HACKER Q&A
📣 lluis_m_ventura

What is the most painful part of your meetings?


from thinking that you need one, receiving an invitation, during the meeting... to a week later


  👤 gtirloni Accepted Answer ✓
1. When people come unprepared to discuss the meeting's topic and all the meeting is wasted bringing people to the same level of understanding (e.g. discuss CI options and some people don't know what CI is, made up example). As a bonus, the people that got their day disrupted because they have to prepare for the meeting feel frustrated that others didn't do the same.

2. Vague meeting goals and no expected outcome. After an hour, the meeting ends and nothing was decided, no clear consensus, etc.

3. Having to join a meeting because people can't communicate in written form properly and think a meeting will be easier. Especially hard when people are in different timezones.


👤 sergiotapia
For me:

1. No clear agenda, or "standing meetings" for no reason.

2. Clueless people in the meeting that need to be brought up to speed when an email could have been enough.

3. Being in a meeting when you shouldn't really be there - a total waste of time. Musk is onto something here.

4. Meetings that can easily be an email.


👤 muzani
The ones I dreaded most were stand up meetings. Mostly they force you to listen to things you already know.

Any team with decent teamwork, who have lunch together, communicate together, or even shitpost on Slack... they will know what's going on. Trello updates or some tool equivalent makes trivial progress updates unnecessary.


👤 srijanshetty
The extensions. I would love meetings to be time-boxed. A meeting more than 30 minutes serves no purpose.