I chimed in with “this isn’t relevant to me, can you bring that up outside standup?” Things got super awkward and later I overheard my boss apologizing to the exec.
My point is, there can be rules about what is and isn’t allowed in a meeting, but the people at the top can always change those rules on a moment’s notice…and those of us who are less socially adept won’t catch on.
jsight · 1h ago
Yeah, IMO meetings without a discernible outcome are mostly pointless. It may not be a specific decision, but it should be "tangible". "students learned tech X" is tangible.
Two out of ten attendees talked for 30 minutes and didn't write anything down, really isn't.
For some reason, I'm seeing a lot more hesitance to record or document, and I don't think it is a good thing at all.
RHSeeger · 5h ago
Not all meetings have decisions to be made. Some are just discussions of a topic; generally to make sure everyone is on the same page.
MetaWhirledPeas · 25m ago
> generally to make sure everyone is on the same page
If everyone is on the same page then there should be a 'page' resulting from the meeting; something to look back at to represent what everyone agreed on. Those are the 'decisions' being made.
The worst meetings are ones where people share ideas, nod their head in agreement, then write nothing down. Inevitably this leads to an identical meeting later down the road, after people have forgotten key details and the game of telephone has distorted others. Then later it leads to upset people when they find, often close to delivery time, that their understanding conflicts with others on the team.
If there's no desire to have updated plans or documentation after the meeting has concluded, then I question the true intent of the meeting. Was it because the person calling the meeting felt out of the loop? Why was that allowed to happen in the first place? Why were the requirements and the team's progress not easy to observe at a glance?
llm_nerd · 1h ago
If we're being totally honest, a good percentage of meetings in many workplaces are work surrogates. Lots of people happily meeting and accomplishing nothing for the purposes of having the accomplishment that they attended a variety of meetings.
dugmartin · 7h ago
In the late 90s there was a manager where I worked at the time where you actually felt relieved she they scheduled a meeting for one reason: she scheduled meetings to be 50 minutes long and no matter what she would end them promptly at 50 minutes and then she would stand up and leave the room. I once saw her, politely but firmly, tell a senior exec a few rungs up the ladder from her that time was up when he was in mid-pontification and close the folio thing she always brought to meetings and then exit the room.
steveBK123 · 7h ago
I've not seen management with a spine like that in a long time.
Detrytus · 5h ago
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.
cruffle_duffle · 2h ago
lol. It’s the same way you manage kids time. Give them a warning instead of just up and bail.
nyrikki · 7h ago
> 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.
hnthrow90348765 · 6h ago
Get your other developers in on it and schedule a 2 hour "dev sync" and then just don't meet.
marcusb · 7h ago
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.
xp84 · 1h ago
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.
jcalvinowens · 6h ago
I don't understand this at all, why not just skip the meeting and spend the time refactoring? If you need the meeting as an excuse to prevent somebody else from claiming your time, it's time to look for a new job... that's super dysfunctional.
dcre · 8h ago
This is not really malicious compliance because it is not aimed at the boss who ordered the policy. It’s more like chaotic neutral compliance.
hn_throwaway_99 · 7h ago
I didn't even see it as that. I saw it as perfectly rational behavior - you only need 10 minutes for a short standup, then squeezing it in between the tail end of meetings makes perfect sense.
Perhaps I'm a tad on the spectrum which is why I have zero problem with this, either from the perspective of the people who booked it for 50 mins or those who booked it for 10.
xp84 · 1h ago
I'm completely NT here and I agree with you 100%. Maybe it's also that I've usually worked in buildings where finding a free conference room (either on short notice or even in advance) was a nontrivial amount of trouble. So, using an open 10 minutes instead of essentially burning at minimum a half-hour by starting at :00, is doing the whole floor a big favor.
jakevoytko · 7h ago
I did hem and haw over whether it was appropriate, but I eventually went with it because it felt in line with the first 2 sentences of the Wikipedia page defining the phrase as "Malicious compliance (also known as malicious obedience) is the behavior of strictly following the orders of a superior despite knowing that compliance with the orders will have an unintended or negative result. It usually implies following an order in such a way that ignores or otherwise undermines the order's intent, but follows it to the letter."
marcusb · 7h ago
It might have been malicious compliance. It might also have been your coworkers having a reasonable (if incorrect) expectation that their coworkers at a leading tech company understood how to schedule meeting time using the calendar their company produces. Or maybe both.
Propelloni · 7h ago
Malicious compliance is one of the great tips from the Simple Sabotage Field Guide. And it is one of the few effective ways to escalate pain in an organization. If you don't get shit done because of rules, and a boss asks you to simply break the rules for efficiency's sake, you can return the favor and just ask to simply abolish the rules for efficiency's sake. It may surprise you how fast stupid rules can be abolished, even in large orgs.
ummonk · 7h ago
I don't see how it undermines the intent here, or has an unintended result. It's actually reinforcing the order by forcing other teams to comply with it.
jedimastert · 6h ago
> I mean, I’d personally tell them that I wasn’t going to leave the room, but surely it worked a lot?
Maybe it's because I worked in a different office or whatever, but 25 and 50 minute meetings were pretty common and if somebody else scheduled the room it was 100% respected.
It wasn't really considered pedantry or anything, just the basic respect of honoring the commitment of the meeting calendar.
No comments yet
that_guy_iain · 4m ago
> I mean, I’d personally tell them that I wasn’t going to leave the room, but surely it worked a lot?
