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> 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.

How much can you actually do in 1 hour that’s 45 minutes long?

All my classes were 1.5 hours long. Yet professors still regularly chose to introduce new material on days with back-to-back classes, leaving standalone classes for practice or “less important” topics.

>How much can you actually do in 1 hour that’s 45 minutes long?

Almost exactly as much as one that's 55 (or 60) minutes long but many people are late to.

But yes, "1 hour" is fairly short for any deep topic progress. I vastly prefer classes that are 2 or 3, it gives time to have questions and not be in a blind rush.

We usually had 2 hour classes starting ct, some of them with another 10 minute break.

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!

For the most part, American Universities were established after railroad time tables were a thing…and in the US Latin and the other liberal arts were never the primary curriculum at most US universities, so cum tempore might as well be Latin.

UC Berkeley had this as well, at least as of the class of 2010. I think it was called "berkeley time" or something along those lines.

Yep I even had one professor who locked the door at the start of class. You either had to pound on the door to get in or accept defeat. Most people just walked away unless it was an exam day

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.

At my university in New Zealand they didn't take attendance for lectures. You attended the lectures so you could learn stuff so you could pass the exams. It's surprising that isn't considered normal.

(There's some nuance to that statement as science courses tende to have labs - I don't remember why first-year physics was a requirement for software engineering, but it was - mathematics courses tended to have weekly assignments, and at least one software course had a very unusual style of putting us in a room one whole day per week for a semester to work on group projects.)

That's how it was for me in college in the USA.

As an aside, it's a little absurd that people wouldn't go to class given how much money they're paying.

Private colleges are around $39k USD per year. That's a lot of dough per class-hour.

I was lax about going to certain classes. Not always because of laziness (though, I'll admit it was occasionally a factor) but often because the format of one person, who lacked any particular talent for teaching, reading mostly from notes or scribbling incomprehensible symbology on a blackboard in a room filed with hundreds of people wasn't really a teaching format that did anything for me.

Hm, I had good teachers who were also researchers in their respective fields. Mostly. I wonder if this is another symptom of the USA's general hypernormalization - sounds like they're going through the motions, without the substance. They're using distilled water in the hydroponic supply.

That's the thing though, in many places Europe people usually aren't paying much for university, and higher education is funded by the state. So the state has a keen financial interest on people not failing/doing over because they can't be bothered to go to lectures, a lot more than the students themselves.

The reality in my experience is that, whilst students are on paper adults (mostly) and responsible for their own successes and failures, a significant number benefits from being forced to attend. That's unfortunate for the ones that could "safely" skip the lectures and have to go, but on average it leads to better overall outcomes. So in that regard the attendance policies are sensible.

For NZ citizens to go to university it's only around $5k NZD per year and most degrees are only three years, except for a few which are four.

I only paid 50 bucks per month to study at university — there were many classes I never visited only wrote the exams

... so the old American high school "if the teacher is 15 minutes late, we're legally allowed to leave" meme has some roots in reality? Huh.

Never heard of that in high school but my university's student handbook explicitly stated that if the professor did not show up within ten minutes of the scheduled start time, the class was officially cancelled for that day. I only remember that happening once, maybe twice, during my academic career. A few times they cancelled a class ahead of time but no-shows were extremely rare.

I guess it was the same in Poland and in America. It was never formally announced. Just sort of unwritten cultural norm.

Same in Denmark. Actually often needed to get from one auditorium across campus to another auditorium

Times are given as "c.t.", cum tempore.

Same thing in Sweden in the 1980s

Still is, standard lecture is scheduled for example for 10-12. It starts at 10.15, pause 11.00-11.15, continues until 12.00. So it's neatly split in two 45 minute halves.

This has also been extended to evening events (dinners, balls, parties) in student towns. There “dk” stands for double quarter, so for example 18dk means that an event starts at 18:30, but you may show up from 18:00. And the time between 18:00-18:30 is used for mingling.

It’s a good convention.

Still is!

Thankfully

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?

Generally, a single-slot class was 45 minutes. So a slot at "10 AM" would have started at 10:15 AM and ended at 11:00 AM.

Most lectures were allocated double slots, though, for example from 10 to 12. In that case the actual official lecture time would have been either 10:15 to 11:00, followed by a quarter hour break, and another 45 minutes from 11:15 to 12:00. Alternatively -- and probably more commonly -- there was no break, and the lecture was 1.5 hours from 10:15 to 11:45.

At the universities I've been to classes were almost always 1½ hours, so until 11:45am.

A bit different in Russia and Ukraine, there's a notion of "academic hour" which is 45 minutes. Same idea though.

Yes except classes in schools usually start at X:00 and breaks between them are X:45 - (X+1):00. The first class is usually at 9:00.

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.

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!

There are a number of variations. You might actually be thinking of https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/my-favorite-liahtml or possibly https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/prediction/2022-gelman.pdf (if neither of those are it, it might be one of the others I collated in https://gwern.net/fake-journal-club#external-links ).

This is the best/most fun way to bet on the Oscars.

