[HN Gopher] Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting...
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Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room
Author : jakevoytko
Score : 279 points
Date : 2025-05-15 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.clientserver.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.clientserver.dev)
| realitysballs wrote:
| 10 minute standup , woof
| OrderlyTiamat wrote:
| 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".
| M3L0NM4N wrote:
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do you drop everything every time a chat message is
| posted like it's a life threatening emergency?
| carefulfungi wrote:
| 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.
| wjamesg wrote:
| Nothing from my end, thanks
| baxtr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| No need for everyone to be in a room together either, to do
| that.
| baxtr wrote:
| It's more efficient for us at least.
|
| It reduced the number of back and forth on slack/other
| tools quite a bit.
| exhilaration wrote:
| The root problem, of course, is that no one stands up at
| anymore at standups.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think they are supposed to be so short you don't even sit,
| right?
| malfist wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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?
| frabcus wrote:
| "My top priority today is to internalise data structure B"
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >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?"
| malfist wrote:
| Absolutely, you can be more specific about the specific
| aspect if you want, but it's mainly a forcing tool for
| focus and not an accountability tool. Although everyone
| thinks it's accountability
| exhilaration wrote:
| 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.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| I presume in that case each meeting would just stretch to 10
| over the hour.
| lkirkwood wrote:
| 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.
| singron wrote:
| If "30" minute meetings start 5 minutes late, then you can
| only go 5 past reliably.
| bentcorner wrote:
| 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.
| flerchin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Not everywhere is like wherever you are.
|
| 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.
| jghn wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There are unavoidable life obstacles, but some people are
| always late to everything.
| apercu wrote:
| Yea, I meant the habitually late.
| jghn wrote:
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.
| Loughla wrote:
| My experience is that when you have habitually late
| people will enter a meeting after you start, their first
| question is, "what did I miss?"
|
| So then you waste even more time when someone recaps for
| them.
|
| It's almost like people need to think about their day
| when they're scheduling things instead of just accepting
| every single meeting.
|
| You can request different times for things. That's an
| option.
| franktankbank wrote:
| Probably not, but they'll roll their eyes at ya when they
| show up.
| buildsjets wrote:
| I view people who show up too early as rude, as do many
| others.
| jxjxn wrote:
| 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
| genewitch wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| > 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.
| jghn wrote:
| 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.
| franciscop wrote:
| 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):
|
| https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180729-why-
| brazilians-a...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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".
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| It's considered at least weird to show up to some parties
| exactly on time, yes.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as
| rude for being on time?
|
| No. Not for meetings. What is perceived as 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.
| Loughla wrote:
| I was accused of not having enough to do by a boss. He was
| habitually late to everything. I am at every meeting 3 to 5
| minutes early, because I leave every meeting at the :20 or
| :50 depending. Then I have 5 minutes to pee or whatever
| before going to the next one.
|
| Either way, he saw me get to meetings a few minutes early
| and legitimately accused me of not having enough to do.
|
| That was one of two jobs that I've ever walked out of.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _> 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.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If you're not needed at the meeting, probably best not to
| be there in the first place.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| smeej wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| yegle wrote:
| 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.
| neilpa wrote:
| 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
|
| https://record.umich.edu/articles/university-updating-start-...
| isaacimagine wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://oge.mit.edu/mit-time/
| saubeidl wrote:
| At most European universities, it is practice to start lectures
| _cum tempore_ , i.e. _with time_ , meaning 15 minutes after
| formal calendar 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...
| BearOso wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| moi2388 wrote:
| Same. Never encountered this.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Must be a regional thing then. I've seen it all over
| DACH.
| mrngm wrote:
| 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.
| esnard wrote:
| If anyone else is confused, a microcentury is apparently around
| 52.6 minutes long.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Microcentury sounds like somebody didn't reduce their
| fractions. I propose centiyear.
| xen0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's actually 100 microyears!
| xen0 wrote:
| Erm, yes. Yes it is...
| madcaptenor wrote:
| It's one ten-thousandth of a year but there's not a prefix
| for that.
| quesera wrote:
| 100 microyears?
| dcre wrote:
| 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.
| jakevoytko wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ummonk wrote:
| 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.
| Propelloni wrote:
| 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| flerchin wrote:
| 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.
| RankingMember wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| zem wrote:
| what is a ytb?
| singron wrote:
| Yesterday, Today, Blockers. I.e. the typical standup update.
| singron wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Exactly. Sounds like a shitty group of people harassing their
| coworkers.
| msukkarieh wrote:
| 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.
| morkalork wrote:
| >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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| They're talking in the context of C level meetings. Not many
| juniors there.
