During the pandemic, we had a natural experiment at my previous company. Our org had started an org wise auto ‘meeting starts 5 minute past’ while others had the traditional meetings start on the hour.
Also conveniently, we also had the calendar data for internal meetings, internal VC software (not zoom) db that logs the participants when they join and leave meetings and employee function db.
I was serendipitously the lead DS for analyzing the effectiveness of the ‘starting 5 minutes past’. After joining and cleaning a lot of the data, the data showed:
1) at the start of the trial, meetings ended on time. Then after few weeks it slip to ending late, negating the usefulness. Other orgs did not see meetings running late.
2) ICs tend to stick around and over run meetings, while managers tend to leave meetings on time.
3) if I remember right, we had a survey data that showed pretty clearly that managers prefer the ‘starting 5 minutes past’ while ICs do not care or have negative sentiment.
The biggest predictor for people who prefer starting late is how crowded their schedules are. Managers tend to have very crowded schedules which means they want a break between meetings, while ICs prefer not having to waste time waiting.
In the end we reverted back to normal schedule. It was just easier for busy people to bounce early.
I’ve experienced this all before in similar ways. The metric for meetings ending on time isn’t even very useful because when it’s needed people will ask “do you have a hard stop?” or similarly agree to continue the meeting. Often because of all the points you made, it’s the IC that stick around to talk about finer points or specifics of what was decided or discussed. It’s best to do this while it’s fresh and between people that can “talk shop” at a granular level (whatever that means for your org/team). It’s actually a good thing your ICs want to collaborate or align separate from management. If you’re a manager and you could technically continue on the meeting, consider opting out to give them space as peers. I often ask “do you all need me to stay one?” and most often it’s a No. It all means that it’s basically 2 meetings occurring and it’s the scheduling calendar artifact that is faulty.
>ICs tend to stick around and over run meetings, while managers tend to leave meetings on time.
That makes 200% sense. A couple or more ICs tend to want to stick around to go off topic or drill down on some thing if they don't have a conflict. People who aren't expressly relevant to that or have a conflict drop at that time.
You're basically seeing the post-meeting hall conversation of the ICs in your data.
Additionally, most meetings are worthless drivel from an IC perspective. The off-topic/drilldown is usually when ICs actually discuss topics relevant to them and get into a level of detail on issues that actually helps further the project.
> The biggest predictor for people who prefer starting late is how crowded their schedules are. Managers tend to have very crowded schedules which means they want a break between meetings, while ICs prefer not having to waste time waiting.
I have had a few senior managers (at Google) who ask for all the meetings _they_ attend to start 5 minutes late.
This seems 100% reasonable to me. No need for it to be an org policy. Just a affordance for the people who spend 95% of their working hours in meetings.
I've also had several senior managers at Google who _don't_ do this, but are 5 minutes late for every meeting anyway. This alternative is pretty annoying!
The problem is that final decisions tend to be made in the last 30 seconds of a meeting. If you're a manager with a stake in the outcome, you can't leave the meeting until you've ensured that the outcome works for you. Leaving 5 min early is often simply not an option. While arriving 5 minutes late is. It's not an ego thing -- it's the fact that meeting leaders often let meetings run long.
That almost sounds insulting. Like management is the only party with vision, drive and a goal and everybody else is just there to help. When often management just manages and true innovation really comes from people of all positions.
On the contrary, it is a helpful term. Before the term, it was common to ask "are you a manager", and then you were defined oppositionally, as not-a-manager.
Whereas IC having its own identity means it has many positive connotations. "I'd much rather be an IC, so I can get things done" etc. You can still be very senior without having direct reports or having to do line management, often seen as a necessary evil.
In my reading it makes it easy to even spin managers as the bad ones: ICs contribute individually and directly something of worth. Managers contribute only indirectly via ICs.
The term isn’t used to define everyone who isn’t a manager. It’s used to define people like Lead and Principle Engineers who are a subject matter expert, have influence in defining a project, but have chosen to continue in engineering roles rather than switching to management. Often their position in the company is parallel to the managers rather than subordinates, hence the “individual” part of the term.
This requires the intentionality of the organization though. They seem to default to managers make the decisions. Ideally, managers manage people, IC execute and you get the "right" people in the room to make decisions, regardless of title or track.
> This requires the intentionality of the organization though. They seem to default to managers make the decisions.
if a company doesn’t intend to utilise IC then they don’t have ICs, just regular software engineers.
An IC is only an IC if the organisation is structured to utilise them as an IC. It isn’t a job title, it’s more to do with how an individual is utilised in a company. It’s their placement in the org structure.
> IC execute
IC plus engineers execute. IC are a subset of engineers.
As @hnlmorg mentioned, the term is only typically used for people who are at a level where they could be managers, primarily supporting others, but are instead still contributing directly themselves. It's almost the opposite sense from your "insulting", in my experience.
SME and IC are functionally different. SME informs, IC creates. Often, IC aren't SME in the space they're developing in, because they're SME of the technology instead of the business.
That's fine to do that, but kind of pointless. Everyone is then a "SME" in their own job space and thus the term is kind of useless. So, just replace every mention of SME outside of your company to "Business SME" instead of "Technology SME" and you'll understand what we're talking about.
Or, if you truly do not need anyone but a "technologist" to deliver product, you must work in a pretty simple business space! I work in healthcare and our PhD's and MD's have a very, very different knowledge space than I do, I and I deeply respect their contributions.
This whole thing reminds me why I never wanna work for someone again. From what I saw at Google it all just ends up being classist top-down BS of who isn't allowed at the big kids table, or bottom-up BS by insisting they aren't the SME just the IC and we can't do anything until the XYZ PM SME TL and/or manager approve.
It is unparsable Dilbert nonsense to anyone outside of specific scenarios. And it causes interminable discontent. Because what if the SME is the PM because they know business and tech but the SME is actually the IC because they know the tech and its tech but what if the manager is actually the SME because they're running the tech and may need to redelegate if the IC needs vacation, blah blah blah.
(job history: college dropout waiter => my own startup, sold => Google for 8 years => my own startup)
I'm sorry you've had bad experience working with other people, but in my experience as a developer, having multiple SME's available is indispensable to real alignment and fast development. I've primarily worked in startups, not big companies, and have often worked in healthcare. In healthcare, you get beyond your "I'm a big smart engineer" ego BS and you are willing to listen to the PhD's and MD's that help inform clinical workflows. From my perspective, I would never ask a clinical researcher or a doctor to understand our react app, and they aren't going to ask me to have deep understanding on medical details and clinical workflows. We work together to deliver high quality useful software quickly.
My PM SME validated my workflows and I found Jesus in them then my MBA TL PhD…bla bla bla.
A human being who avoided corporate brainrot just writes “I worked with John and he was indispensable because (insert reasons you wrote here)”
I’m 37 and never heard of this acronym. That’s the entry-level version of my point. Not that other people hurt me or people knowing things is actually bad.
True. It is part of the general industrial ritual of reducing workers to a number or a letter combination. That way, managers reduce the emotional attachment to the people, and they can fire them more easily.
If, instead, you would be Tom, Bill and Biff, there is a risk that the manager would build attachment, and make it harder to treat you bad. If you're IC1, IC2 and IC3, you can be exchanged like machine parts when you break, without anyone crying.
No that’s not really how it works in tech at all. There’s a deep recognition that individual engineers (and other functional practitioners) have important knowledge and expertise that is essential. Of course you do need some overlap and redundancy so that people can take sick days and avoid the wheels falling off through attrition, but competent shops aren’t ever treating people as numbers. To the contrary good ICs are widely recognized as being much less full-of-shit then management.
> The biggest predictor for people who prefer starting late is how crowded their schedules are. Managers tend to have very crowded schedules which means they want a break between meetings, while ICs prefer not having to waste time waiting.