You pick the winner and then assign 1-25 (or whatever) points to it (using each number for only one category) and if you get it right you get that number of points.

It basically prevents ties. It lets you make risky picks without falling out of the running. The downside is a shocking number of people won't be able to follow the rule and end up with 22 used twice or whatever.

> shocking

I don't think it's surprising or notably bad that people will have trouble tracking everything when you ask them to order a big list while making other decisions that affect the order.

Make it a web app or hand out cards where the order is the certainty.

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.

You seem to expect the professor to give you a reasonable accommodation for an affliction you didn’t even realize you had. If you want to hold him accountable for his (unfair?) rules, you need to first hold yourself accountable for getting the disease diagnosed.

The world we live in, with the people we live with, require accomodations every single day.

Not locking a door allows the students who were delayed on the road by a car accident, as much as the disabled student who took five minutes longer than expected after falling down some stairs.

Every single person makes mistakes at times. If those are not absorbed by flexibility, then they go on to affect everyone else connected to the punished.

If the professor is delayed due to a tire puncture, should they lose their tenure?

It also allows the people actually in the class a lesson uninterrupted by random people for variety of good/bad reasons.

Most 90% of students is not late on any given day. Should they all be penalized for the actions of a few?

The request is not to transfer the burden onto the 90%, but to design a system where the 10% are able to participate without impeding the 90%.

For example, if students enter from the rear of the room, then delayed students can join without disrupting the on-time students.

If we start the design process with the awareness that some students will be late, then we can design systems which support all students.

Here’s a process for that 10%: wake up 30 minutes earlier to create a buffer that allows for unexpected events like traffic and for expected events like “I just can’t seem to be on time, maybe I’m sick.”

I’ve been in the 90% at times and in the 10% at others. People should be entitled to grace, and we shouldn’t just assume anyone who isn’t absolutely punctual is a malingerer. Unless you live alone on a thousand acres you’re perpetually giving other people grace for their foibles and they’re giving you grace for yours.

This doesn't work, any other smart easy solution to heal this disease?

"Just get less sleep, bro!" isn't the gotcha you think it is.

So you're happy to punish 10% of students, for no fault of their own. You'll trade a moment's distraction, for a paid-for day's learning.

That, is a lack of empathy. Especially as for about the last hundred years universities have had a process that allows for the necessary flexibility.

To take this to the extreme... Should we simply fire everyone who is late to work, without reason? If someone else causes a car accident, should we simply revoke the licenses of everyone involved, regardless?

Come now, we can be more extreme than that! Late for class, your city gets nuked. Forget an assignment, bioweapon deployed. Bomb an exam, and you're on the first plane to the front lines in Ukraine.

See also: we can reduce the number of police and compensate by increasing the penalties for crime (late 20th century edition).

> Should we simply fire everyone who is late to work, without reason?

Not necessarily, but I think you’d see a much more consistent attendance rate. Which is of course the whole point of such a policy.

The student is the employer, though. They are paying the university for a service. They aren't the employee.

The student is the customer, not the employer, if you must phrase it in those terms.

And I think education benefits when you define the student as a student, before anything else.

Jonathan Haidt details quite a few reasons why treating a student as a customer creates bad incentives and poor outcomes (just agreeing with you on the student-first point)

Those educational benefits are being denied here, for reasons outside the customers hands.

Make them sit at the back of the class?

>If the professor is delayed due to a tire puncture, should they lose their tenure?

This seems like a false equivalency. The student isn’t getting dropped from their degree program, they’re missing a class. If a professor is late, especially habitually late, I may not advocate for them losing tenure, but I’d certainly expect it to have a smaller impact like being brought up in a performance review.

> You seem to expect the professor to give you a reasonable accommodation for an affliction you didn’t even realize you had.

No. How could he? Instead, I'm pointing out the value of empathy, tolerance and flexibility.

I’m all for empathy, tolerance, and flexibility (to a reasonable degree). I also don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a professor to act on an assumption of illness when the person actually experiencing the symptoms does not hold that assumption. Your perspective makes it seem like the prof is privy to information about your health that you don’t have.

I'd go a step further.. The prof was expressing empathy for the students that made the effort to be on time. They made it.

If you know you're late all the time, then make allowances. 8 hours not enough sleep, go to bed earlier. 1 hour not enough time to wake up, set your alarm to give you 2 hours.

This isn't related to knowing you're sick, just knowing you're late often.

It always makes me wonder when I hear "empathy, tolerance, flexibility" pointed at a group of 30 or more, who need to work around one persons inability to do the same.

I had a co-worker who was always late. I told her she was lying when she said she'd be there at 2. She got miffed. I replied. "You're late so often, do you expect you'll be on time. I know you'll try, but do you really believe you're not going to be late." She paused. "If you know you're very likely going to be late and tell me you will be somewhere at time X, then you are lying."

It really shows that you know nothing about sleep-related disabilities. I know someone suffering from idiopathic hypersomnia[1]. You can't just "choose" to go to bed earlier to wake up earlier in the morning. Sometimes it might work, most of the time it doesn't.