| morkalork wrote:
| I must have been reading sideways, it came off like a blanket
| policy from top down to everyone
| barbazoo wrote:
| 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.
| vessenes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| 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.
| diggan wrote:
| Suggestion: Have an agenda, have rules to religiously follow
| the agendas and help each other follow the agenda. Once
| completed, meeting over.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| In my experience, most folks appreciate a gentle hint to
| stick to the agenda. I don't hang out with "execs" though.
| apercu wrote:
| Execs that have responsibilities appreciate sticking to
| agendas. But there are a lot of Elon Musks in the world.
| philipallstar wrote:
| 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?
| matwood wrote:
| How many people do you think skip _his_ meeting?
| apercu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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.
| ljm wrote:
| 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.
| leviathant wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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."
| zorked wrote:
| Oh how many times I ended a meeting over VC by pretending that
| someone was knocking on the door...
| ctkhn wrote:
| I've been in 90 minute standups, the 10 minute standup pedants
| would be my heroes.
| ab71e5 wrote:
| Wow, was it actually 90 minutes of standing?
| ctkhn wrote:
| 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.
| khedoros1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Any and every team member should be empowered to do this.
| delecti wrote:
| 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.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Did anyone faint?
| ctkhn wrote:
| I think some of my swe friends might have when I told them
| about it later.
| bityard wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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".)
| kabdib wrote:
| 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 :-)
| neilv wrote:
| 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.
| verall wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 :-)
| bbaron63 wrote:
| I've been stuck in meetings like that. I'd just walk out
| saying, "you know where to find me if my input required."
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I used to love pomodoro style meetings... it became a test of
| will and stamina at some point.
| remram wrote:
| 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.
| dr_kretyn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Malicious compliance would involve reviewing the action items
| from the 50 minute meeting at the beginning of the 10 minute
| meeting
| caminante wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| nyrikki wrote:
| > 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.
| marcusb wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| Get your other developers in on it and schedule a 2 hour "dev
| sync" and then just don't meet.
| xyst wrote:
| A 10 min standup would be a dream.
|
| Been at companies where they last _45-60 minutes_
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They always trend that way unless you have someone very
| disciplined leading them.
| dugmartin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I've not seen management with a spine like that in a long time.
| Detrytus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| lol. It's the same way you manage kids time. Give them a
| warning instead of just up and bail.
| jiehong wrote:
| Sounds more like a story of change management with people not
| changing their way.
| lesser23 wrote:
| 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.
| havblue wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > funny DefCon video on elevator hacking
|
| For those wondering, is Deviant Ollam's talk on elevators.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oHf1vD5_b5I
| grimpy wrote:
| 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.
| Artoooooor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| palmotea wrote:
| > 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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14541220
|
| 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...
| Zigurd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| McNealy's other terrible ill-formed neologism was "You're
| going to have to stop hugging your tree!"
|
| 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. [...]
| xivzgrev wrote:
| 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?
| Zigurd wrote:
| 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.
| dogleash wrote:
| > 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.
| drewg123 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I wish they added a feature to Teams where it will just
| automatically disconnect everyone from the meeting at the
| scheduled end time.
| dmurray wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Verdex wrote:
| 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.
| gwd wrote:
| > 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.
| Tomte wrote:
| 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".
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Those are strange annotations; it looks like at least one
| word is missing. They mean "with time" and "without time".
| divbzero wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They sound like appropriate abbreviations to me. Something
| like: "With time to get to the location" and "Without time
| to get to the location"
| spookie wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 :)
| shakna wrote:
| 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.
| raphman wrote:
| > 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.
| buzer wrote:
| 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.
| reddalo wrote:
| I confirm, we have it in Italian universities (it's called
| "quarto d'ora accademico" in Italian).
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Same thing in Sweden in the 1980s
| spookie wrote:
| Still is!
|
| Thankfully
| kzrdude wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Msurrow wrote:
| Same in Denmark. Actually often needed to get from one
| auditorium across campus to another auditorium
| cyberax wrote:
| A bit different in Russia and Ukraine, there's a notion of
| "academic hour" which is 45 minutes. Same idea though.
| Groxx wrote:
| 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| 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.
| ipdashc wrote:
| ... 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.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I guess it was the same in Poland and in America. It was
| never formally announced. Just sort of unwritten cultural
| norm.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| 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.)
| almostnormal wrote:
| Times are given as "c.t.", cum tempore.
| brummm wrote:
| 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).
| ketzo wrote:
| This thread is absolutely fascinating -- American, never
| heard of this practice (esp ct/st), and desperately want it
| in my life now!
