> 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.
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.
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.
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.
For some lectures it was great, you really needed those 15 minutes to get coffee, go to the bathroom, etc., but for some late afternoon stuff, you just wanted to shorten the last three breaks to 5 minutes and leave half an hour early.
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.
>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!
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".)
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.
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.
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".
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.
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."
This is always because people would rather than twiddle their thumbs in meetings than work - so they drag it out as long as possible. Getting paid for doing nothing is a good deal. Meetings are never necessary, and usually the worst possible way to convey information.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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...
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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
“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?”
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.
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.
At MIT, lectures must follow MIT time; all lectures are expected to start 5 minutes after the hour, and end 5 minutes before. Funnily this means each lecture is about one microcentury long. Exams are the one exception, they start on the dot.
At a US university, I had an large elective class where the professor refused to start until things had "settled down", and he said he was going to add that time to the end to ensure he got his full 50 minutes.
I had a major-related class 10 minutes after, clear across campus, about a mile of walking. This professor was nice about it, but I was the only one coming in late at all.
So I made sure to sit in the front row of the earlier lecture, and left precisely when the class was supposed to end, leaving no doubt I had places to go.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...)
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
> 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.
>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.
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.
Pfft. If I’ve booked the room and you’re loitering in there I don’t care what your perception of defaults or the meaning of the minute hand’s position on the clock face is. That room is mine for the time I’ve booked it. Be off with you!
The answers for the first and third question should always be "No" because you should have raised them before standup, but it's a relief valve if you didn't.
What is your top priority should be short and focused. If you let people talk about what they did or didn't do yesterday it becomes a slog with people justifying their progress or non-progress. Ultimately it doesn't matter. Focusing on the top priority he's focus people on their main task for the day.
How do you manage (if you have to) more research-heavy/blue-sky tasks that may take a few days or weeks without linear daily progress? Like, some days may just involve doing some sketches and playing around with code in order to internalise some data structure. Does that person just say "I'm continuing with task X" several days in a row?
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 on Feb 25, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Institutions try to preserve the problem to which ...
>exhortation
I assumed you were talking about Sun, and I read that as "extortion".
It reminds me of the vicious intimidation tactics that Sun executives made their poor sysadmin enforcers perform on their behalf, to ruthlessly coerce other reluctant executives and employees to run Solaris instead of SunOS!
I remember an all-hands meeting where Scott McNealy told everybody, "You're going to have to stop hugging your tree!"
After the meeting I went to my manager and demanded a tree: I never knew about any trees! Why did everybody get a tree but me? I want my tree! I promise I will not hug it.
So he gave me an old set of SunOS manuals.
ChuckMcM on Feb 25, 2024 [–]
One of my mentors was Steve K. at Sun who I consulted with about how badly Sun did changes. It really pissed me off that Sun wouldn't put NIS+ into SunOS because they were allegedly worried it would "reduce the incentive to migrate to Solaris."
I would say I was not particularly successful at being a 'change agent' there.
DonHopkins on Feb 26, 2024 | parent [–]
It's not just changing badly, but changing to the wrong thing.
They'd beaten AT&T in the Unix marketplace, then celebrated by getting in bed with them.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
I confirm, we have it in Italian universities (it's called "quarto d'ora accademico" in Italian).
This thread is absolutely fascinating — American, never heard of this practice (esp ct/st), and desperately want it in my life now!
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so did things end at 11:15am as I imagine a lot of times there was something to be done in the next hour of 11AM?
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.
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Times are given as "c.t.", cum tempore.
Same in slovenia, in technical colleges at least.
For some lectures it was great, you really needed those 15 minutes to get coffee, go to the bathroom, etc., but for some late afternoon stuff, you just wanted to shorten the last three breaks to 5 minutes and leave half an hour early.
Same thing in Sweden in the 1980s
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Same in Denmark. Actually often needed to get from one auditorium across campus to another auditorium
A bit different in Russia and Ukraine, there's a notion of "academic hour" which is 45 minutes. Same idea though.
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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.
>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!
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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.
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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”.
> 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.
Those are strange annotations; it looks like at least one word is missing. They mean "with time" and "without time".
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That’s called the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing.... (It usually is 15 minutes.)
AKA "Fashionably Late"
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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'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.
That stopped in about 2017, right after I finished my master's degree.
Yeah that seems like such an obvious solution to this problem.
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.
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.
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.
Malicious compliance would involve reviewing the action items from the 50 minute meeting at the beginning of the 10 minute meeting
[flagged]
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.
