Ask HN: What are your main issues with meetings?

Well...we don't have real meetings at my work...the closest we have is when someone fucks up bad enough the owner takes notice and gathers everybody up and yells at us about how our work is worse than a bunch of Chinese and brown people...without recognizing the irony because most of his employees are Chinese or brown and he himself is Cambodian.

Mostly I dislike the part where we get yelled at over such mistakes. We do a lot work every day and we do high quality work. We rarely make mistakes we can't fix and we all take pride in the work we do. But we're only human.

The rest of what I consider meetings are usually productive and necessary. They involve relaying important information about upcoming jobs to the people that will need the information or general planning about the best way to accomplish a task.

For the most part we don't tend to waste time with general meetings and the like. Everyone for the most part knows the schedule and their tasks and just gets to work. We don't usually report progress unless asked or we notice a problem or we know we're going to fall behind.

Generally I have a negative view on useless meetings. Everyone should have a good idea of what they need.to be doing and if they don't then time needs to be spent with those individuals rather than wasting the time of those that are on task. If people regularly don't know what they should be doing or failing to complete there work then something is wrong with the management.

Our manager never usually directly interferes with things unless there's a problem or somebody asks for assistance or guidance. Despite what I said above, most mistakes or problems are dealt with on an individual basis and usually dealt with without too much fuss or problem.

I guess, in summary, meetings should be saved for only the communication of necessary information to team members that need it or to deal with a specific problem. Needing regulary meetings and progress updates seems like something is lacking somewhere. A good team should already know there roles and duties and shouldn't require constant meetings to ensure progress.

They very rarely have anything of value for the people whose livelihood depends on actually getting things done.

Meetings were mostly invented and proliferated by middle managers who wanted to look busy and provide some structure to their otherwise unproductive existence

And if its a sales meeting, well, that's just summed up with "please give us money."