People don't know what 'as few as possible' means though. It needs to be clearer than that. As a rule I encourage my reports to consider:
- Does it even need to be a meeting? Keeping meetings to things that need 'a discussion or decision', and keeping updates and announcements to chat or email works fairly well.
- Does the meeting give you any value, or do you bring value to it? If both are no they should decline it.
- Is there an agenda with expected outcomes? No agenda and no goal means it should be declined.
- Are you doing something that's a higher priority? Seeing one of my reports in a meeting when there's an active incident in progress gets me asking questions.
- Does the person running the meeting share notes afterwards? One thing I've noticed over the last couple of decades is that people are much happier to skip a meeting if they'll still hear about what happens afterwards. People don't skip them if being in the meeting is the only way to know about what was discussed or decided. I always encourage people to write some notes and share them if they've set up a meeting now.
>much happier to skip a meeting if they'll still hear about what happens afterwards.
If you're just a 'follower' of what's going on, that's fine. The problem shows up when you have some stakeholder or steering ability.
If you miss meeting about X and don't bring up discussion about Y then other person A may not talk about Z that affects X. But I agree that every meeting should have a point and total number of meetings should be minimized.
> there is social pressure not to allow meetings to run much past the top of the hour.
I've never seen this pressure.
> meetings rarely started on the dot anyway before this change.
It's like I live in an entirely different world.
Start meetings when they say they're going to start. People will learn to show up quickly. I think that works better than trying to psychologically game people into cooperation. That just starts the classic treadmill. You might have that one friend that you tell to show up half an hour before everyone else. They mentally add the half hour back because you're always giving such early times. Better IMO to just keep things simple. Let people leave when they need to. Show up on time.
My bosses (leadership) are in meetings literally all day long. Them showing up 5 minutes late to an internal meeting has nothing to do with them "learning". It's entirely about priorities. Teaching them to "show up on time" does nothing and only hurts me for being obtuse with them.
Unfortunately this is the reality. If I’m on with a big external partner/client and they need to finish their thought I’m going to be late to an internal meeting. If it’s too late I will try to slack and say go ahead.
Yep. Execs who are booked pretty solid with meetings, including with customers and field teams making important decisions, will sometimes be late for or even miss meetings.
Last job, the senior guy who I knew missed our breakfast meeting to discuss a job. Turned out that he had something come up with one of the regions and his admin didn't have my cell. Ended up with the job anyway where I stayed for a long time.
Well, yes, but also the critical attendees (people with something substantial to add) of the meeting aren't there on time, so the meeting cannot start on time, which leads to a culture where no one shows up on time. I was flummoxed yesterday when an SVP scheduled a large meeting and was the only critical attendee, and started exactly on time, within seconds. I showed up at the top of the hour + 49 seconds and missed at least 30 seconds of content.
On the exact opposite side, I remember when I first started working and was used to keeping an eye on the clock because of, oh, 16 years of school that had us timed to the minute. I'd walk into meeting rooms right when it was supposed to start and interrupt whoever was in the previous meeting and was going over. Surprised a lot of people like that.
In the early 90s I had a new department director who would bring a kitchen timer to every meeting. Meetings started on precisely on time and the timer was set to 22 minutes. When that bell rung, you could finish the thought, but the meeting would break at the 25 minute mark. If you didn’t accomplish the agenda, another meeting could be set, but it needed to be at least 2 hours after the one that just broke. Even meetings without him had to follow the rule. He also had a request that were were supposed to follow if we could, which was to allow ourselves to only schedule one meeting in an hour.
Obviously it was pretty chaotic at first and I recall us being pretty brutal in our assessment of his “crazy meeting quirk”. However after a few weeks something pretty interesting happened:
- Brevity and productive discussion became common. People usually went with their best opinion
- we usually finished the agenda (probably because we set reasonable agendas for 22 mis) and rarely needed that rollover meeting
- we spent more time at our desks actually doing instead of just talking about doing. I recall that team being really productive overall.
Later when I moved into leadership roles I attempted to bring this methodology but my own leadership generally was not supportive enough to allow me to be as rigid and I didn’t see the same success with the method…but to this day 32+ years later I still think it had merit.
I had asked him where he had learned it. My recollection is that he formulated it after reading that the average person’s attention span in a meeting was 27 minutes and he figured no one was productive after that, so he decided it was pointless to go longer.
I find it interesting when people such as the writer of the linked post take their experience and think it can just be applied to everyone else, and it'll always be a positive outcome.
A team I once ran made rules their meetings would end 5 minutes early, to create some space. We didn’t have the power to change the whole org, but we could control team meetings to create space before other meetings. Since the whole team was on board with this, there was always someone who would call out that it was time for the meeting to end, to prevent them running long.
At the same time, we had a rule that meetings would start when they say they start. This was after being incredibly frustrated by a guy on another team who would schedule his meetings to start on the hour, but then display a message that said we’d start at 5 after, to give people time to join, assuming other meetings would run long. This felt like he was wasting everyone’s time who showed up on time, and had the net effect of everyone showing up late to his meetings. If people learned they should show up late to his meetings, they can learn to show up on time to our meetings. Then we can stop waiting around hoping that everyone shows up. When someone shows up late to a meeting that’s already well underway, that sends a strong signal that they should be on time for the next one.
Sounds like the issue is back to back meetings then.
Also every meeting taking the exact time it was scheduled for is a bit of an org smell too. If you have your meeting etiquette dialed in you should hopefully be finishing meetings early more often than running over. If you are running to the minute or over all the time you might just be having crap meetings.
Novelty might be a factor but the author was relying on "social pressure" to wrap things up by top of the hour. That pressure doesn't exist in all work cultures.
Obviously, meetings shouldn't be longer than they need to be. But 15-20 minutes of unused time tend to be dead. That's mostly not long enough to do anything useful.
That said, nothing wrong with 30 minute meetings. In my previous analyst stint we tried to default to that--especially for non-clients. Didn't need all the throat-clearing stuff and industry background that we knew perfectly well.
This is a bad idea. We used a software that did this for a while, and everybody scheduled meetings 30 minutes longer than necessary and specified the real time in the description, just to avoid cutting people off mid sentence.
To me ending at 0:55 is a million times more logical than starting at 0:05… and if there was an issue then rolling back to 0:50, or 0:45, or whatever it takes for honest accounting and/or meeting discipline to emerge.
Decades ago at an engineering firm I worked for it was baked into the groupware settings.
The smelly basement nerd running IT seemed normal back then, but here are in 2026… Turns out he was an unsung smelly genius ahead of his time. A giant among men who bathe.
Meetings running over is avoidable. People just need to stop enabling bad behavior.
I work with a PM who is notorious for meetings running long. People just start hanging up while she’s talking if they have another meeting to go to. When she start hearing a bunch of beeps of people leaving, she starts to get the message that she needs to continue on the next meeting and stop. People are tired of it and don’t entertain it anymore, as much as she keeps trying to talk.
You have correctly identified that this is a cultural issue not a meeting software issue.
I often have meetings with people who have to deal constantly with urgent operational issues, that cost $mega if not solved on time. I accept they may be late, but try hard not to keep them waiting.
At previous companies this wasnt the case, so we started meetings on time
My org had the opposite problem in the Covid remote transition. At one point we successfully enforced meetings ending 5 minutes before the hour, but then somebody would just open the next meeting 5 minutes early.
Good idea, after trying it a number of times, it has some downsides. Most calendar applications cannot clearly display 5 minutes past, and the meeting appears to start on the hour visually. One of the attendees ends up dialling in at the hour, and then everyone gets a notification that the meeting has started.
Half of the people who get the notification click "join" without checking. This ends up with a half-populated meeting room. The issue becomes obvious, and somebody says, "Let's dial back in 5 mins", and drops off. Half of the people like the idea and drop off, while the rest decide to stay and chat.
