> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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 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.

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 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.

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.

> But you could never shake the feeling that Larry Page had to make decisions all day long and forgot that sometimes people meet for other reasons.

I can empathize. I'm in the middle of an extremely prescriptive re-org (down to the team level) that kinda feels like some leader forgot that the rest of the org isn't some cookie cutter copy of the leader's personal experience.

It's so satisfying when the leader describes the results of the re-org as exactly opposite to what actually happened.

“I wish I knew the identities of these brave meeting crashers. I saw them pull this stunt twice and then ride off into the sunset, and I never got to learn what team they were on. I wish Were they true believers in the 50-minute policy? Were they bored pedants? Were they wraiths, cursed to hunt the office for available meeting rooms?”

No, they were software developers

I saw a funny DefCon video on elevator hacking where one of the emcees tried to patronizingly lure the lecturers off-stage, with shots! This was presumably because they constantly take too long to get their AV set up and wanted to get a headstart.

The response was ice cold. "No, this is our time." (Go ahead and stop us.)

So it isn't the problem of the people booking the meetings, it's the problem of the people who formulate and implement the rules.

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...)

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.

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)

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/

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?

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.

>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.

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?

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...

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.

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.

A 10 min standup would be a dream.

Been at companies where they last _45-60 minutes_

In my previous employer we used to call this "Malicious Obedience". We also used it locally where your direct boss asked for something stupid (especially if they were the nasty kind). We'd implement it and sit back to watch the resulting chaos. Sometimes the change would be quietly rolled back.

There's zero real difference between a meeting ending at :50 dragging over and a meeting ending :00 dragging over.

If anything, a group booking a meeting in the ten minutes in between increases meeting room usage, since the next meeting can now start at :00.

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

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!

"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 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.

My thought was that you handle meetings wasting everyone's time by releasing huntsman spiders (of clock spider meme fame) into the room periodically.

If things are running over because of something important like the financial future or your org or the health and safety of your clients then people will deal with the spiders roaming at terrifying speeds. But if everyone is just bikeshedding then the room will empty out pretty quick.

I thought one of the reasons we call it a standup is because everyone just, stands up, and does a ytb. So you don't need a meeting room. Nice story.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

The real problem is that its possible to book meeting rooms back to back when there's supposed to be decompression time in between.

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

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

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

10 minute standup , woof

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

Petty? Maybe. Brilliant? Absolutely.

Good story thanks

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!