I'm not sure if this is they told them or he thinks he would tell them that he wouldn't give up a meeting room they had booked. If I had a meeting room booked and it was just an internal team they wouldn't leave they would quickly be learning what me and my team did the day before and what we plan to do today.
grimpy · 7h ago
Before I left Google, my org's leadership (recent external hires in the pursuit of ruthless efficiency) instituted a "5 minutes between meetings" rule. The intent was to shorten meetings and have time between them.
Well, no one agreed upon which 5 minutes were to be shortened, and like the post, it often wasn't observed anyways. So the result was 10 minutes of confusion every half hour.
mrcartmeneses · 5h ago
“I wish I knew the identities of these brave meeting crashers. I saw them pull this stunt twice and then ride off into the sunset, and I never got to learn what team they were on. I wish Were they true believers in the 50-minute policy? Were they bored pedants? Were they wraiths, cursed to hunt the office for available meeting rooms?”
No, they were software developers
joostdecock · 5h ago
When it's a meeting I run/control my rule is that I will wait 150 seconds for people who are late, after which I start the meeting.
You can join later, that's fine, but I'm not waiting longer than 150 seconds.
Waiting 150 seconds feels like waiting a long time. Whereas being 2.5 minutes late feels like being on time.
So I find that phrasing it this way is more impactful.
(by now you probably figured out that I am not very popular ar work)
divbzero · 5h ago
> (by now you probably figured out that I am not very popular ar work)
I bet your colleagues appreciate it if you’re similarly strict about ending meetings on time.
jzb · 3h ago
What's "fun" is when companies try to be different and schedule meetings at :05 or :10 past the hour, so if you have any regular meetings with people outside the company that do the :50 or :55 thing, it's complete chaos.
FWIW I've never seen top-down efforts to make meetings more efficient stick. Humans are humans, not automatons. They're chatty. They're messy and unorganized. And attempts to build "culture" that curbs those things isn't going to stick when people constantly change jobs because it no longer pays to stay at the same company for decades. (You know, assuming they don't just lay people off because that's the way the wind is blowing...)
palmotea · 7h ago
> But you could never shake the feeling that Larry Page had to make decisions all day long and forgot that sometimes people meet for other reasons.
I can empathize. I'm in the middle of an extremely prescriptive re-org (down to the team level) that kinda feels like some leader forgot that the rest of the org isn't some cookie cutter copy of the leader's personal experience.
It's so satisfying when the leader describes the results of the re-org as exactly opposite to what actually happened.
havblue · 7h ago
I saw a funny DefCon video on elevator hacking where one of the emcees tried to patronizingly lure the lecturers off-stage, with shots! This was presumably because they constantly take too long to get their AV set up and wanted to get a headstart.
The response was ice cold. "No, this is our time." (Go ahead and stop us.)
So it isn't the problem of the people booking the meetings, it's the problem of the people who formulate and implement the rules.
jedimastert · 6h ago
> funny DefCon video on elevator hacking
For those wondering, is Deviant Ollam's talk on elevators.
The other form of malicious compliance is my preferred malicious compliance. If the meeting is for 15 minutes I leave at the 15 minute mark after excusing myself.
The problem with meetings always falls into one of two camps for me:
1. Some company leader is in the meeting and everyone sits tight while they waste time bikeshedding on whatever they read on LinkedIn today.
2. Two engineers are quarreling over the nuance of a status update.
I find meetings that should be short (stand ups) are better done over slack. Submit a quick update and then people can DM if needed. Then you’re not holding people hostage.
baruz · 51m ago
I wonder whether TFA author never saw it again because the fifty-minute bookers wised up and started booking the extra ten minutes or whether the ten-minute stand-up pirates finally got a talking-to.
bityard · 5h ago
TFA's author is ascribing malice to the team booking the room during the last 10-minute slice of the hour, but I think there is a simpler and more charitable explanation based on having been in a similar situation: The team might prefer that particular room for a specific reason, frequently have to adjust their stand-up times for various reasons, and just took the only available slot.
cadamsdotcom · 1h ago
"Meetings" should've never been the term.
There are team updates & all-hands that are one-to-many. They are often basically a seminar so can be recorded, sent out online, and Q&A delivered in a follow up 24-72 hours later after everyone has submitted & voted on questions. any interactive bits the only bits left.
There are 1:1s. These can be in person in a meeting room, online, or taken on-the-go.
Then there are decision & planning meetings; these are what was being optimized.
But if the other types of meetings were changed as above there’d have been no need.
isaacimagine · 8h ago
At MIT, lectures must follow MIT time; all lectures are expected to start 5 minutes after the hour, and end 5 minutes before. Funnily this means each lecture is about one microcentury long. Exams are the one exception, they start on the dot.
At a US university, I had an large elective class where the professor refused to start until things had "settled down", and he said he was going to add that time to the end to ensure he got his full 50 minutes.
I had a major-related class 10 minutes after, clear across campus, about a mile of walking. This professor was nice about it, but I was the only one coming in late at all.
So I made sure to sit in the front row of the earlier lecture, and left precisely when the class was supposed to end, leaving no doubt I had places to go.
Some people just think they set the conventions.
barbazoo · 7h ago
Odd. Over the course of my education I went to 3 different universities in the EU. Classes/lectures/labs, they all started at the advertised time and I’ve never encountered a concept of “c.t” or “s.t”. Not a formal one anyway. People “talked” about the “academic 15 minutes” but like it was a thing of the past.
mrngm · 1h ago
I've had one side of the same university campus observing the academic 15 minutes, while in one course on the other side did not... after the lunch break. So at 13:30 we started walking towards the other side of the campus (the class was "scheduled" at 13:30), but did not receive a warm welcome 10 minutes later, because the lecturer had already started at the "scheduled" time.
moi2388 · 6h ago
Same. Never encountered this.
saubeidl · 3h ago
Must be a regional thing then. I've seen it all over DACH.
esnard · 7h ago
If anyone else is confused, a microcentury is apparently around 52.6 minutes long.
saubeidl · 7h ago
Microcentury sounds like somebody didn't reduce their fractions. I propose centiyear.
xen0 · 7h ago
Those are not the same; one is a bit less than an hour, another is 3 and a half days.