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.
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.
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I always love seeing stuff like this on reddit /r/oddlyspecific
I think I even saw a 5.25 mph sign once!
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.
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 :-)
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 :)
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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.
I've been stuck in meetings like that. I'd just walk out saying, "you know where to find me if my input required."
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.
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.
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.
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".)
Suggestion: Have an agenda, have rules to religiously follow the agendas and help each other follow the agenda. Once completed, meeting over.
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.
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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.
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I've been in 90 minute standups, the 10 minute standup pedants would be my heroes.
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".
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Wow, was it actually 90 minutes of standing?
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Did anyone faint?
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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.
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."
Oh how many times I ended a meeting over VC by pretending that someone was knocking on the door...
This is always because people would rather than twiddle their thumbs in meetings than work - so they drag it out as long as possible. Getting paid for doing nothing is a good deal. Meetings are never necessary, and usually the worst possible way to convey information.
I used to love pomodoro style meetings... it became a test of will and stamina at some point.
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.
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.
> 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?
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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-...
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.
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.
> 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.
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>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...
In that case you can just keep scheduling it for 9:00 to 10:00, I guess?
But I agree with the parent, if you need to move something then move the start.
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.
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I presume in that case each meeting would just stretch to 10 over the hour.
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.
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.
If "30" minute meetings start 5 minutes late, then you can only go 5 past reliably.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've not seen management with a spine like that in a long time.
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.
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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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Get your other developers in on it and schedule a 2 hour "dev sync" and then just don't meet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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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.
What did i learn from this post. meetings are unmanageable in the early years at Google?
> 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.
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)
> (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.
“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
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.
> funny DefCon video on elevator hacking
For those wondering, is Deviant Ollam's talk on elevators.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oHf1vD5_b5I
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.
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/
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...
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.
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.
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If anyone else is confused, a microcentury is apparently around 52.6 minutes long.
Microcentury sounds like somebody didn't reduce their fractions. I propose centiyear.
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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?
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.
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.
I wish they added a feature to Teams where it will just automatically disconnect everyone from the meeting at the scheduled end time.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...)
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
Peak engineer energy: weaponizing calendar defaults for 10-minute standups.
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
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.
"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.
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!
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.
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.
An enthusiastic writing but the ending was such a letdown. I feel cheated.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Exactly. Sounds like a shitty group of people harassing their coworkers.
what is a ytb?
Yesterday, Today, Blockers. I.e. the typical standup update.
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?
Sounds more like a story of change management with people not changing their way.
The real problem is that its possible to book meeting rooms back to back when there's supposed to be decompression time in between.
Rooms don't need to decompress.
This really does make you further loathe the types of exasperating clowns working for big G.
A 10 min standup would be a dream.
Been at companies where they last _45-60 minutes_
They always trend that way unless you have someone very disciplined leading them.
> 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.
this was genuinely fun to read. thanks to the author/OP
>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.
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.
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.
They’re talking in the context of C level meetings. Not many juniors there.
I must have been reading sideways, it came off like a blanket policy from top down to everyone
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Pfft. If I’ve booked the room and you’re loitering in there I don’t care what your perception of defaults or the meaning of the minute hand’s position on the clock face is. That room is mine for the time I’ve booked it. Be off with you!
10 minute standup , woof
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.
> 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?
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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".
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.
> 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?
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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.
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.
No need for everyone to be in a room together either, to do that.
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The root problem, of course, is that no one stands up at anymore at standups.
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.
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Nothing from my end, thanks
I think they are supposed to be so short you don’t even sit, right?
Petty? Maybe. Brilliant? Absolutely.
> 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.
>Sun's Workstations Still Shine, But Rivals Cloud The OutlookZigurd
13 hours ago
DonHopkins
12 hours ago
>Daily Gazette - Nov 10, 1991
>Associated Press (Google News Archive)
>Sun touts an "all the wood behind one arrow" slogan, meant to describe a company focused on one goal - workstations. As an April Fool's joke in 1990, Sun employees built a 60-foot-long arrow in McNealy's office with the point going out the window.
Phrase: more wood behind, all the wood behind one arrow
A terrible ill-formed neologism, widely adopted by dopes who never had an original thought. It is about as predictive of an empty statement as that guy who who emphasizes his inchoate thoughts by claiming the proof is in the pudding.
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.
>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."ashurbanipal
10 hours ago
lowbloodsugar
12 hours ago
Good story thanks
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.