You think it's the disabled person's responsibility to never put a burden on others when others' expectations puts an unreasonable amount of burdens.

And we're talking about this specific kind of disability, but as someone else said in a sibling comment, it could be anything. Imagine you really have to go to the bathroom for some reason (pregnancy, diarrhea, ...). That can happen to a lot of people. Should all of them be prevented from being accepted into class ?

That's why we speak about "empathy, tolerance, flexibility". Empathy towards the weaker few, not empathy towards the "normal" many.

[1]: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hypersomnia/s...

FWIW I agree but I think it’s worth communicating a devils advocate position.

I don’t think anyone here is disagreeing that those with a disability should be protected. The distinction is that many don’t go so far as to assume someone has a disability when their behavior is maladaptive. In game theory, systems break down when they are too many people abusing the system. Giving everyone a break on all instances just in case they have a disability sets the table for creating an unstable system ripe for abuse.

You point out the specific case of sleep disorders. But the numbers of medical disorders is functionally infinite. If we apply the same rule across the board, we would be creating a world where nobody is held accountable because they might just have some obscure illness they aren’t aware of.

I think there are better approaches that don’t devolve like that. As another congener said, you can create a system where late-comers can quietly come in the back.

You are being purposely obtuse.

Illness is only one of the possible issues a student may have that may be impacting them. A little flexibility goes a long way.

I have no problem with the professor being flexible if he so chooses. I think the difference is I don’t levy an expectation that he is. I also don’t think he’s unreasonable for expecting people to be on time in a professional setting.

Maybe we should just be a little lenient to everyone, on principle?

What of the ADD student who gets distracted when someone comes in late? What should we tell them. "Suck it up"

What of the daycare that's expecting you to show up and pick up your kids on time. Should we tell the workers to wait, because the guy replacing you at work was late. Then of course we tell the cleaners of the daycare to start their shift 30 mins later because they have to wait for the last kid to leave. Oh and the cleaners will have to stay 30 min extra to clean, so now we tell the people relying on them to wait. Or.. Or we tell the cleaners to work a bit harder so they don't take an extra 30 minutes..

So the 30min you're late messes up the day of not just the person expecting you, but all the people expecting them.

How about on principle anticipate that you're going to be late, and make an effort to arrive early. If you know you're late all the time, start giving yourself more time.

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First, go read the HN guidelines and understand why your post should be reframed.

>how would you even know you had a condition and werent just a lazy ass?

If you are not able to know, how on Earth do you expect the professor to know you aren’t just lazy or unmotivated?

I’m all for giving people grace. But it strikes me as a weird take to expect people to go around assuming people have some grave condition that they don’t even realize to excuse them from all manner of aberrant behavior.

This is completely out of line. Calm down before commenting. Strong disagreement is fine but this style of communication repels discussion.

And here is the notable lack of empathy HN displays on a daily basis.

You don't need to tone police people to get their point. Just read what they are saying instead of rejecting their opinion because you are uncomfortable when someone displays a strong emotion.

It is baffling that you are claiming “can’t show up on time” is something professors need to work around as a reasonable accommodation.

In cases where a student shows up 10+ minutes late to a course and disrupts the lecture, what percentage of the time do you estimate the reason for tardiness is a diagnosed or undiagnosed illness or hardship.

Then maybe the easy solution is to make sure anyone showing up late doesn't disrupt anything? That accommodates everyone, is flexible, and does not unfairly punish anyone.

_THAT_ is flexibility.

Isn't it reasonable that we try to disrupt each other as much as possible as a default? It seems odd to force that responsibility onto another party. (ie it's weird to assume the professor is responsible for making sure another adult isn't disruptive)

> Your Prof Ramsey would have penalised me for this unknown condition. This isn't behaviour to be celebrated.

On the contrary, your anecdote is evidence of how this seemingly arbitrary behaviour can actually uncover real issues and prompt people to question and investigate.

Maybe people had ADHD and having students disrupt the class once it began made it hard to stay focused. The professor was making a reasonable accommodation for them and should be celebrated.

You seem to think that if everyone were more empathetic, it would be possible to arrange our society so that people with serious un-diagnosed medical conditions never have to miss out on anything important.

Why not. I mean if you're expected to come and relieve a co-worker at 5pm, because he has to go get his kids from daycare, and you show up at 5:30 so now the police are at the daycare collecting his kids (because he's waiting for you all the time)

It always baffles me. Make accommodations for your conditions.. So the 30 plus students are meant to have their time interrupted by a late arrival. I have ADD, so when in a class if someone comes in late, I get distracted and can't pay attention. Which person should this prof accomodate? Me with ADD or you.

The "make accommodations" is always argued by the few, against the needs of the many. It's self centred. If waking up is hard, go to be earlier, get a better alarm clock, pick classes later in the day. Make accommodations for your own disability.

My ADD has me working from home, with noise cancelling headphones. I accommodated my own-self.

As someone who is _often_ late, your inability to be there in time is not someone else's problem. Unfairly punished...gimme a break.