Meanwhile, some of those who dropped off see this as a great opportunity to grab a brew. That inadvertently triggers some water-cooler, kettle-corner chats, and they end up running late for the 5-past. The rest usually get engaged in something else to make use of 5 minutes, and miss 5-past since no new notifications are issued due to the people already chatting in the meeting :)
I want Teams to show me the dollar cost of meetings. Enter an approximation of the average salary for people involved in the meeting, multiplied by the number of people in the meeting, and broadcast the cost ticking up every second to every person in the meeting.
I don’t think anything else will be ans effective at reducing the number of meetings, reducing the length of meetings and reducing the number of people who are late to meetings.
Okay, but only if this is balanced by accounting for the cost of IC engineers’ solo time too. Sometimes it does feel like meetings waste a lot of time/money quickly, but I’ve also watched people burn money by not having meetings and going the wrong direction for weeks, watched teams over-engineer the crap out of features nobody asked for, watched people tear out huge swaths of working code they just didn’t like and waste years re-implementing it, only to have it be buggier for a few years and then end up with basic design flaws, sometimes the same ones as before, and sometimes new ones…
A blanket force to reduce meetings isn’t quite the right incentive; we need incentives to have the right amount of meetings and to make them more effective. The right amount of meetings is probably always going to be more than ICs want, and less than managers want. But if you have any reliable ways to make that happen, to keep meetings effective, that’s gold. Charge money for that knowledge and consult, or become a CEO, either way you’ll get rich!
I've worked a place that tried it. It does nothing. It's a random number that nobody cares about. Everyone quickly concludes that running a company is expensive and gets used to that. It's not their money, after all. They don't get to spend the saved money on a fancy lunch or something. It's just more money going into the pockets of owners/investors.
People have meetings because there's a need for a decision that requires conversation, and they're often late because they're coming from other meetings that ran late because they were having difficulty coming to a decision. Awareness of cost doesn't affect these at all. The decisions still need to happen.
I was bad in being on meeting discipline. The only thing that consistently works: start on time, end on time, and don’t wait for late arrivals. If someone joins late, they catch up from notes/recording.
There’s a famous example from the Lucasfilm/Pixar deal: a Lucasfilm exec used to arrive late as a power move, until Steve Jobs started the meeting exactly on time without him. The exec walked in 5 minutes later and had already lost the room. And Jobs gets the deal.
> The only thing that consistently works: start on time, end on time, and don’t wait for late arrivals.
Agree, but that doesn't solve the problem of back to back mtgs. In some cases people have to physically move from one mtg room to another, or they need to use the restroom, etc.
Having the 5 min gap really is needed for those types of things.
How about just be punctual, respecting the time others have agreed to meet with you? Simpler solution than what this article suggests. People will abuse that system just the same anyway.
How do you plan to show up on time if one of your meetings ends at 2pm, the next one starts at 2pm, the meeting rooms are 3 floors apart, and you need to go to the restroom because you've been in meetings since lunch and need to pee? You're going to clone yourself?
Tell the people in the first meeting at the start that you’ll need to leave a few minutes early, to set the expectation and make sure any important stuff is done early. Then when it hits your transition window, politely tell them you have to run and leave.
The thing is, a lot of meetings start with presenting evidence of a problem, then have some discussion of the problem and potential options, and only in the last 10 minutes do the proposed actions turn into firm decisions with names against them.
And often if I'm in a meeting it's because I think the problem is important and I want it solved. Getting permission for my team to fix things, or getting other teams to agree to fix things, is the point.
In my experience, this is a time management problem. Meetings tend to fill the time available. Rarely are there meetings that have to last a full hour and could not have been over after 50 minutes.
Or what makes 60 minutes so magical that you can wrap up a meeting quickly once that marker approaches? People need to leave, that's why. If it had been clear from the start that people will leave after 50 minutes, you can wrap up by then, same way you wrap things up at 60.
There is a lot of slack in meetings. What you need is someone to manage the available time and move things along, make sure that there is room at the end to get to a conclusion. You will have these last 10 minutes after 40 minutes instead of 50 if you pay attention to time and keep things moving.
This can be done, even with time to spare for pleasantries. I know this because I've been in meetings and I have run meetings like this. It helps if you can start on time and don't have to wait for stragglers in the beginning who needed a break between their back-to-back meetings.
I'd rather have a 5-minute break built-in for everyone by starting 5-past and actually enforce meeting end-times. Behaviors would change if people knew they had 25 or 55 minutes for a meeting and that folks would just leave when the time is up.
Seen from within the meeting, it does not really matter if you start 5 minutes late or end 5 minutes early.
I think the point is to reduce meeting time from 60 minutes to 55 or even 50 and be firm about it. People need to expect to start and end on time; giving them a natural break between helps make this happen even for people whose job requires them to be in back-to-back meetings.
Personally, I think starting on the hour (or half-hour, etc) and ending "early" is better, because it tends to sync well with the calendars of external folks.
But in the end, moving start or end time is only part of the solution. This is a time-management problem, and in addition to constraining the available time, it also needs proper management of the available time within the meeting.
> Seen from within the meeting, it does not really matter if you start 5 minutes late or end 5 minutes early.
It matters because there sometimes are meeting where it is very important to know how much time you have to prepare appropriately. As long as the expectations are set beforehand, it matters less.
I roughly agree with the rest of your post. "Just be punctual" is a cop out that ignores the fact that I need to have enough breaks between meetings before I can even think about being punctual. Make space for breaks and enforce the time allocated is imo the solution, it matters less where exactly the 5-minute break fits (but I tend to agree that people would more likely end on the full hour, so that would mean we need to start 5 past).
I work as an Engineering Manager ...
If you try to end at 1:55pm, you will likely talk until
2:00pm anyway, which then runs into the next meeting.
This is more a statement to the lack of respect for other's time than anything else, as evidenced by the presumption; "you will likely talk until 2:00pm anyway."
Engineering Managers which see value in giving coworkers a five minute break between meetings ensure the breaks exist. Those which do not and only pay lip service to the concept will burn through predefined breaks no matter where they exist on a clock face.
In my experience, the recipe for having meetings interface smoothly with the time that surrounds them is twofold:
1. Constrain the meeting duration to a slighly smaller blocks than natural time.
2. Be diligent and efficient in managing time within the meeting.
That means, for 60 minutes of natural time, 50 minutes of meetings.
You start on time, you end on time.
The first few minutes are for pleasantries (important!) and getting everyone focused on the topic and goals of the meeting. This gives people the possibility of running slightly late without missing anything too important, but they still come into an ongoing meeting and are noticeably late.
But: you quickly move on to the meat of the meeting, even if people are still missing, and keep things moving while having an eye on time. (Sometimes, you can even start without key people there and at least get everyone else synced and thinking about the topic.)
Once you get close to the end (that is, 40 out of 50 minutes of runtime for an "hour"-long meeting, but depending on subject and people), you make sure to come to a conclusion and wrap things up by the 50 minute mark. If it's clear that's not enough time, you move to wrapping things up enough and discuss how you will keep the discussion going after the meeting time runs out. In any case, you have some time for parting pleasantries, while the meeing is officially over on time and people are free to leave.
This leaves a bit of slack, while people expect to start and end on time, and it crucially gives everybody enough time to move between meetings with some breaks, even those unfortunate folks whose jobs consist of lots of back-to-back meetings.
Starting on the (half) hour and ending after 50 (25) minutes works well, in my experience, and syncs well with the calendars of external meeting participants.
I know this works, because I have been in meetings like this, and I have run meetings like this. Of course, this will not work in 100% of all meetings, but it can go a long way in making a lot of them much better.
I've found myself watching and waiting for at least 3 people to join a meeting before I connect to avoid the inevitable minutes of greetings and unrelated discussion that always happens. Our meetings always start 5-10 minutes _past_ the scheduled time.