A microcentury is 100 nanoyears if you prefer that.
esnard · 3h ago
It's actually 100 microyears!
xen0 · 1h ago
Erm, yes. Yes it is...
madcaptenor · 7h ago
It's one ten-thousandth of a year but there's not a prefix for that.
quesera · 6h ago
100 microyears?
drewg123 · 6h ago
The backstop forcing function to end meetings is the conference room being booked for the next slot... One of the things I noticed during COVID when everyone was remote was that meetings would never end on time b/c there was no contention for meeting rooms.
Aaargh20318 · 6h ago
I wish they added a feature to Teams where it will just automatically disconnect everyone from the meeting at the scheduled end time.
dmurray · 6h ago
I've been saved from more than a few Zoom meetings where the free plan ran out after, I think, 40 minutes. Even in at least one organisation that was paying for Zoom - maybe not everyone was set up to host unlimited-length meetings.
amendegree · 5h ago
Teams used to have a pop up that said “your meeting is ending in 5 minutes” but it wouldn’t do anything else to actually effectuate the meeting ending. They should add a feature where it starts playing “it’s closing time” music
benhurmarcel · 4h ago
I’ve used a system that did this. Everyone created the call by adding 30 minutes to the theoretical end time just so it wouldn’t cut the conversation.
avg_dev · 5h ago
tbh i don't feel like the people who scheduled a 10 min meeting did anything wrong. the room is marked as free during that time; they know they will be done in 10 mins; it's a shared resource... what's the point of a schedule for a shared resource if people don't respect it?
thomascountz · 1h ago
I scrolled too far down to find this... Perhaps it's selection bias, but surely there are others that see it this way?
I do have empathy for the people in the room who expected to have 10 more minutes for there meeting, and I'm not a pedantic rule follower, but I expect some grace and self awareness here.
Yes, your meeting was unexpectedly interrupted, but my meeting was unexpectedly delayed. Your problem was caused by a system that—however unfair or inscrutable—we all have to conform to. My problem was caused by ignorance, accident, or malfeasance on your part. If I show respect and empathy in this situation, I expect you show some respect and humility.
sequoia · 2h ago
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!
amendegree · 6h ago
Ha, in my company we start meetings late and blow past the end time, they’re generally on teams though, so aside from wasting everyone time who’s in the meeting we’re not preventing anyone else from getting work done
xivzgrev · 6h ago
what the engineers did seems fair to me. The rule is 50 minutes, they booked right after, so yea the meeting room is theirs.
The author of this story seems to be just adjusting. Like "really, we mean 60 minutes?" New rule is, book for 60 if you need 60. Leave it at 50 if not.
at the same time, do you really need a meeting room for a standup?
dogleash · 5h ago
> at the same time, do you really need a meeting room for a standup?
We're stuck in the office, the least you could do is not subject everyone within earshot to your meetings.
I have struggled very hard to not fill this comment with profanity and insults.
Zigurd · 6h ago
They should use a meeting room. Standups are informal, have crosstalk, and should move fast. Unless they have a team room and won't disturb colleagues, they should do standups in a meeting room or office if they can all fit.
eCa · 4h ago
There's zero real difference between a meeting ending at :50 dragging over and a meeting ending :00 dragging over.
If anything, a group booking a meeting in the ten minutes in between increases meeting room usage, since the next meeting can now start at :00.
energywut · 3h ago
This isn't malicious compliance. The room wasn't booked, a team booked it. They have a right to expect others to exit. If you want to book an hour, book an hour.
CommenterPerson · 6h ago
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.
ZpJuUuNaQ5 · 4h ago
An enthusiastic writing but the ending was such a letdown. I feel cheated.
bombcar · 4h ago
You need meeting rooms like those expensive public toilets. At the allotted time the doors open and it ejects you along with a loud buzzer.
Verdex · 6h ago
My thought was that you handle meetings wasting everyone's time by releasing huntsman spiders (of clock spider meme fame) into the room periodically.
If things are running over because of something important like the financial future or your org or the health and safety of your clients then people will deal with the spiders roaming at terrifying speeds. But if everyone is just bikeshedding then the room will empty out pretty quick.
flerchin · 7h ago
I thought one of the reasons we call it a standup is because everyone just, stands up, and does a ytb. So you don't need a meeting room. Nice story.
bluGill · 7h ago
Depending on how your team runs it a room is often useful. In an open office (which is very popular these days with management) you want a room to keep the noise down for others. Sometimes you can keep a dedicated whiteboard in the room for you post-it notes (this beats computers for what developers need to track, but for management needs a computer based tracker is better). I've worked on teams with semi-disabled people - while they could walk a short distance they couldn't stand for that long and so they sat.
However if there is one remote person you must never use a meeting location - either a room or just standing around desks. Make even people who are sitting next to each other communicate only by their headset. Otherwise the remote person is a lesser member of the team.
msukkarieh · 5h ago
The only time I've actually stood up during a standup was when I interned at Ubisoft. We would have ~25 people in a room all standing on the perimeter and we'd say what we were working on one by one. As an intern I really liked it because I got to hear what problems everyone was working on.