That's a common point of view, but when your disability is never someone else's problem, it becomes waaaaaay harder to manage. You should display more empathy to people that don't follow the norm.

Except in this case, there is no information to the other party that someone has a disability. So the default that we assume someone has a disability is what most people take umbrage with.

I try to be generous as much as is reasonable. I generally assume the person who cuts me off in traffic may have an urgent need, but vaulting every misdeed to an assumption that it's due to some unknown disability crosses into unreasonable territory, if for nothing else than it's probabilistically a bad assumption. Taken to the extreme, it becomes enabling for everyone who does not have a disability but gets away with bad behavior.

Its so strange to me that when it comes to college no one has any empathy whatsoever for students. Its so absurd.

Some people don't have empathy for students regarding this particular subject.

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".

Tempore is in ablative case, and in english there isn't a good substitute. This means it isn't a static set time event, it has some leeway so to speak. German has the ablative case, so I think it works out for them.

I don’t see why the grammatical cases of Latin and German matter in the interpretation of these abbreviations.

The Latin prepositions cum (with) and sine (without) are always followed by the ablative case. German has grammatical cases too, but no ablative. The German propositions mit (with) and ohne (without) are followed by the accusative case.

So c.t. = cum tempore = mit Zeit = with time (or with some delay), and s.t. = sine tempore = ohne Zeit = without time (or without delay).

"mit" is followed by dative in German. In Latin, ablative and dative are very close and which is very close, a lot of forms are indistinguishable.

That doesn't change anything else you said, though :)

While it's true that many Latin nouns have identical dative and ablative forms, tempus isn't one of those nouns. (In the singular. I think dative and ablative are identical in the plural for every noun.)

And of course, as everyone has already mentioned, spookie's comment is complete nonsense because the case is required, and fully explained, by the prepositions.

Wikipedia specifically states:

> German does not have ablative case

It seems to make sense if you interpret it as:

10am c.t. = 10am with extra time

10am s.t. = 10am without extra time

Cum can be translated as 'with', but due to cultural use, it can also be translated as 'in addition'.

Some younger Latin recipes use 'cum sal' as a one-liner at the end, to tell the chef to season to their taste, for example.

> Some younger Latin recipes use 'cum sal' as a one-liner at the end

I have some questions:

1. What cultural use? Are you saying that German culture involves writing recipes in recreational Latin?

2. Why is sal in the nominative case? That can't possibly work.

3. Shouldn't there be a verb? For example, Apicius always ends recipes with a direction like "serve" / "bring in" / "enjoy".

(Technically, those verbs are all in the future indicative, so I guess I shouldn't call them 'directions'. But it's hard to think of them as something other than directions.)

By cultural use, I meant a phrase whose direct translation makes no sense. An idiom ("cultural phrase").

Nominative case - Its how its used. Can't say I've studied the evolution of that particular idiom, but breaking expected rules is not unusual.

There might have been a verb, once. But as with all slang, what gets dropped tends to confuse the foreigner, but be understood to the local.

They sound like appropriate abbreviations to me. Something like: "With time to get to the location" and "Without time to get to the location"

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

AKA "Fashionably Late"

How very European.

This is also fast becoming the norm in many big tech companies. The internal calendar tools will pretty much always start meetings 5minutes after the hour/half hour by default and end exactly on the hour/half hour by default (you can override if needed).

It's pretty obvious, you can't travel to a meeting instantly and 100% appreciated when you work in such a place. For those senior enough for all day back to back meetings you get toilet breaks!

If you work in a company that doesn't do this take note and if you're senior in a company you should start pushing for this to be implemented. A lot of calendar tools have options for meeting buffers by default and enabling it is all you need to do.

At 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 really like and appreciate their system. It's simple and easy for everyone to adapt to.

my alma mater!

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

Our team did the same during the pandemic. They declared that the first 5 minutes of every meeting were for bio breaks.

Now meetings actually start at :05 or :07. The prior meeting will often drag until that time, but you don't feel bad knocking at :00 or :02 and asking for the room to clear.

I'm sure that's where Larry Page got the idea.

Unfortunately UMich ended "Michigan time" back in 2018. I always thought it was a great solution to the problem.

> 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.

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.

It really should a setting that the user can toggle to default.

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

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

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

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.

When I got to the bit about "I’d personally tell them that I wasn’t going to leave the room" that seemed crazy to me. I'm fully on the side of the 10 minute booking guys.

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

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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.

The first time I drove in the US I came up to a turn with the yellow speed sign. I was going faster and I could feel my car strain to not go off the road. This is to this day the second scariest thing I've experienced in a car.

After that I 100% followed the yellow signs.

I had a similar experience but had an opposite takeaway. I learned that my car, in dry, daylight conditions, could comfortably go 20±5 mph faster around curves than those signs suggest.

Those signs aren’t just for whether you can go around a curve comfortably. It is if you can see and/or stop safely if something happens. If there is a broken-down car in the lane, you will see it way off at 65 mph, but if you are going around a blind curve comfortably at 65 you might plow into it or skid off the road.