Depends. If it’s with ICs, sure. But as soon as some manager or someone with a leadership position joins, then it’s just plain work. So I dislike chitchatting with such people.
I know we don’t get to choose our coworkers and teams necessarily and experiences vary, but I am sorry you dread/dislike a little chit chat with your teammates:(
I think it's likely a problem with me specifically - I said no to going to celebrations like christmas lunch etc. But at the same time our team doesn't interact with each other socially in any other way. I'm very new to the job, so it isn't that I pushed everyone away from me, there just wasn't any closeness in the first place. It doesn't really help that I don't much like the job either.
But there are other times for that, why in a meeting? I chitchat during day 1-1 (virtual/irl) with my teammates, I don't, for etiquette, have to do it again when starting a meeting.
I agree maybe ideally not in a meeting, but humans are imperfect and the larger the number of people invited, the greater the chance it’s going to take a few mins for everyone to arrive. So inevitably the folks who are prompt do some water cooler talk while waiting, and depending on the day/group/topic the water cooler talk might even extend a few mins after everyone has arrived, especially if people are enjoying the convo.
> But there are other times for that, why in a meeting?
If you're in-person in an office, there are plenty of times for random social interaction. If you're full-remote, pre-meeting/post-meeting time is a low-friction source of social interaction.
I do love that zoom feature that shows the avatars of who’s joined already. Although I don’t like the game theory of it when every attendee is watching those icons…
Same! If I see the first people joining are managers or above, I just wait until I see other engineers join. I hate managers talk, I couldn’t care less about them.
Those awkward 5 minutes of greetings and unrelated discussion are because other people don't join until 5 minutes past, and sitting in silence would be even more awkward.
I suppose this may be the case for a lot of people. In my case it is always the two managers talking about their life and/or child's successes. This still occurs when _they_ are the late ones.
Fine, just like literally thousands of previous weekends before this one. And now I’m going to ask you the same and then zone out for 5 minutes because I literally couldn’t care less.
It’s been shown before that a couple minutes of pleasantries helps the meeting. I’m guessing it helps regulate everyone on a similar vibe. A lot like saying hello to someone and maybe how are you doing before launching into any requests.
The teaching model is much like that proposed by the originator of this thread. Classes are 50 minutes instead of an hour (and similar for 1.5 hour classes). The start time is 5 minutes past the hour and the end time is 5 minutes before the hour. This gives students and professors enough time to get from one lecture to another (unless they have to commute across a big campus, in which case they simply do not sign up for classes that are too close in time).
I've served on a big committee on campus that solve the timing problem simply. It starts exactly on time. Every item has a designated number of minutes. And if it appears that we will not finish on time, there is a vote on whether to extend the meeting by 30 minutes.
I realize that a lot of the discussion on this thread involves bosses and employees, which is quite a different thing, of course. There's no point in starting a meeting at a designated time if the big boss is running late.
That is because the purpose of meeting is often only to keep the big boss informed of what their team is doing. The team can operate without the meeting. The big boss cannot. Their job is to know what their team is doing.
I have found significant frustration since the pandemic in the most unexpected place: the new expectation of punctuality for online meetings. In meatspace, in the before times, if a meeting was set for 2pm in the board room, everyone understood this to mean 2pm was the time to come through the door and chat for a bit while everyone got comfortable. The actual meeting would start at 2:05-2:10.
Online, there is no equivalent to walking in the door for a bit of a chit chat. Everyone just materializes instantly and then we’re supposed to be ready to go by 2:01. I miss meatspace for meetings and the more casual, human-matched pace.
I do connect 5 minutes past, but after the start of the meeting, just to miss the 'how was your weekend', 'let's do an introduction round' and other nonsense (the email invite already has intro's; i know people don't read, but that's not my problem).
We mostly turned our internal and partner meetings around these days; meetings are organised and distributed by who thinks they are needed, everyone who could be needed is included (they basically have to answer when called upon during the meeting; that also keeps the meetings within bounds as no-one is going to answer anymore once the time passed) but they are called in only when needed which is to say, almost never in reality. This showed us the enormous waste of these meetings before.
Alternatively, join my meetings on time. You click End Call, then Join. It takes 3 seconds.
You get Outlook reminders 15 minutes in advance. Webex/Teams notifications 5 minutes in advance. I’m sure you can make your watch vibrate or something.
People at my office join every meeting 5 minutes late because no one expects meetings to start on time anymore. So I guess we’re following this advice in all but the nominally scheduled time. Drives me nuts.
I'm absolutely baffled by colleague who somehow manage to be five minutes late to an online meeting while working from home. Because you're right, you get a reminder 10 - 15 minutes in advance, you just need to click the join meeting button, you're already at the computer. We have, for remote meetings, a five minute buffer at the start of every meeting, for people to "settle in" makes no sense, just start the meeting.
In general a lot of people just aren't being serious about meetings, which I guess is also why many hate them. So key indicators of a bad meeting is: runs more than 60 minutes, no meeting plan, documents or talking points provided in advance, more than five people (unless the meeting is more of a briefing).
> So key indicators of a bad meeting is: runs more than 60 minutes, no meeting plan, documents or talking points provided in advance, more than five people (unless the meeting is more of a briefing).
Seems about right, but wouldn't you agree that the majority of those meetings either could have been an email, or could have been handled in 20% of the time, if they had been planed?
Maybe, I think most people just don't give shit about any of this and for them wasting an hour feels "productive", like they've achieved something. After all, nobody can hear your beautiful voice over email.
TBH unless the meeting has a clear agenda and not just a vague title, I only join it when someone mention me. This allows me to be able to actually work and/or take breaks.
We got bunch of internal meetings starting at quarter past instead of full hour and mostly we can get it finished in 45mins.
Gives people room to breathe for those who are back to back scheduled full day. When they have calls with customers or other departments they are usually late anyway and don’t have time to go to toilet in between because as always other meetings run past time.
and wireless headset - i've done everything from cooking lunch, answering the door, toilet, walking around the house, laying in bed. When you aren't required to be watching someones screen, there is a lot of freedom.
This doesn't work well if you don't have a microphone though. though you could just join from your phone.
A norm of scheduling the “start” on the hour or half hour while really starting the meeting five minutes later also works. That way, attendees have an opportunity to arrive “on time” and chat if they like, building relationships in the process. The freedom to arrive at any point during the first five minutes also helps to create the kind of ease that’s conducive to serious discussion. This second part is particularly important when power dynamics might otherwise derail real discussion.
Because five minutes of pure chitchat can feel excessive to some folks, though, a three-minute norm probably works better—-especially because the off-centeredness has the informal aesthetic that, again, forms a better backdrop for serious discussion.
Whether it's planned or not, that seems like a pretty normal dynamic. "Let's give people a few minutes and then we'll get started." Especially with back to back meetings which are the norm for a lot of people, they need a few minutes to grab coffee/water, use the bathroom, etc. (And, of course, with in person meetings they usually need some time to run to the next room.)
Yep. In general, when you see social solutions emerge in the wild from the free choices of participants, there is an underlying logic that’s doing important work. It’s easy to think you can improve over these natural solutions, but usually you can’t.
I recall working at this place that prided itself on starting meetings a minute early, as if trying to prove a point. The early starts did prove that, yes, you could get people to scramble, but not much else.
If you truly believe in this, just effectively block Teams between :55 and :05 every hour. You can always allow exceptions with presubmitted motivation.
Shifting everything from :00 to :05 is theatre at best, and a slippery slope more often.
A similar concept has been used for university lectures to start 15 minutes after the full hour. This was due to nobody having watches and everything being synced to the church bells ringing at the full hour. Then you had 15 minutes to get to the next lecture (in another building). Starting time was given as ct (cum tempore, with time) or st (sine tempore, without time). Usually only st was marked as everybody assumed the 15 minutes delay.