RankingMember · 7h ago
We've thankfully gotten out of the YTB trap at my current org- In my experience there's nothing more energy-draining and pointless than rote statusing and recaps during a standup. We've got tooling to see what each other are working on, and any blockers are brought up in the standup.
singron · 7h ago
In an open office, room-less meetings are quite disruptive. I still remember what the completely unrelated team two rows away was working on 8 years ago since I listened to them talk about it for 10 minutes every day. (I also apologize to everyone else since our team did the same thing)
barbazoo · 7h ago
Exactly. Sounds like a shitty group of people harassing their coworkers.
zem · 7h ago
what is a ytb?
singron · 7h ago
Yesterday, Today, Blockers. I.e. the typical standup update.
habitue · 4h ago
I was really hoping this was going to explain some big issue with Larry's seemingly reasonable meeting policies. Turns out a few people kinda messed with it a few times?
Simon_O_Rourke · 3h ago
This really does make you further loathe the types of exasperating clowns working for big G.
IIAOPSW · 5h ago
The real problem is that its possible to book meeting rooms back to back when there's supposed to be decompression time in between.
recursive · 1h ago
Rooms don't need to decompress.
kelnos · 3h ago
> I’d personally tell them that I wasn’t going to leave the room, but surely it worked a lot?
What? I can't really imagine that. If I'd booked a room until X:50, and someone came in at X:50 saying they had the room, I would leave, because that's the right thing to do. If I really wanted the room until (X+1):00, then that's what I'd book it for, regardless of what the defaults are in GCal.
jiehong · 7h ago
Sounds more like a story of change management with people not changing their way.
fitsumbelay · 4h ago
this was genuinely fun to read. thanks to the author/OP
xyst · 7h ago
A 10 min standup would be a dream.
Been at companies where they last _45-60 minutes_
SoftTalker · 7h ago
They always trend that way unless you have someone very disciplined leading them.
realitysballs · 8h ago
10 minute standup , woof
malfist · 7h ago
That's exactly how I run my standups.
Everyone answers 3 questions:
* Do I need something?
* What is my _top_ priority for the day?
* Am I blocked?
The answers for the first and third question should always be "No" because you should have raised them before standup, but it's a relief valve if you didn't.
What is your top priority should be short and focused. If you let people talk about what they did or didn't do yesterday it becomes a slog with people justifying their progress or non-progress. Ultimately it doesn't matter. Focusing on the top priority he's focus people on their main task for the day.
n4r9 · 7h ago
> What is my _top_ priority for the day?
How do you manage (if you have to) more research-heavy/blue-sky tasks that may take a few days or weeks without linear daily progress? Like, some days may just involve doing some sketches and playing around with code in order to internalise some data structure. Does that person just say "I'm continuing with task X" several days in a row?
mrguyorama · 1h ago
>Does that person just say "I'm continuing with task X" several days in a row?
Absolutely. If other devs or even a manager or project lead or someone feel they've been doing the "same" task too long, they should be reaching out and checking in. "Hey, running into any problems? How are you doing?"
frabcus · 5h ago
"My top priority today is to internalise data structure B"
OrderlyTiamat · 8h ago
My team has 15min standups, in holiday times we regularly stop after 10min. Very focussed on the sprint goal and getting each other unstuck- it's great. Much better than the "let's walk over every issue on the jira board and argue about technical implementations".
carefulfungi · 7h ago
The first standup experience of my career predates “agile” and was run by my first engineering manager, who happened to be an ex-marine. QA was unhappy with the product. (There was QA!) 10m standups were instituted at 8:45a in the QA workspace. Great process hacking: QA could interject and also hear first hand orientation. Everyone started their day knowing the plan. (And everyone started their day at the same time.) Fun to reflect on how much has changed.
nottorp · 7h ago
> and getting each other unstuck
Let me guess, there is no group text chat where people can randomly whine and get unstuck by whoever notices and is an expert on the problem?
SoftTalker · 7h ago
This is the thing I dislike most about chat. It encourage people to be lazy. Don't make any effort, just throw your problem out to the group the moment you don't immediately know what to do next.
nottorp · 6h ago
Do you drop everything every time a chat message is posted like it's a life threatening emergency?
M3L0NM4N · 8h ago
This is generally how my team works, but we don't have a hard cap on the time. I just think nobody wants to debate about technical implementations early in the morning.
baxtr · 7h ago
In my world stand-ups are mainly status, blockers and other ops/admin updates.
No functional/topic discussions. If they’re required you schedule those in the standup and decide who participates.
No need to expand beyond 15min in that mode.
SoftTalker · 6h ago
No need for everyone to be in a room together either, to do that.
baxtr · 4h ago
It’s more efficient for us at least.
It reduced the number of back and forth on slack/other tools quite a bit.
exhilaration · 7h ago
The root problem, of course, is that no one stands up at anymore at standups.
shermantanktop · 6h ago
This is my problem, but I’m not great at standing, for reasons, but it’s physically not good. 10m is ok but there’s always some bore who wants to blather on. Or “we’re done, can x and y stay back to discuss z” and then everybody stays for some reason.
vessenes · 5h ago
I’m prone to this, as is many a manager/leader in a standup. I always designated the spiciest admin to run the meeting and keep us on time; you need someone who can cut off the boss or these take forever.
wjamesg · 8h ago
Nothing from my end, thanks
bee_rider · 7h ago
I think they are supposed to be so short you don’t even sit, right?
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.
Sun even produced a TV commercial in which an arrow that presumably had all of Sun's wood behind it whooshed through the air and hit the bull's eye of a target. (Nobody at Sun ever knew what the target was, but by golly they all knew which arrow to put their wood behind.)