> This is to this day the second scariest thing I've experienced in a car.

I have to know! What was the scariest thing?

Going past a line of cars that were backed up and going like ~10 km/h and some guy in a pickup truck suddenly decided to force his way into the line and hit a car so it jumped into my lane by a meter or so. Only time I have ever needed to perform the moose maneuver we are taught in driving school :P

I was lucky there was no car in the lane to my right.

> And an enforceable sign could never be a weird number because speedos don’t have ticks but every 5mph.

Disneyland famously has a 14mph speed limit for their property. They do this both to get your attention, and because the tram moves at 14mph (because 15mph requires seatbelts).

Not a legally enforceable speed limit.

I always love seeing stuff like this on reddit /r/oddlyspecific

I think I even saw a 5.25 mph sign once!

Not really the same thing, but in New Zealand, all speed limits are multiples of 10 (km/h), and all recommended safe speeds (e.g. for a sharp corner) end in ‘5’.

The 95 signs are hilarious.

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

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

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'm dadhacker, yes

i may bring the site back, but it's not a priority, and i'm not sure i can write much at the moment without getting into trouble :-)

The meeting room cuckoo clock is pure brilliance.

(+ nice catch @verall)

Seems like someone's ego is out of check; these tend to happen when someone needs to "hold court" or otherwise wants to feel important.

In general, your management should take care of this.

Otherwise, if they are unwilling, it requires becoming slightly antagonistic once the meeting runs long. In my case, as soon as someone mentioned another meeting I just interrupted abruptly and said, "We do not need another meeting." The groans of agreement got the point across.

Otherwise, if that doesn't work, you can do something like, "Everyone but [person droning on] needs to leave the room, now." Once everyone leaves, point out that "these long meetings are killing team productivity, morale, and are completely unneeded. Stop wasting the engineering team's time. We don't need to be here."

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.

There's something beautifully old-school about using a literal cuckoo clock as a productivity tool

I've been stuck in meetings like that. I'd just walk out saying, "you know where to find me if my input required."

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.

I tried this once and my manager and skip level explained to me that sometimes it's necessary to make people get together in case anyone wanted to talk about something, not every meeting needs an agenda. Unsurprisingly, I was not a good fit for that team.

That is so terribly inefficient it makes me physically anxious.

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.

In my experience, most folks appreciate a gentle hint to stick to the agenda. I don’t hang out with “execs” though.

Execs that have responsibilities appreciate sticking to agendas. But there are a lot of Elon Musks in the world.

Didn't Elon Musk have in his companies that thing of if you have no value to add or receive from a meeting, you can leave it?

No idea but someone who claims to work harder than just about everyone else while managing to be on social media all day is hilarious.

This goes way back further then Musk. I remember working at a large corporation in early 2000 before the first dot com crash that had severe meeting issues. At one point, I was having two or three hour long meetings during the week on what another meeting later in the week was supposed to cover.

The CEO of the company got caught fooling around with a co-worker and abruptly resigned. The new CEO came in and found out what a mess meetings had become and issued the same proclamation - if a meeting isn't productive and produce some actionable items, then it shouldn't be scheduled. If you're not 100% required in a meeting, don't go. If you're in a meeting and feel its a waste of time, then leave.

Just those simple rules got rid of half of my meetings and the several teams I was on suddenly were cranking through sprints, building some amazing apps and products and killing our delivery times. The entire company suddenly was cooking along. It was a real eye opener how you can really bog a Fortune 500 company down just by clogging people's time up with useless meetings.

How many people do you think skip his meeting?

I’ve seen it come mostly from participants who are more dominant or verbose in the conversation than others, often leading to the meeting being a lengthy back and forth between two people because nobody else can get a word in and the person running or facilitating it isn’t keeping it in check.

Long winded execs enjoying open ended meetings without any structure to constrain them.

I've been through too many of these. They like to sit at the head of the table and bask in the glow of their underlings like they're king for an hour.

Even with an agenda, nobody wants to be the guy that interrupts people to get them back on topic.

I frequently ask people whether they can discuss the diversion later with whoever is interested. It's not just me but part of company culture.

In other contexts I'm notorious for keeping people on the agenda. It's generally appreciated.

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’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."

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".

I get why people hate scrum/agile and random standards from above but this is the kind of guy that needs enforcement from his manager. Unfortunately I have never seen that happen and have had to just move on from teams where it gets poisoned like this.

Interject. When things are getting off topic (which is to say, as soon as one person interrupts another person's update with a question) just say "this might be better for post standup", or even just "post standup?" with a questioning inflection.

Most of the people who will mind are exactly the kind of person that you're trying to keep from wasting everyone's time.

Any and every team member should be empowered to do this.

Wow, was it actually 90 minutes of standing?

For me, yes. I was working remote from a surprisingly loud coffee shop so I had to pop out in the back alley. The rest of the team (even those in office) was all connecting on zoom so I doubt it.

Did anyone faint?

I think some of my swe friends might have when I told them about it later.

Oh how many times I ended a meeting over VC by pretending that someone was knocking on the door...