I think unstructured chat with colleagues is undervalued, though I also respect people who want no part of it.
At one place where we were remote, we had a morning daily (I don't care to argue the usefulness of dailies, though).
When I joined as an IC, I added an emphatically-optional 15 minute "coffee chat" meeting preceding it on the same video chat link. Most people pretty consistently joined at some point before the start of the daily. Sometimes chat was about work, most often, it was just social.
IMO, it was worth it. It was low friction because it was next to a scheduled meeting at a time where a morning beverage was reasonable, and people felt no pressure to join.
You can tell this is written by a manager who has never written a line of code in their life. For me as an actual programmer, meetings were always the time where I had to stop working. It's staggering to me that managers still think real work happens in meetings.
At my job, when the meeting time is over it is over. So everyone knows that they need to work the thing during the allocated time.
People might skip or leave the meeting at any time or simply say they need more context before attending.
Zero BS
If there are conflicts, the technical points, pros and cons should be on the table, or at least raise that it seems likely that people will receive those soon.
If the meeting detects a failure, we find a way, if we already completely failed we raise to the upper levels and we refresh the plans. We trust people to be professionals though we understand personal matters can always be on the way.
The counterpart is no one has a career ladder, there is little to no feedback. People can't raise so they leave the company if they are not happy. The only way to take the lead is when someone leaves
For some larger meetings during the pandemic, managers started scheduling them 5 minutes after to give people time to join, but because people's reminders triggered at the same relative time all it meant was people started joining meetings 5 minutes later negating any perceived benefit.
For companies using Google Calendar as the primary meeting scheduler, one issue with this is that there's a setting for short meetings, but it only supports ending the official meeting 5 or 10 minutes early: "End 30 minute meetings 5 minutes early and longer meetings 10 minutes early".
But if you're in a meeting already, people are expecting that they have time until the hour or half hour point, so in spite of the meeting officially ending at H:25, it really almost always lasts until H:30 unless you have someone who wants to leave early and can enforce it by actually leaving.
It surprises me a bit that even engineering managers at Google agree with this policy and yet it's not an option in the Google Calendar settings.
Exactly. I had a manager who said "Standup with start exactly on time", and stuck to it. And after a couple of meetings with some people coming in a minute or two late and realizing he was for real... everyone started showing up on time.
this is exactly the way to do it. i have a recurring large meeting where the first 5 minutes is ALWAYS "lets wait for a quorum". Guess what time I show up to the meeting? 5 minutes late, of course.
I suggested this to management at my company and they shot it down almost immediately. Narrow-minded middle manager types generally aren't receptive to this kind of out-of-the-box thinking unless they think it's an idea they've come up with.
It's equally silly to the method my mom used for clock in the bathroom when I was a kid: she would set the clock to be 5 minutes later, so we would rush to get to school on time. Needless to say, I just learned to subtract 5 minutes from it and that was the end.
When the start/end doesn’t matter as much for my team as changing the default duration to 25/50 minutes. This way even if a meeting would start at the quarter hour you would always end up with a small gap between.
If you have so many back-to-back meetings, maybe put in a school bell that chimes at 5 minutes before and 5 minutes after the hour. Please just put this in your conference rooms so those of us who know how to evade meetings don't have to hear it as well.
I mean you can't make people read an email but I feel like you would have a much higher success rate if the content was in the email itself. You're competing with the other work that people have to do and actually get graded on, why add a layer of indirection?
People don't read the email itself, they just want to 'over it together' because lazy/no reading comprehension/whatever the reason is. So many meetings have 10+ people there who have no clue what this meeting is about while the agenda, questions, possible answers etc are in the email. So I usually start (if it's my responsibility to do so) with; how about you read the email for a few minutes before we start. Which is usually met with 'why don't you go over it line by line with us, share screen and read it'. Drives me bonkers. Granted, these are usually very big partner companies for which the employees (including middle management) see this as some break in their day, so they don't really care about the time spent or the outcome.
TBH, if everyone involved is invested in what is being said, you don't need to be in person and you don't need to shut laptops.
If that is the majority of your meetings, you are in a good place.
The mistake is to think the rules are what makes the meeting useful. Having the right audience, an agenda, and appropriate expectations for the outcomes are the useful things.
The problem with these kinds of advices is that it requires ALL teams to have buy-in to this idea.
As soon as a few teams start booking meetings on the hour or half-hour, this whole idea goes out the window and downsides begin to outweigh the positives.
The other downside, as others have mentioned, is that eventually meetings begin to run late.
The best advice about meeting is, in my opinion:
1. Don't have back to back meetings
2. Try to have at least 1 clear point for the agenda
3. Give at least some heads up. Don't pull people into meetings suddenly.
Maybe I’m just a silly lab engineer who doesn’t know how big companies work (i did work at a startup for a time but that’s even more anti meeting than a lab) but I feel like maybe if you have so many back to back meetings that you need to plan around them you should have fewer meetings?
Also why is there a hard end time rather than a maximum time? What is even going on? How are you getting work done?
At large companies, there's just a lot of coordination needed. Which means a lot of meetings typically. Probably more than there is needed but one of the points of a large company is having a critical mass of people pulling in roughly the same direction(s).
>also why is there a hard end time rather than a maximum time?
Depends on company, culture, and individuals. If you get through the purpose of the meeting, the meeting organizer may well say "Let's give everyone 20 minutes (or whatever) back." I do think that it's a worthwhile goal to default to <1 hour meetings.
In any case, agendas and thinking about how the meeting time should actually be spent is worthwhile.
At least at my multinational company, we have teams iny department that are 12 hours ahead of us. That makes the window of overlap time we have small, so we often have blocks of meetings during that overlap time that compete for time slots for staff that make higher level decisions.
Our org does 5 minutes past for a 30-minute window, and 10 minutes past for an hour or longer. Works great once everyone gets it. Can be confusing for new hires.
I don't remember the last time i had a meeting that was productive. Last time i worked in the office, the hallway discussions where the productive ones and now working remote most of the time is just being able to work with good people that understand text and work by messages that works good. Even video meetings with good people tends to be waste of time.
Where I work, we have company-wide breaks between 10.00-10.15, 12.00-13.00 and 15.00-15.15. These cannot easily be enforced with external parties, but running an internal meeting over a break will need an explanation. What I noticed is that back-to-back meetings are more likely "capped" at 2 hours, so it's easier for people to show up on time and energized.
You are treating the symptoms by doing this. If you are a serious manager then you should be serious about time management. Making sure your team has discipline is a manager problem and consistently being late shows that there are fundamental, principle discipline problems with your team.
> You might fear that people will start arriving at 1:07pm, but I have seen the opposite. They respect the new time. They arrive by 1:05pm, ready to work.
We do the :05 thing and this is exactly what happens every meeting: all of them end up starting between :07 and :10 since people leave their desk to find the room at :05.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me feel like I’m surrounded by idiots.
Waiting for attendance is simply scheduled into the agenda. The first 5 minutes of the agenda is reserved for quorum. There is absolutely no need for making it any more complicated, or playing games with the scheduled time like the post suggests. Childish nonsense.
When I have 5 hours of meetings in a given day, I'd much rather have them back-to-back, rather than with a half-hour or hour in between. I try to pack all my meetings for the week into a couple of days, so that I have the rest of the week to do non-meeting work.
And join early of it's convenient, but actually spend those first 5 on social interaction. Because one problem with online meetings is they feel "all business" without explicitly making time to just be humans.
This works even better if your neighboring teams start their meeting at hour or half hour. Then towards the end of the meeting you can say "I'm getting kicked out of the office".
We've been doing this at Qualcomm for a while, and I really like it. While meetings do run over sometimes, the practice has still built this acceptance around short breaks between meetings. No one bats an eye if we've got two consecutive meetings together, the first one ends late, and we wait five minutes before starting or joining the next one.