| layer8 wrote:
| That's called the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarte
| r_(class_timing.... (It usually is 15 minutes.)
| RajT88 wrote:
| AKA "Fashionably Late"
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| 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.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Yeah that seems like such an obvious solution to this problem.
| bsimpson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://www.michiganpublic.org/education/2018-02-20/universi.
| .. / https://record.umich.edu/articles/university-updating-
| start-...
|
| Sad.
| mxstbr wrote:
| 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.
| dunham wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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!
| gwern wrote:
| There are a number of variations. You might actually be
| thinking of https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-favorite-
| liahtml or possibly
| https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/prediction/2022-gelman.pdf
| (if neither of those are it, it might be one of the others
| I collated in https://gwern.net/fake-journal-club#external-
| links ).
| paulcole wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > shocking
|
| I don't think it's surprising or notably bad that people
| will have trouble tracking everything when you ask them
| to order a big list while making other decisions that
| affect the order.
|
| Make it a web app or hand out cards where the order is
| the certainty.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| 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.
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Its so strange to me that when it comes to college no one
| has any empathy whatsoever for students. Its so absurd.
| recursive wrote:
| Some people don't have empathy for students regarding
| this particular subject.
| DrammBA wrote:
| > 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.
| bumby wrote:
| 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.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| 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.
| bumby wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| 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.
| outworlder wrote:
| You are being purposely obtuse.
|
| Illness is only one of the possible issues a student may
| have that may be impacting them. A little flexibility
| goes a long way.
| shakna wrote:
| 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?
| Aeolun wrote:
| It also allows the people actually in the class a lesson
| uninterrupted by random people for variety of good/bad
| reasons.
|
| Most 90% of students is not late on any given day. Should
| they all be penalized for the actions of a few?
| shakna wrote:
| So you're happy to punish 10% of students, for no fault
| of their own. You'll trade a moment's distraction, for a
| paid-for day's learning.
|
| That, is a lack of empathy. Especially as for about the
| last hundred years universities have had a process that
| allows for the necessary flexibility.
|
| To take this to the extreme... Should we simply fire
| everyone who is late to work, without reason? If someone
| else causes a car accident, should we simply revoke the
| licenses of everyone involved, regardless?
| degamad wrote:
| The request is not to transfer the burden onto the 90%,
| but to design a system where the 10% are able to
| participate without impeding the 90%.
|
| For example, if students enter from the rear of the room,
| then delayed students can join without disrupting the on-
| time students.
|
| If we start the design process with the awareness that
| some students will be late, then we can design systems
| which support all students.
| taneq wrote:
| Maybe we should just be a little lenient to everyone, on
| principle?
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| 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.
| wcunning wrote:
| That stopped in about 2017, right after I finished my master's
| degree.
| salamanderman wrote:
| 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?
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| 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.
| jedimastert wrote:
| > 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.
| amendegree wrote:
| 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
| stkni wrote:
| 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?
| RHSeeger wrote:
| 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.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| 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.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > 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?
| dsr_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| joostdecock wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _(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.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| 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.
| bityard wrote:
| 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.
| pawanjswal wrote:
| Petty? Maybe. Brilliant? Absolutely.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Rooms don't need to decompress.
| avg_dev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mrcartmeneses wrote:
| "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
| ZpJuUuNaQ5 wrote:
| An enthusiastic writing but the ending was such a letdown. I feel
| cheated.
| habitue wrote:
| 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?
| eCa wrote:
| 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.
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| this was genuinely fun to read. thanks to the author/OP
| mandevil wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I always love seeing stuff like this on reddit
| /r/oddlyspecific
|
| I think I even saw a 5.25 mph sign once!
| hammock wrote:
| Then there's an aggressive driver who sees that and realizes
| it hammers home the point that the yellow speed signs (vs the
| white ones) are not enforceable.
|
| And an enforceable sign could never be a weird number because
| speedos don't have ticks but every 5mph.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| energywut wrote:
| 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.
| ashurbanipal wrote:
| Good story thanks
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| This really does make you further loathe the types of
| exasperating clowns working for big G.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _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.
| jzb wrote:
| 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...)
| sequoia wrote:
| 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!
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| "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.
| baruz wrote:
| 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.
| coolcase wrote:
| 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.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > 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.
| aag wrote:
| I once kicked Larry Page himself out of a meeting room because he
| had run over. I admired him for not making a special case for
| himself.
| innomatics wrote:
| Good on you.
|
| I've always thought that the preparedness of employees to boot
| seniors out of their booked meeting rooms was a bellwether of
| good corporate culture. Places that values everyone's time and
| leaders follow process by example.
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