Photo of Scott McNealy in his office at Sun with a huge Cupid's Span style wooden arrow through his window, and a small Steve Martin style wooden arrow through his head:
>Sun's Workstations Still Shine, But Rivals Cloud The Outlook
>Daily Gazette - Nov 10, 1991
>Associated Press (Google News Archive)
>Sun touts an "all the wood behind one arrow" slogan, meant to describe a company focused on one goal - workstations. As an April Fool's joke in 1990, Sun employees built a 60-foot-long arrow in McNealy's office with the point going out the window.
Phrase: more wood behind, all the wood behind one arrow
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.
DonHopkins · 6h ago
McNealy's other terrible ill-formed neologism was "You're going to have to stop hugging your tree!"
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!
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.
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.
>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."
>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. [...]
morkalork · 7h ago
>Everybody in a meeting should give input or they shouldn’t be in the meeting.
This is wierd and terrible, what does it mean, no interns and juniors get to attend engineering meetings? Tagging along to those meetings is how they learn and it's not expected that they have input at every one, sometimes it's just a question or two.
vessenes · 5h ago
If you imagine a spectrum between a 20 person PowerPoint demonstration that takes an hour, and a 10 minute meeting with say Bezos when you’ll get your next 10 minutes in 90 days and you need him to get behind your project and unlock budget, most corporate meetings would do well to shift closer to Beezy. That’s the intent.
Another way to say it, in the 90s workplace studies showed an engineering IC’s job was roughly 35 hours of meetings a week. If you work 40, that leaves 5 hours for coding. If you could get someone back just 5 of those 35 hours, you’d have double the coding output per engineer.
jollyllama · 5h ago
Yes, it is weird and terrible, and it means that you'll be expected to voice your agreement to what the real decision makers say.
barbazoo · 7h ago
They’re talking in the context of C level meetings. Not many juniors there.
morkalork · 6h ago
I must have been reading sideways, it came off like a blanket policy from top down to everyone
barbazoo · 5h ago
I think it could both be true, a decision made from top to bottom _and_ made in the context of someone who's in executive meetings all day.
At that point you might not be able to relate anymore to what a day of people looks like that are half a dozen levels down and have decades less work experience.
lowbloodsugar · 5h ago
If you need to hardcode 50 minute meetings so “you can take a piss before the next meeting” then your problem is everyone is in meetings instead of coding.
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 massive anchoring effect for things on the hour. Still being in the meeting room at 11:01 feels a lot later than still being in the meeting room at 10:51.
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.
(There's some nuance to that statement as science courses tende to have labs - I don't remember why first-year physics was a requirement for software engineering, but it was - mathematics courses tended to have weekly assignments, and at least one software course had a very unusual style of putting us in a room one whole day per week for a semester to work on group projects.)
It’s a good convention.
Thankfully
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 prof, and I enjoyed his classes.
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 the course!
You pick the winner and then assign 1-25 (or whatever) points to it (using each number for only one category) and if you get it right you get that number of points.
It basically prevents ties. It lets you make risky picks without falling out of the running. The downside is a shocking number of people won't be able to follow the rule and end up with 22 used twice or whatever.
Your Prof Ramsey would have penalised me for this unknown condition. This isn't behaviour to be celebrated.
Not locking a door allows the students who were delayed on the road by a car accident, as much as the disabled student who took five minutes longer than expected after falling down some stairs.
Every single person makes mistakes at times. If those are not absorbed by flexibility, then they go on to affect everyone else connected to the punished.
If the professor is delayed due to a tire puncture, should they lose their tenure?
Second, do you know how fucking difficult it is to navigate the medical system? Something like this could take DECADES to diagnose. First you have to find a doctor that actually pays attention and gives a flying fuck. For example- ive had like 5 primary care doctors over the years and NONE of them until the latest one noticed that I have a heart murmur. Well he kept pressing to diagnose why and turns out I have a genetic heart disorder that will probably kill me eventually. The other 4 docs didnt lay enough attention to notice or didnt care enough to do anything about it.
So yeah, your take sucks.
Since this is a cheap and easy test, all it would have taken is for me to go to any doctor and ask for it. But I didn't do that, because I believed I was just a lazy ass.
>how would you even know you had a condition and werent just a lazy ass?
If you are not able to know, how on Earth do you expect the professor to know you aren’t just lazy or unmotivated?
I’m all for giving people grace. But it strikes me as a weird take to expect people to go around assuming people have some grave condition that they don’t even realize to excuse them from all manner of aberrant behavior.
No. How could he? Instead, I'm pointing out the value of empathy, tolerance and flexibility.
No comments yet
On the contrary, your anecdote is evidence of how this seemingly arbitrary behaviour can actually uncover real issues and prompt people to question and investigate.
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It's pretty obvious, you can't travel to a meeting instantly and 100% appreciated when you work in such a place. For those senior enough for all day back to back meetings you get toilet breaks!
If you work in a company that doesn't do this take note and if you're senior in a company you should start pushing for this to be implemented. A lot of calendar tools have options for meeting buffers by default and enabling it is all you need to do.
When I studied it had already been mostly abolished. Sometimes starting times were explicitly marked “sine tempore”.
c.t. is still standard at many German universities (and at all Bavarian universities I know). However, I know at least one university of applied sciences where lectures start at full hours.
Some younger Latin recipes use 'cum sal' as a one-liner at the end, to tell the chef to season to their taste, for example.
The Latin prepositions cum (with) and sine (without) are always followed by the ablative case. German has grammatical cases too, but no ablative. The German propositions mit (with) and ohne (without) are followed by the accusative case.
So c.t. = cum tempore = mit Zeit = with time (or with some delay), and s.t. = sine tempore = ohne Zeit = without time (or without delay).