I used to love pomodoro style meetings... it became a test of will and stamina at some point.

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.

> 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?

> Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?

As someone who tries to be prompt to a fault, I can see that yes there are people who get annoyed at promptness. It's not that you're a bad person for being prompt. Rather you're a bad person if you start without them or otherwise push back on their lateness.

I think to some extent some of the pushback is the prompt folks not understanding that sometimes lateness isn’t something they can control (e.g., meeting with important set of stakeholders that you can’t duck out on early ran late)

There are unavoidable life obstacles, but some people are always late to everything.

Yea, I meant the habitually late.

I think people on both sides need to have more empathy, then. I'm generally one of the prompt people, and I'll try to start on time. If people are late, they'll arrive after we start, but that's fine.

And the late people need to understand that sometimes they will miss the beginnings of things, but that's ok too; their inability to be on time (for whatever reason) should not waste the time of those who get there on time.

My experience is that when you have habitually late people will enter a meeting after you start, their first question is, "what did I miss?"

So then you waste even more time when someone recaps for them.

It's almost like people need to think about their day when they're scheduling things instead of just accepting every single meeting.

You can request different times for things. That's an option.

Yes. And even as someone who tries to live by the ethos "if you're on time, you're late", I wind up late sometimes. It stresses me out, but hey sometimes shit happens.

But there are people where shit seems to happen more than for others. Late once in a blue moon? No worries. Repeat offender? That's a you problem.

Not everywhere is like wherever you are.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-dec-11-tr-insid...

Non-punctual cultures can view on-time people as clueless, over-eager, and annoying.

The exact opposite can also be true, so not much is being said here. Try being late to a meeting in Germany or Japan. It is disrespectful.

Are there any highly developed countries where the business culture is still "non-punctual"? I struggle to think of any. In short, if you have two businesses side-by-side, and one operates more punctually, then it will probably out-compete the other. To be clear, I'm not talking about social culture. Yes, Italians might be late by an hour to go to dinner with friends, but I doubt people in Milan will be so late to a sales meeting with client.

Well, business cultures are social cultures. Firing off angry emails because somebody is “late” in Madrid won’t land you suppliers, resellers, contracts, or corporate customers.

FWIW I am personally a very punctual person with heritage from one of the most punctual countries. But when in Rome…

In my experience the people who are late are usually senior or exec types who arrive late with a lot of bluster and comments about how busy they are and then "Ok where are we?" like they are taking over the meeting.

I love how true this article resonated to me, since it's very similar to Spain (but now I live in the polar opposite, Japan, where I am supposed to be at least 15 mins early):

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180729-why-brazilians-a...

I view people who show up too early as rude, as do many others.

The beautiful thing about being an early bird is you don't need to "show up too early". You just hang out until you're exactly on time and then show up. There is no analogue for the late person.

I don't get why you are getting downvoted

If an interviewee is half an hour early to a meeting that is rude if they actually expect to start now instead of the scheduled time

> if they actually expect to start now

That's the meat of it. If I'm going to a meeting where consequences of lateness would suck, like a job interview or something else where it would be highly rude to be late, I'll get there early. Then I'll hang out and play with my phone or something until the person's ready to meet with me at our scheduled time.

I also make it clear that I know I'm early and don't expect the other person to be ready for me. I might use a friendly, stock phrase like "I'd rather wait for them than have them waiting for me" to emphasize that I'm perfectly fine entertaining myself while they're getting ready to see me.

But ultimately, I treat it like getting to my gate at an airport. If I'm there early with time to kill, then so be it. That's infinitely preferable to arriving late and suffering the consequences.

What does being early have to do with the other? Just because I don't know trafficor other unknowns, and leave my house early, and go into the building to get some water or something; that does not mean I expect anything except the appointment to be on time.

That's a tough one. I lived in Toronto for many years and traffic and public transportation are unpredictably - it could take me an hour or it could take me three hours. Sure, if I was early a there was coffee shop near by that's an option. So I like to have a little compassion for people, especially working people.

    > I lived in Toronto for many years and traffic and public transportation are unpredictably - it could take me an hour or it could take me three hours.

It's considered at least weird to show up to some parties exactly on time, yes.

> Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?

No. Not for meetings. What is perceived as rude is making a big deal about it. You think it's a major social faux-pas, they think it's a "meh", and if you make a big deal about it and get offended now you're just being rude for no reason at all.

For personal and informal meetings, yes, being "on time" may mean annoying the host a bit. Why? Because when they say the party starts at 6pm, everyone should understand it as they should start showing up no earlier than 6:30pm etc.

I am not saying I agree or take side with any of these, just presenting it as both sides see it.

I was accused of not having enough to do by a boss. He was habitually late to everything. I am at every meeting 3 to 5 minutes early, because I leave every meeting at the :20 or :50 depending. Then I have 5 minutes to pee or whatever before going to the next one.

Either way, he saw me get to meetings a few minutes early and legitimately accused me of not having enough to do.

That was one of two jobs that I've ever walked out of.