In fact, having done it for so long, it surprisingly really annoys me when our vendors schedule 60 minute meetings on the hour.
I don't know about others but if I'm gonna have 3 meetings in a day, I'd take them back-to-back anyday. Then the rest of my day is available for focus work.
We start the meeting at 2 minutes past. Meetings end at 10 minutes before the hour (or half hour) - yes, "30 minute" meetings are only effecitvely 18 minutes, but we leave a few minutes of buffer.
Any meeting that goes over an hour has a mandatory 10 minute break at the 50 minute mark every hour.
If you're not on time..tough sh*t we're starting without you. Use the AI minutes or something to catch up.
There's no substitute for leadership establishing a culture of meeting discipline. By and large, every org will follow the example leadership sets.
If leadership blesses this cutesy little five-minutes-late maneuver, implicitly accepting that meetings don't end on time, then meetings won't end on time at 5 after the hour either.
Some meetings are more important than others. So losing 5 minutes of a useless meeting is better than not going over 5 minutes for the important meeting.
Everyone wants to think their time is valuable, but this is relative.
this rule makes all worse sorry. our PO/BE tries to do this but no one cares anymore. why not just start/end at a given time? meeting starts at 9, be there, it ends at 10, rage quit.
some teams at my org start 5 mins past some don't... result, some people hop on early and keep waiting and some meetings ppl don't show up for at least 5 mins.
I've always wondered at the company cultures between Google and Microsoft - Gcal supports ending meetings five minutes early while Outlook supports starting five minutes late.
At Microsoft it was obvious how five minutes late was optimal - meetings usually dragged on past their end time anyhow, but never started early so it gave folks time to eg get to their next meeting (in person), coffee, bio break, etc.
Does Google have a culture of meetings ending on the dot with finality? I just don't see that working with human nature of "one last thing" and the urge to spend an extra few minutes to hammer something out.
It's just laughable to me to bother with a "ends five minutes early" option. It just doesn't work - you know you're not cutting into anyone's next meeting by consuming those last five minutes. But you can't know that if you push into the next half hour block - maybe they have a customer call up next that starts on time, so you have to wrap up.
> while Outlook supports starting five minutes late
This contrast is an incorrect assumption. Outlook does allow starting meetings late as well as ending meetings early, with somewhat arbitrary durations. [1] I have definitely seen these options in Outlook settings (on web, since I hate Outlook).
However, I haven’t used it because the teams one works with need to be alerted and reminded of it before it sticks in their minds (if nobody else is using such settings).
> Does Google have a culture of meetings ending on the dot with finality?
Whenever I'm having remote meetings with people using a Google meeting room, right at the hour they'll say "I'm getting kicked out", because the next person is waiting to use the booked meeting room.
The solution I like best is to "pin" issues that would cause the meeting to run long, with select personnel needing to stay late to address the pinned issue but everybody else leaving on time.
My 2 cents, just make the damn meetings 20 minutes or 50 minutes, and start at sharp. I absolutely hate the 5 minutes past, as I am ALWAYS late on them, or 5 minutes early.
Fixed time makes it so much easier to reason than random stuff.
Well, I simply don't accept nor attend meetings that are setup directly after another meeting. There must be also time to pee, poop, drink, prepare, etc. in between them.
At least 30mins gaps between meetings is a must have for me.
During the pandemic, we had a natural experiment at my previous company. Our org had started an org wise auto ‘meeting starts 5 minute past’ while others had the traditional meetings start on the hour.
Also conveniently, we also had the calendar data for internal meetings, internal VC software (not zoom) db that logs the participants when they join and leave meetings and employee function db.
I was serendipitously the lead DS for analyzing the effectiveness of the ‘starting 5 minutes past’. After joining and cleaning a lot of the data, the data showed:
1) at the start of the trial, meetings ended on time. Then after few weeks it slip to ending late, negating the usefulness. Other orgs did not see meetings running late. 2) ICs tend to stick around and over run meetings, while managers tend to leave meetings on time. 3) if I remember right, we had a survey data that showed pretty clearly that managers prefer the ‘starting 5 minutes past’ while ICs do not care or have negative sentiment.
The biggest predictor for people who prefer starting late is how crowded their schedules are. Managers tend to have very crowded schedules which means they want a break between meetings, while ICs prefer not having to waste time waiting.
In the end we reverted back to normal schedule. It was just easier for busy people to bounce early.
I’ve experienced this all before in similar ways. The metric for meetings ending on time isn’t even very useful because when it’s needed people will ask “do you have a hard stop?” or similarly agree to continue the meeting. Often because of all the points you made, it’s the IC that stick around to talk about finer points or specifics of what was decided or discussed. It’s best to do this while it’s fresh and between people that can “talk shop” at a granular level (whatever that means for your org/team). It’s actually a good thing your ICs want to collaborate or align separate from management. If you’re a manager and you could technically continue on the meeting, consider opting out to give them space as peers. I often ask “do you all need me to stay one?” and most often it’s a No. It all means that it’s basically 2 meetings occurring and it’s the scheduling calendar artifact that is faulty.
>ICs tend to stick around and over run meetings, while managers tend to leave meetings on time.
That makes 200% sense. A couple or more ICs tend to want to stick around to go off topic or drill down on some thing if they don't have a conflict. People who aren't expressly relevant to that or have a conflict drop at that time.
You're basically seeing the post-meeting hall conversation of the ICs in your data.
Additionally, most meetings are worthless drivel from an IC perspective. The off-topic/drilldown is usually when ICs actually discuss topics relevant to them and get into a level of detail on issues that actually helps further the project.
Not to mention that managers are way more likely to have back-to-back meetings.
> The biggest predictor for people who prefer starting late is how crowded their schedules are. Managers tend to have very crowded schedules which means they want a break between meetings, while ICs prefer not having to waste time waiting.
I have had a few senior managers (at Google) who ask for all the meetings _they_ attend to start 5 minutes late.
This seems 100% reasonable to me. No need for it to be an org policy. Just a affordance for the people who spend 95% of their working hours in meetings.
I've also had several senior managers at Google who _don't_ do this, but are 5 minutes late for every meeting anyway. This alternative is pretty annoying!
Or they can just drop off 5 minutes before their next meeting and avoid having everyone else adapt to their preferred start time??
Even better is they only need to use that method when meetings actually run full time rather than every single meeting they are in
The problem is that final decisions tend to be made in the last 30 seconds of a meeting. If you're a manager with a stake in the outcome, you can't leave the meeting until you've ensured that the outcome works for you. Leaving 5 min early is often simply not an option. While arriving 5 minutes late is. It's not an ego thing -- it's the fact that meeting leaders often let meetings run long.
What are ICs?
Individual Contributors - not managmenet
I always read it as Independent Contractors. Based on that I thought they were looking for billable hours.
That almost sounds insulting. Like management is the only party with vision, drive and a goal and everybody else is just there to help. When often management just manages and true innovation really comes from people of all positions.
On the contrary, it is a helpful term. Before the term, it was common to ask "are you a manager", and then you were defined oppositionally, as not-a-manager.
Whereas IC having its own identity means it has many positive connotations. "I'd much rather be an IC, so I can get things done" etc. You can still be very senior without having direct reports or having to do line management, often seen as a necessary evil.
In my reading it makes it easy to even spin managers as the bad ones: ICs contribute individually and directly something of worth. Managers contribute only indirectly via ICs.
The term isn’t used to define everyone who isn’t a manager. It’s used to define people like Lead and Principle Engineers who are a subject matter expert, have influence in defining a project, but have chosen to continue in engineering roles rather than switching to management. Often their position in the company is parallel to the managers rather than subordinates, hence the “individual” part of the term.
ICs are generally considered highly valued staff.
This requires the intentionality of the organization though. They seem to default to managers make the decisions. Ideally, managers manage people, IC execute and you get the "right" people in the room to make decisions, regardless of title or track.