That doesn't change anything else you said, though :)
10am c.t. = 10am with extra time
10am s.t. = 10am without extra time
Now meetings actually start at :05 or :07. The prior meeting will often drag until that time, but you don't feel bad knocking at :00 or :02 and asking for the room to clear.
Unfortunately UMich ended "Michigan time" back in 2018. I always thought it was a great solution to the problem.
https://www.michiganpublic.org/education/2018-02-20/universi... / https://record.umich.edu/articles/university-updating-start-...
Sad.
This was the worst part of being a person who is prompt and on-time for all meetings and events. If you're going to always accommodate people who are chronically late, then you don't respect my time or effort. You just slapped me in the face for being prompt when you rewound your lecture or repeated your introduction. You wasted ten minutes of my time to cater to other people who are [habitually] wasting ten minutes of everyone else's time.
It was horrible and reprehensible, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it or mitigate it. What was I going to do, be late on my own?
I learned about 25 years ago never to be late to anything, particularly an appointment or a job/volunteer role where I'm indispensable. I was fired as a volunteer from a very important role because I was late only once. It was a role which was strictly dependent on timing and promptness. I learned at that very moment, never to be late again, and riding public transit as I did, I always built-in at least 30 minutes of lead time so that I was super-early rather than on-time, or God forbid, late.
"Malicious compliance" would be if the same team booked a 50min meeting then a 10min meeting in the same room.
If anything, the company saved money with optimizing meeting room capacity and the CEO's desire to give breaks was enforced.
The team pushing back against leaving at 50m was the only "malicious" party, and they weren't compliant.
I think I even saw a 5.25 mph sign once!
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 clock and installed it on the wall of our single large conference room
it would make whirring noises every 15 minutes. a few clicking sounds before the hour, and then CUCKOO, CUCKOO as many times as necessary. the marketing and sales folks did NOT like it, but:
- meetings got shorter and there were fewer of them
- the CEO of the company loved that clock. if i forgot to wind it, he or our admin did :-)
Are you just reposting or are you the real dadhacker?
Because if you are, I was reading your blog since I was like 14. Sad it's down now. But absolutely great stuff that helped prepare me for today's industry :)
i may bring the site back, but it's not a priority, and i'm not sure i can write much at the moment without getting into trouble :-)
Now that I work 100% remote, I have more flexibility to mentally ignore the bits of all meetings that don't apply to me and can instead fill the time writing comments on HN.
Nothing worse than meetings that drag on, where everyone starts to lose focus, and where one or two vocal participants sidetrack it into a 1:1 conversation. Just get shit wrapped up and have your other conversations without demanding the time of people who don’t need to be involved.
In meeting-heavy orgs it is really annoying to have meetings led by people who regularly run up to or beyond the final minute of the time slot. Those extra few minutes practically never produce anything worthwhile enough to compensate for the rushing between meetings and having to choose between being more late to the next one or taking care of a quick bathroom/water/snack break.
(All I actually do about this is be the person who pops up in meeting-chat at XX:51 with a "time-check: we've gone over".)
Following this with "What outcome should we expect at the end of this meeting? If there are next steps, what would we like them to be?" helps cut to the chase, and in my experience, things got better across the board. Sure, there were one or two folks who still struggled to create agendas for meetings - but it wasn't long before they were updating their LinkedIn profiles. Accountability can do that sometimes.
Long winded execs enjoying open ended meetings without any structure to constrain them. Which is to say, the kind of shops with micromanaging management who keep themselves busy with meetings with their own team.
The CEO of the company got caught fooling around with a co-worker and abruptly resigned. The new CEO came in and found out what a mess meetings had become and issued the same proclamation - if a meeting isn't productive and produce some actionable items, then it shouldn't be scheduled. If you're not 100% required in a meeting, don't go. If you're in a meeting and feel its a waste of time, then leave.
Just those simple rules got rid of half of my meetings and the several teams I was on suddenly were cranking through sprints, building some amazing apps and products and killing our delivery times. The entire company suddenly was cooking along. It was a real eye opener how you can really bog a Fortune 500 company down just by clogging people's time up with useless meetings.
I've been through too many of these. They like to sit at the head of the table and bask in the glow of their underlings like they're king for an hour.
Most of the people who will mind are exactly the kind of person that you're trying to keep from wasting everyone's time.
Usually by this point the stuffy room and long meeting have people going in circles. Getting up, opening the door, getting the blood moving while one or two groups have a little sidebar, usually causes the rest of the meeting to wrap up fast.
Being late is viewed as rude or lacking respect for others by a lot of people.
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.
And the late people need to understand that sometimes they will miss the beginnings of things, but that's ok too; their inability to be on time (for whatever reason) should not waste the time of those who get there on time.
But there are people where shit seems to happen more than for others. Late once in a blue moon? No worries. Repeat offender? That's a you problem.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-dec-11-tr-insid...
Non-punctual cultures can view on-time people as clueless, over-eager, and annoying.
No. Not for meetings. What is perceived rude is making a big deal about it. You think it's a major social faux-pas, they think it's a "meh", and if you make a big deal about it and get offended now you're just being rude for no reason at all.
For personal and informal meetings, yes, being "on time" may mean annoying the host a bit. Why? Because when they say the party starts at 6pm, everyone should understand it as they should start showing up no earlier than 6:30pm etc.
I am not saying I agree or take side with any of these, just presenting it as both sides see it.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180729-why-brazilians-a...
If an interviewee is half an hour early to a meeting that is rude if they actually expect to start now instead of the scheduled time
That's the meat of it. If I'm going to a meeting where consequences of lateness would suck, like a job interview or something else where it would be highly rude to be late, I'll get there early. Then I'll hang out and play with my phone or something until the person's ready to meet with me at our scheduled time.