In my experience, being on time isn't viewed as rude, but it is viewed as a nuisance, reflecting poorly on other people.

I had a Chinese tutor who got pretty upset that I would show up to lessons before she got there. Her first approach was to assure me that it was ok if I showed up later. Eventually she responded by showing up very, very early.

In a different case, I had an appointment to meet a friend, and she texted me beforehand to ask whether I'd left home yet. Since the appointment was quite some distance from my home, and I couldn't predict the travel time, I had already arrived, but upon learning that my friend dropped everything to show up early... and asked me why I was so early. I don't see a problem with waiting for a scheduled appointment if I show up early! But apparently other people do?

Presumably the tutor was being paid. If you arrive late, you are cheating yourself of your full time slot. Unless the tutor operated on a model of, “45 minutes starting whenever we are both here”.

> Unless the tutor operated on a model of, “45 minutes starting whenever we are both here”.

I would be unsurprised if that's how she thought about it, but it didn't really come up.

My sense was that, since she was the service provider and I was the customer, she felt that it was inappropriate for me to be waiting for her.

Probably not, but they'll roll their eyes at ya when they show up.

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.

I've worked mostly remotely, and in companies where management insists on having visibility into subordinates' calendars. So I've placed an awful lot of official sounding decoy meetings on my calendar right after meetings that were completely unnecessary (could easily have been an email), hut where management would certainly listen to themselves talk past the buzzer.

My department head made a point once to instruct us that, if you need it, you should schedule time on your calendar as a meeting to just be "heads down" on work.

We have a lot of meetings so he encourages we do basically whatever it takes to keep meetings timeboxed.

I once was in an incident call where one of the execs was brought in and eventually said "We have 20 people in this call who all have good salaries. It will cost $600 to just inform our customer service agents to take care of this. Let's get out of here"

Management has to push that culture downwards, and reinforce it themselves, and continually encourage it as people join and leave and teams change.

I always felt this was wholly ineffective coming from someone who wasn’t contributing or necessary to any given meeting, but it’s important to establish and hold boundaries like this.

Even more points when a participant speaks up at the very beginning, to announce, “I’ve got a hard-stop at 9:50, so I’ll need to leave at that point no matter what.” Then the responsibility for wrap-up is placed squarely on leadership.

Unfortunately I’ve also found that a poorly-run meeting won't get around to the wrap-up on time, and so leaving early may only hurt that participant, by missing something important.

If you're not needed at the meeting, probably best not to be there in the first place.

This is one of those things that's hard to measure.

Quite often I'd have to sit thru meetings that 99% of the time I'm not needed but for one specific minute I keep someone else from making an expensive time wasting mistake. It can be very difficult to determine what you're actually needed for in IT/Operations stuff.

Someone who is neither contributing nor necessary to a meeting may still be required to attend the meeting. For example, a mandatory training meeting includes people who are being trained, who are in this category.

If the meeting fails to accomplish its objectives in 50 minutes, then participants may excuse themselves with a clear conscience, but they may find themselves less-informed than coworkers who chose to stay for the entire session. Especially if there is "Q&A" for clarifications at the end of it.

>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...

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.

Haha. I was one of those “set clock fast” people until one day realized that all it did was make the time I was supposed to be somewhere even more ambiguous than before. It never helped me arrive somewhere exactly on time, but certainly contributed to me arriving late because my mind forgot precisely what time my clock was set to relative to real time.

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.

In most places I've worked it's de rigueur to give people at least 5 mins to arrive before proceeding. Do people really just start meetings the instant they get in the room?!

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.

It's kind of sad that basic human needs like bathroom breaks require policy intervention

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.

lol. It’s the same way you manage kids time. Give them a warning instead of just up and bail.

> 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.

While I agree, sometimes working to repair problems is required to get there.

Sometimes one has to demonstrate value to counteract the cultural erosion caused by action and outcome bias to enable that empowerment.

These big wasteful meetings are typically a product of action and outcome biases, and one needs to have a medium and longer term strategy to address them which is exactly why my manager was willing to sponsor it.

My intention was to deliver value when the team thought it was impossible.

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.

Even if it’s the latter, it doesn’t make sense, because you can just block off time in your calendar as « Focus Time » to work on things.

At most companies you can’t see other people’s calendar event names, but even if you can, I highly doubt someone would look at an event and overlap it without asking you first.

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.

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.

[flagged]

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.

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'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...)

> 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 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

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

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.

I've had one side of the same university campus observing the academic 15 minutes, while in one course on the other side did not... after the lunch break. So at 13:30 we started walking towards the other side of the campus (the class was "scheduled" at 13:30), but did not receive a warm welcome 10 minutes later, because the lecturer had already started at the "scheduled" time.

Same. Never encountered this.

Must be a regional thing then. I've seen it all over DACH.

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.

Those are not the same; one is a bit less than an hour, another is 3 and a half days.

A microcentury is 100 nanoyears if you prefer that.

It's actually 100 microyears!

Erm, yes. Yes it is...

It's one ten-thousandth of a year but there's not a prefix for that.

