
Kill Our Meeting Culture - dpflan
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sebastian-thrun/kill-our-meeting-culture_b_8273410.html
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exelius
Here's my answer to these meetings: I just stopped going to them.

If you ask people why they go, it's generally to "see and be seen as working
hard". But in general, the people that matter don't attend these pointless
meetings: they send their least qualified subordinates in their place because
they're the only ones with time to go.

You don't need a weekly meeting to deliver a status update. You need a single
e-mail once a week. Or better yet, just use whatever project management/bug
tracking system and create a dashboard so you don't even need to meet. All you
have to do then is have the project/scrum master harass people to log their
tickets (which they are probably already doing anyway).

The real decisions are made one-on-one anyway -- meetings are just a place
where people posture and take credit for things.

~~~
Devthrowaway80
Peopleware has a great line about "status meetings" really being meetings
about status - as enforcing the manager/subordinate role, or "look at how
productive I am" image or so on. They aren't to accomplish actual work or
communicate.

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orestes910
I think he's being diplomatic in not bringing up another reason for meetings.
Some people make their career around them, especially management. When it
comes to decision making, most team sizes simply don't produce enough
decisions to fill a manager's 40+ hour work week. Meetings act as a method of
elongating those decisions into multiple hour ordeals. Quit hiring pure
managers below the executive level and make use of working managers instead.

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krosaen
yes, bad meetings are bad.

on the flip side, I've noticed something creeping up within 'no meeting'
culture: constant distraction in slack or hipchat. I'd rather sit down and
resolve something in 15 minutes with 2 people than to constantly have to check
back on whatever thread happened in a slack channel.

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dpflan
37Signals had a blog post a few years on the related topic that 'meetings are
toxic'. [1].

[1.]
[https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Meetings_Are_Toxic.ph...](https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Meetings_Are_Toxic.php)