I also make it clear that I know I'm early and don't expect the other person to be ready for me. I might use a friendly, stock phrase like "I'd rather wait for them than have them waiting for me" to emphasize that I'm perfectly fine entertaining myself while they're getting ready to see me.
But ultimately, I treat it like getting to my gate at an airport. If I'm there early with time to kill, then so be it. That's infinitely preferable to arriving late and suffering the consequences.
I had a Chinese tutor who got pretty upset that I would show up to lessons before she got there. Her first approach was to assure me that it was ok if I showed up later. Eventually she responded by showing up very, very early.
In a different case, I had an appointment to meet a friend, and she texted me beforehand to ask whether I'd left home yet. Since the appointment was quite some distance from my home, and I couldn't predict the travel time, I had already arrived, but upon learning that my friend dropped everything to show up early... and asked me why I was so early. I don't see a problem with waiting for a scheduled appointment if I show up early! But apparently other people do?
https://record.umich.edu/articles/university-updating-start-...
This can be easily enforced because other neighboring teams would knock the door at the half hour mark and you can't really blame them or be grumpy about it.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately I’ve also found that a poorly-run meeting won't get around to the wrap-up on time, and so leaving early may only hurt that participant, by missing something important.
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.
If the meeting fails to accomplish its objectives in 50 minutes, then participants may excuse themselves with a clear conscience, but they may find themselves less-informed than coworkers who chose to stay for the entire session. Especially if there is "Q&A" for clarifications at the end of it.
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...
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.
For the larger scheduled meetings, if they drag over the hour because of some conversation our culture is that people leave/drop if they're not interested.
Obviously the solution is to have buffer where rooms can't be booked rather like hotel checkout and check-in times. I also think psychologically that a 9:10am start and 10am end would make people stick to their slot better.
I'm glad I work remote and this is a distant memory:
> Meetings continue until the participants of the next meeting are clawing on your door like a pack of zombies.
This made me laugh!
By the way I can't think of how you can do malicious compliance here. You can annoy your boss by refusing a meeting if you have nothing to say... but while annoying this is the point of the edict.
A contemptible law breeds contempt for all laws.
Once people get used to bullshit everything turns into bullshit. They don’t get rid of those rules because it’ll hurt someone’s feelings. But our feelings get hurt all the time so clearly it’s whose feelings they care about.
Some examples:
- a class
- a briefing
- a classic "all-hands meeting"
- standup (if you haven't had a standup which ended in 45 seconds because everyone reported "no obstacles, no requests", your standups have too many people in them or your organization is under too much stress)
- lunch-and-learn
My point is, there can be rules about what is and isn’t allowed in a meeting, but the people at the top can always change those rules on a moment’s notice…and those of us who are less socially adept won’t catch on.
Two out of ten attendees talked for 30 minutes and didn't write anything down, really isn't.
For some reason, I'm seeing a lot more hesitance to record or document, and I don't think it is a good thing at all.
If everyone is on the same page then there should be a 'page' resulting from the meeting; something to look back at to represent what everyone agreed on. Those are the 'decisions' being made.
The worst meetings are ones where people share ideas, nod their head in agreement, then write nothing down. Inevitably this leads to an identical meeting later down the road, after people have forgotten key details and the game of telephone has distorted others. Then later it leads to upset people when they find, often close to delivery time, that their understanding conflicts with others on the team.
If there's no desire to have updated plans or documentation after the meeting has concluded, then I question the true intent of the meeting. Was it because the person calling the meeting felt out of the loop? Why was that allowed to happen in the first place? Why were the requirements and the team's progress not easy to observe at a glance?
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.
Perhaps I'm a tad on the spectrum which is why I have zero problem with this, either from the perspective of the people who booked it for 50 mins or those who booked it for 10.
Maybe it's because I worked in a different office or whatever, but 25 and 50 minute meetings were pretty common and if somebody else scheduled the room it was 100% respected.
It wasn't really considered pedantry or anything, just the basic respect of honoring the commitment of the meeting calendar.
No comments yet
I'm not sure if this is they told them or he thinks he would tell them that he wouldn't give up a meeting room they had booked. If I had a meeting room booked and it was just an internal team they wouldn't leave they would quickly be learning what me and my team did the day before and what we plan to do today.
Well, no one agreed upon which 5 minutes were to be shortened, and like the post, it often wasn't observed anyways. So the result was 10 minutes of confusion every half hour.
No, they were software developers
You can join later, that's fine, but I'm not waiting longer than 150 seconds.
Waiting 150 seconds feels like waiting a long time. Whereas being 2.5 minutes late feels like being on time.
So I find that phrasing it this way is more impactful.
(by now you probably figured out that I am not very popular ar work)
I bet your colleagues appreciate it if you’re similarly strict about ending meetings on time.
FWIW I've never seen top-down efforts to make meetings more efficient stick. Humans are humans, not automatons. They're chatty. They're messy and unorganized. And attempts to build "culture" that curbs those things isn't going to stick when people constantly change jobs because it no longer pays to stay at the same company for decades. (You know, assuming they don't just lay people off because that's the way the wind is blowing...)
I can empathize. I'm in the middle of an extremely prescriptive re-org (down to the team level) that kinda feels like some leader forgot that the rest of the org isn't some cookie cutter copy of the leader's personal experience.
It's so satisfying when the leader describes the results of the re-org as exactly opposite to what actually happened.
The response was ice cold. "No, this is our time." (Go ahead and stop us.)
