Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

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.

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.

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”.

That’s called the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing.... (It usually is 15 minutes.)

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.

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.

At St Andrews University we have the concept of an “Academic hour” where every class and lecture begins at 5 past and ends at 5 to the hour. So your 10:00-11:00 lecture is actually 10:05-10:55. I believe this is mainly to give people time to get between their classes across town and to standardise how much time one has to set up between lectures.

UC Berkeley does this too. Nobody told us freshman, and in my very first class we were all dutifully early, wondering where the professor was, and at 8 minutes after the hour the whole lecture hall was wondering if we needed to bail. Then the lecturer came in and asked what we were all doing there, didn't we know classes don't start until 10 minutes after the listed time?

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.

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.

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.

A rare case of institutional design that respects how people actually behave, not just how they're "supposed" to.

That stopped in about 2017, right after I finished my master's degree.

Yeah that seems like such an obvious solution to this problem.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Initially I was sure you were talking about my Scoutmaster. (The details diverged in the end.) The expected arrival time for camping trips was always something like 9:59am - that way people would hopefully show up at 9-something or maybe just a few minutes late like 10:10. If the expected arrival time was 10:00, people would interpret it as 10-something and show up at 10:45.

It breaks the autopilot habit of just rounding things off and rolling in late

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 :-)

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.

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.