> This requires the intentionality of the organization though. They seem to default to managers make the decisions.
if a company doesn’t intend to utilise IC then they don’t have ICs, just regular software engineers.
An IC is only an IC if the organisation is structured to utilise them as an IC. It isn’t a job title, it’s more to do with how an individual is utilised in a company. It’s their placement in the org structure.
> IC execute
IC plus engineers execute. IC are a subset of engineers.
As @hnlmorg mentioned, the term is only typically used for people who are at a level where they could be managers, primarily supporting others, but are instead still contributing directly themselves. It's almost the opposite sense from your "insulting", in my experience.
Eh.
It's a relatively common term. I wouldn't read too much into it.
I'd rather not have by ass kissed with a term like "everyday innovator". -- "Individual Contributor" is fine.
I like it - though we use SME- Subject Matter Expert.
E.g. If you aren't an SME or a Manager, then why are you in the meeting?
(SME encompasses PM and BA roles, as they too should be experts in their domain and ideally on the domain we are working on.)
SME and IC are functionally different. SME informs, IC creates. Often, IC aren't SME in the space they're developing in, because they're SME of the technology instead of the business.
I agree that technologists are SME of their field (so we still call them SME in my Corp)
That's fine to do that, but kind of pointless. Everyone is then a "SME" in their own job space and thus the term is kind of useless. So, just replace every mention of SME outside of your company to "Business SME" instead of "Technology SME" and you'll understand what we're talking about.
Or, if you truly do not need anyone but a "technologist" to deliver product, you must work in a pretty simple business space! I work in healthcare and our PhD's and MD's have a very, very different knowledge space than I do, I and I deeply respect their contributions.
This whole thing reminds me why I never wanna work for someone again. From what I saw at Google it all just ends up being classist top-down BS of who isn't allowed at the big kids table, or bottom-up BS by insisting they aren't the SME just the IC and we can't do anything until the XYZ PM SME TL and/or manager approve.
It is unparsable Dilbert nonsense to anyone outside of specific scenarios. And it causes interminable discontent. Because what if the SME is the PM because they know business and tech but the SME is actually the IC because they know the tech and its tech but what if the manager is actually the SME because they're running the tech and may need to redelegate if the IC needs vacation, blah blah blah.
(job history: college dropout waiter => my own startup, sold => Google for 8 years => my own startup)
I'm sorry you've had bad experience working with other people, but in my experience as a developer, having multiple SME's available is indispensable to real alignment and fast development. I've primarily worked in startups, not big companies, and have often worked in healthcare. In healthcare, you get beyond your "I'm a big smart engineer" ego BS and you are willing to listen to the PhD's and MD's that help inform clinical workflows. From my perspective, I would never ask a clinical researcher or a doctor to understand our react app, and they aren't going to ask me to have deep understanding on medical details and clinical workflows. We work together to deliver high quality useful software quickly.
My PM SME validated my workflows and I found Jesus in them then my MBA TL PhD…bla bla bla.
A human being who avoided corporate brainrot just writes “I worked with John and he was indispensable because (insert reasons you wrote here)”
I’m 37 and never heard of this acronym. That’s the entry-level version of my point. Not that other people hurt me or people knowing things is actually bad.
What alternative term would you suggest?
True. It is part of the general industrial ritual of reducing workers to a number or a letter combination. That way, managers reduce the emotional attachment to the people, and they can fire them more easily.
If, instead, you would be Tom, Bill and Biff, there is a risk that the manager would build attachment, and make it harder to treat you bad. If you're IC1, IC2 and IC3, you can be exchanged like machine parts when you break, without anyone crying.
Welcome to the modern world! =)
No that’s not really how it works in tech at all. There’s a deep recognition that individual engineers (and other functional practitioners) have important knowledge and expertise that is essential. Of course you do need some overlap and redundancy so that people can take sick days and avoid the wheels falling off through attrition, but competent shops aren’t ever treating people as numbers. To the contrary good ICs are widely recognized as being much less full-of-shit then management.
Generally managers still learn their teams names… and I’ve never heard of ICs being numbered
What joy to bump into you in the comments section! I definitely preferred 5 minutes past, but my calendar was pretty awful.
What was really awful, however, was when your calendar was a random mishmash of starts at :00, :05, :30 and :35 :-)
> The biggest predictor for people who prefer starting late is how crowded their schedules are. Managers tend to have very crowded schedules which means they want a break between meetings, while ICs prefer not having to waste time waiting.
Dunno if people here know this Paul guy, but he wrote about this: https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html =)
In my experience, the best approach is simply to have as few meetings as possible.
People don't know what 'as few as possible' means though. It needs to be clearer than that. As a rule I encourage my reports to consider:
- Does it even need to be a meeting? Keeping meetings to things that need 'a discussion or decision', and keeping updates and announcements to chat or email works fairly well.
- Does the meeting give you any value, or do you bring value to it? If both are no they should decline it.
- Is there an agenda with expected outcomes? No agenda and no goal means it should be declined.
- Are you doing something that's a higher priority? Seeing one of my reports in a meeting when there's an active incident in progress gets me asking questions.
- Does the person running the meeting share notes afterwards? One thing I've noticed over the last couple of decades is that people are much happier to skip a meeting if they'll still hear about what happens afterwards. People don't skip them if being in the meeting is the only way to know about what was discussed or decided. I always encourage people to write some notes and share them if they've set up a meeting now.
>much happier to skip a meeting if they'll still hear about what happens afterwards.
If you're just a 'follower' of what's going on, that's fine. The problem shows up when you have some stakeholder or steering ability.
If you miss meeting about X and don't bring up discussion about Y then other person A may not talk about Z that affects X. But I agree that every meeting should have a point and total number of meetings should be minimized.
Between ICs and managers, which ones more commonly left the meeting room early vs. on time/late?
* During the lockdown.
Covid is supposed to have started in October 2019, and no one locked down until nearly six months later.
Was the lockdown not during the pandemic?
It was six months after it started and arguably after it ended.
> there is social pressure not to allow meetings to run much past the top of the hour.
I've never seen this pressure.
> meetings rarely started on the dot anyway before this change.
It's like I live in an entirely different world.
Start meetings when they say they're going to start. People will learn to show up quickly. I think that works better than trying to psychologically game people into cooperation. That just starts the classic treadmill. You might have that one friend that you tell to show up half an hour before everyone else. They mentally add the half hour back because you're always giving such early times. Better IMO to just keep things simple. Let people leave when they need to. Show up on time.
> People will learn to show up quickly.
My bosses (leadership) are in meetings literally all day long. Them showing up 5 minutes late to an internal meeting has nothing to do with them "learning". It's entirely about priorities. Teaching them to "show up on time" does nothing and only hurts me for being obtuse with them.
Unfortunately this is the reality. If I’m on with a big external partner/client and they need to finish their thought I’m going to be late to an internal meeting. If it’s too late I will try to slack and say go ahead.
Yep. Execs who are booked pretty solid with meetings, including with customers and field teams making important decisions, will sometimes be late for or even miss meetings.
Last job, the senior guy who I knew missed our breakfast meeting to discuss a job. Turned out that he had something come up with one of the regions and his admin didn't have my cell. Ended up with the job anyway where I stayed for a long time.
Well, yes, but also the critical attendees (people with something substantial to add) of the meeting aren't there on time, so the meeting cannot start on time, which leads to a culture where no one shows up on time. I was flummoxed yesterday when an SVP scheduled a large meeting and was the only critical attendee, and started exactly on time, within seconds. I showed up at the top of the hour + 49 seconds and missed at least 30 seconds of content.
On the exact opposite side, I remember when I first started working and was used to keeping an eye on the clock because of, oh, 16 years of school that had us timed to the minute. I'd walk into meeting rooms right when it was supposed to start and interrupt whoever was in the previous meeting and was going over. Surprised a lot of people like that.