So it isn't the problem of the people booking the meetings, it's the problem of the people who formulate and implement the rules.
For those wondering, is Deviant Ollam's talk on elevators.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oHf1vD5_b5I
The problem with meetings always falls into one of two camps for me:
1. Some company leader is in the meeting and everyone sits tight while they waste time bikeshedding on whatever they read on LinkedIn today.
2. Two engineers are quarreling over the nuance of a status update.
I find meetings that should be short (stand ups) are better done over slack. Submit a quick update and then people can DM if needed. Then you’re not holding people hostage.
There are team updates & all-hands that are one-to-many. They are often basically a seminar so can be recorded, sent out online, and Q&A delivered in a follow up 24-72 hours later after everyone has submitted & voted on questions. any interactive bits the only bits left.
There are 1:1s. These can be in person in a meeting room, online, or taken on-the-go.
Then there are decision & planning meetings; these are what was being optimized.
But if the other types of meetings were changed as above there’d have been no need.
https://oge.mit.edu/mit-time/
It'll say 10:00 c.t. on the event, meaning it actually starts at 10:15.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing...
I had a major-related class 10 minutes after, clear across campus, about a mile of walking. This professor was nice about it, but I was the only one coming in late at all.
So I made sure to sit in the front row of the earlier lecture, and left precisely when the class was supposed to end, leaving no doubt I had places to go.
Some people just think they set the conventions.
A microcentury is 100 nanoyears if you prefer that.
I do have empathy for the people in the room who expected to have 10 more minutes for there meeting, and I'm not a pedantic rule follower, but I expect some grace and self awareness here.
Yes, your meeting was unexpectedly interrupted, but my meeting was unexpectedly delayed. Your problem was caused by a system that—however unfair or inscrutable—we all have to conform to. My problem was caused by ignorance, accident, or malfeasance on your part. If I show respect and empathy in this situation, I expect you show some respect and humility.
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!
The author of this story seems to be just adjusting. Like "really, we mean 60 minutes?" New rule is, book for 60 if you need 60. Leave it at 50 if not.
at the same time, do you really need a meeting room for a standup?
We're stuck in the office, the least you could do is not subject everyone within earshot to your meetings.
I have struggled very hard to not fill this comment with profanity and insults.
If anything, a group booking a meeting in the ten minutes in between increases meeting room usage, since the next meeting can now start at :00.
If things are running over because of something important like the financial future or your org or the health and safety of your clients then people will deal with the spiders roaming at terrifying speeds. But if everyone is just bikeshedding then the room will empty out pretty quick.
However if there is one remote person you must never use a meeting location - either a room or just standing around desks. Make even people who are sitting next to each other communicate only by their headset. Otherwise the remote person is a lesser member of the team.
What? I can't really imagine that. If I'd booked a room until X:50, and someone came in at X:50 saying they had the room, I would leave, because that's the right thing to do. If I really wanted the room until (X+1):00, then that's what I'd book it for, regardless of what the defaults are in GCal.
Been at companies where they last _45-60 minutes_
Everyone answers 3 questions:
* Do I need something?
* What is my _top_ priority for the day?
* Am I blocked?
The answers for the first and third question should always be "No" because you should have raised them before standup, but it's a relief valve if you didn't.
What is your top priority should be short and focused. If you let people talk about what they did or didn't do yesterday it becomes a slog with people justifying their progress or non-progress. Ultimately it doesn't matter. Focusing on the top priority he's focus people on their main task for the day.
How do you manage (if you have to) more research-heavy/blue-sky tasks that may take a few days or weeks without linear daily progress? Like, some days may just involve doing some sketches and playing around with code in order to internalise some data structure. Does that person just say "I'm continuing with task X" several days in a row?
Absolutely. If other devs or even a manager or project lead or someone feel they've been doing the "same" task too long, they should be reaching out and checking in. "Hey, running into any problems? How are you doing?"
Let me guess, there is no group text chat where people can randomly whine and get unstuck by whoever notices and is an expert on the problem?
No functional/topic discussions. If they’re required you schedule those in the standup and decide who participates.
No need to expand beyond 15min in that mode.
It reduced the number of back and forth on slack/other tools quite a bit.
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 all of Sun's wood behind it whooshed through the air and hit the bull's eye of a target. (Nobody at Sun ever knew what the target was, but by golly they all knew which arrow to put their wood behind.)
Photo of Scott McNealy in his office at Sun with a huge Cupid's Span style wooden arrow through his window, and a small Steve Martin style wooden arrow through his head:
https://findery.com/johnfox/notes/all-the-wood-behind-one-ar... [sorry, link broken, not on archive.org]
>Sun's Workstations Still Shine, But Rivals Cloud The Outlook
>Daily Gazette - Nov 10, 1991
>Associated Press (Google News Archive)
>Sun touts an "all the wood behind one arrow" slogan, meant to describe a company focused on one goal - workstations. As an April Fool's joke in 1990, Sun employees built a 60-foot-long arrow in McNealy's office with the point going out the window.
Phrase: more wood behind, all the wood behind one arrow
https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2011-Septe...
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 <tiemann@cygnus.com>
>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. [...]
This is wierd and terrible, what does it mean, no interns and juniors get to attend engineering meetings? Tagging along to those meetings is how they learn and it's not expected that they have input at every one, sometimes it's just a question or two.
Another way to say it, in the 90s workplace studies showed an engineering IC’s job was roughly 35 hours of meetings a week. If you work 40, that leaves 5 hours for coding. If you could get someone back just 5 of those 35 hours, you’d have double the coding output per engineer.
At that point you might not be able to relate anymore to what a day of people looks like that are half a dozen levels down and have decades less work experience.