100 microyears?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> When 2:50 rolled around and your meeting was supposed to end, do you think people actually ended the meeting? Noooooo. Absolutely not!

Why the hell not? Do people like meetings? I would want to get out as soon as the time is up.

In high school when the bell rang everybody ran out of the door. Maybe meetings need a bell too.

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.

"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!

An enthusiastic writing but the ending was such a letdown. I feel cheated.

There's something deeply satisfying (and painful) about watching well-meaning productivity policies spiral into a kind of bureaucratic performance art

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.

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 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 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.

> 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.

Sounds more like a story of change management with people not changing their way.

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?

What did i learn from this post. meetings are unmanageable in the early years at Google?

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.

Peak engineer energy: weaponizing calendar defaults for 10-minute standups.

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.

This really does make you further loathe the types of exasperating clowns working for big G.

>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

I think it could both be true, a decision made from top to bottom _and_ made in the context of someone who's in executive meetings all day.

At that point you might not be able to relate anymore to what a day of people looks like that are half a dozen levels down and have decades less work experience.

this was genuinely fun to read. thanks to the author/OP

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?

Absolutely, you can be more specific about the specific aspect if you want, but it's mainly a forcing tool for focus and not an accountability tool. Although everyone thinks it's accountability

>Does that person just say "I'm continuing with task X" several days in a row?

Absolutely. If other devs or even a manager or project lead or someone feel they've been doing the "same" task too long, they should be reaching out and checking in. "Hey, running into any problems? How are you doing?"

"My top priority today is to internalise data structure B"

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?

This is the thing I dislike most about chat. It encourage people to be lazy. Don't make any effort, just throw your problem out to the group the moment you don't immediately know what to do next.

Do you drop everything every time a chat message is posted like it's a life threatening emergency?

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.

Nothing from my end, thanks

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.

It’s more efficient for us at least.

It reduced the number of back and forth on slack/other tools quite a bit.

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.

I’m prone to this, as is many a manager/leader in a standup. I always designated the spiciest admin to run the meeting and keep us on time; you need someone who can cut off the boss or these take forever.

I think they are supposed to be so short you don’t even sit, right?

Petty? Maybe. Brilliant? Absolutely.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14541220

DonHopkins on June 12, 2017 | next [–]

The old expression "all our wood behind one arrow" was actually "one of President and CEO Scott McNealy's favorite quotes", which Sun used as a marketing campaign slogan and in presskits around 1990.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080515194354/http://www.sun.co...

Sun even produced a TV commercial in which an arrow that presumably had all of Sun's wood behind it whooshed through the air and hit the bull's eye of a target. (Nobody at Sun ever knew what the target was, but by golly they all knew which arrow to put their wood behind.)

Photo of Scott McNealy in his office at Sun with a huge Cupid's Span style wooden arrow through his window, and a small Steve Martin style wooden arrow through his head:

https://findery.com/johnfox/notes/all-the-wood-behind-one-ar... [sorry, link broken, not on archive.org]

>Sun's Workstations Still Shine, But Rivals Cloud The Outlook

>Daily Gazette - Nov 10, 1991

>Associated Press (Google News Archive)

>Sun touts an "all the wood behind one arrow" slogan, meant to describe a company focused on one goal - workstations. As an April Fool's joke in 1990, Sun employees built a 60-foot-long arrow in McNealy's office with the point going out the window.

Phrase: more wood behind, all the wood behind one arrow

https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2011-Septe...

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125284

DonHopkins on Dec 25, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]

You're right, it was Slowlaris that killed Sun, and Java was meant to be a "Microsoft Killer", not a programming language.

Sun was a dead man walking long before Java. And Scott McNealy's me-too obsession with Microsoft was extremely unhealthy, leading to him actually naming the division "SunSoft". Never define and even NAME yourself in terms of your enemy. Scott McNealy knew neither himself nor his enemy.

“If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle” - Sun Tzu’s “The Art Of War”

Sun could never measure up to Microsoft, and McNealy was totally obsessed with fighting them, to the point that Java was not actually a programming language for solving developer's problems per se, but primarily a weapon in his personal vendetta against Microsoft, and Java developers were considered expendable mercenaries in that war, above all else. Everything they did with Java was measured by how much it would harm Microsoft, not help developers.

Scott McNealy was pathetically and pathologically obsessed with being and beating Bill Gates and Windows, yet so unfit for the task, just as he has been more recently obsessed with licking Trump's boots, raising money for him and his failed coup attempt, and towing his anti-mask anti-vax anti-science line of bullshit.

https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/17/mcnealy_trump_fundrai...

Michael Tiemann on "The Worst Job in the World":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann

>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...

>Subject: The Worst Job in the World

>From: Michael Tiemann <tiemann@cygnus.com>

>I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]

The author doesn’t seem to understand what malicious compliance is.

The people booking the available meeting room are complying with the policy.

The people not getting out are not complying but not doing so maliciously. They’re not attempting to subvert the policy. They’re just not getting out of the meeting room when they need to.

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!

Good story thanks

> 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.

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.