In the early 90s I had a new department director who would bring a kitchen timer to every meeting. Meetings started on precisely on time and the timer was set to 22 minutes. When that bell rung, you could finish the thought, but the meeting would break at the 25 minute mark. If you didn’t accomplish the agenda, another meeting could be set, but it needed to be at least 2 hours after the one that just broke. Even meetings without him had to follow the rule. He also had a request that were were supposed to follow if we could, which was to allow ourselves to only schedule one meeting in an hour.
Obviously it was pretty chaotic at first and I recall us being pretty brutal in our assessment of his “crazy meeting quirk”. However after a few weeks something pretty interesting happened:
- Brevity and productive discussion became common. People usually went with their best opinion
- we usually finished the agenda (probably because we set reasonable agendas for 22 mis) and rarely needed that rollover meeting
- we spent more time at our desks actually doing instead of just talking about doing. I recall that team being really productive overall.
Later when I moved into leadership roles I attempted to bring this methodology but my own leadership generally was not supportive enough to allow me to be as rigid and I didn’t see the same success with the method…but to this day 32+ years later I still think it had merit.
I had asked him where he had learned it. My recollection is that he formulated it after reading that the average person’s attention span in a meeting was 27 minutes and he figured no one was productive after that, so he decided it was pointless to go longer.
I find it interesting when people such as the writer of the linked post take their experience and think it can just be applied to everyone else, and it'll always be a positive outcome.
A team I once ran made rules their meetings would end 5 minutes early, to create some space. We didn’t have the power to change the whole org, but we could control team meetings to create space before other meetings. Since the whole team was on board with this, there was always someone who would call out that it was time for the meeting to end, to prevent them running long.
At the same time, we had a rule that meetings would start when they say they start. This was after being incredibly frustrated by a guy on another team who would schedule his meetings to start on the hour, but then display a message that said we’d start at 5 after, to give people time to join, assuming other meetings would run long. This felt like he was wasting everyone’s time who showed up on time, and had the net effect of everyone showing up late to his meetings. If people learned they should show up late to his meetings, they can learn to show up on time to our meetings. Then we can stop waiting around hoping that everyone shows up. When someone shows up late to a meeting that’s already well underway, that sends a strong signal that they should be on time for the next one.
We do this at my work and guess what - meetings tend to run 5 minutes late because everyone knows the next meeting doesn’t start until 5 past.
Sounds like the issue is back to back meetings then.
Also every meeting taking the exact time it was scheduled for is a bit of an org smell too. If you have your meeting etiquette dialed in you should hopefully be finishing meetings early more often than running over. If you are running to the minute or over all the time you might just be having crap meetings.
Yeah, this works because it's novel. If it became the norm, people would adjust to it and we'd right back where we started.
Novelty might be a factor but the author was relying on "social pressure" to wrap things up by top of the hour. That pressure doesn't exist in all work cultures.
Meeting software should eject everyone when the time is reached.
Zoom offers this feature, but you have to not-pay for it.
Works best when your meetings are 40 minutes long
Obviously, meetings shouldn't be longer than they need to be. But 15-20 minutes of unused time tend to be dead. That's mostly not long enough to do anything useful.
That said, nothing wrong with 30 minute meetings. In my previous analyst stint we tried to default to that--especially for non-clients. Didn't need all the throat-clearing stuff and industry background that we knew perfectly well.
This is a bad idea. We used a software that did this for a while, and everybody scheduled meetings 30 minutes longer than necessary and specified the real time in the description, just to avoid cutting people off mid sentence.
Isn’t the point of TFA that meetings _unavoidably_ run 5 minutes late, and so starting at 0:05 will avoid being impacted by the previous meeting?
I see two flaws:
1) This only works as long as nobody else does it. If the meeting prior to yours follows the same strategy then you’re in the same position as today
2) it starts 5 minutes later but has no plan for ending 5 minutes earlier, which means the next meeting will have to start at 0:10…
To me ending at 0:55 is a million times more logical than starting at 0:05… and if there was an issue then rolling back to 0:50, or 0:45, or whatever it takes for honest accounting and/or meeting discipline to emerge.
Decades ago at an engineering firm I worked for it was baked into the groupware settings.
The smelly basement nerd running IT seemed normal back then, but here are in 2026… Turns out he was an unsung smelly genius ahead of his time. A giant among men who bathe.
Meetings running over is avoidable. People just need to stop enabling bad behavior.
I work with a PM who is notorious for meetings running long. People just start hanging up while she’s talking if they have another meeting to go to. When she start hearing a bunch of beeps of people leaving, she starts to get the message that she needs to continue on the next meeting and stop. People are tired of it and don’t entertain it anymore, as much as she keeps trying to talk.
Meetings are avoidable. People just need to stop enabling bad behavior.
That, and on top of it people now come 5m late on 5m past so we start 10m past and finish 10m late.
This is standard at the large tech company where I work and is extremely effective and universally respected.
You have correctly identified that this is a cultural issue not a meeting software issue. I often have meetings with people who have to deal constantly with urgent operational issues, that cost $mega if not solved on time. I accept they may be late, but try hard not to keep them waiting.
At previous companies this wasnt the case, so we started meetings on time
My org had the opposite problem in the Covid remote transition. At one point we successfully enforced meetings ending 5 minutes before the hour, but then somebody would just open the next meeting 5 minutes early.
Even if someone starts a meeting early, I still don't join until the start time out of spite.
Good idea, after trying it a number of times, it has some downsides. Most calendar applications cannot clearly display 5 minutes past, and the meeting appears to start on the hour visually. One of the attendees ends up dialling in at the hour, and then everyone gets a notification that the meeting has started.
Half of the people who get the notification click "join" without checking. This ends up with a half-populated meeting room. The issue becomes obvious, and somebody says, "Let's dial back in 5 mins", and drops off. Half of the people like the idea and drop off, while the rest decide to stay and chat.
Meanwhile, some of those who dropped off see this as a great opportunity to grab a brew. That inadvertently triggers some water-cooler, kettle-corner chats, and they end up running late for the 5-past. The rest usually get engaged in something else to make use of 5 minutes, and miss 5-past since no new notifications are issued due to the people already chatting in the meeting :)
Well the trick is to schedule the meeting at hh:mm, but start it at hh: mm+5 and then just make this a policy organization-wide.
In academia (mostly European) this has been a concept for centuries to allow changes of classes to happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_%28class_timi...
So you can have a c.t. event (cum tempore = with time) or a s.t. event (sine tempore = without time).
I want Teams to show me the dollar cost of meetings. Enter an approximation of the average salary for people involved in the meeting, multiplied by the number of people in the meeting, and broadcast the cost ticking up every second to every person in the meeting.
I don’t think anything else will be ans effective at reducing the number of meetings, reducing the length of meetings and reducing the number of people who are late to meetings.
Okay, but only if this is balanced by accounting for the cost of IC engineers’ solo time too. Sometimes it does feel like meetings waste a lot of time/money quickly, but I’ve also watched people burn money by not having meetings and going the wrong direction for weeks, watched teams over-engineer the crap out of features nobody asked for, watched people tear out huge swaths of working code they just didn’t like and waste years re-implementing it, only to have it be buggier for a few years and then end up with basic design flaws, sometimes the same ones as before, and sometimes new ones…
A blanket force to reduce meetings isn’t quite the right incentive; we need incentives to have the right amount of meetings and to make them more effective. The right amount of meetings is probably always going to be more than ICs want, and less than managers want. But if you have any reliable ways to make that happen, to keep meetings effective, that’s gold. Charge money for that knowledge and consult, or become a CEO, either way you’ll get rich!
A friend of mine built something for this: https://howmuch.poiesic.com/
Microsoft do have a tool for that at the business level but of course it costs (Viva Insights).
Alternatively you can build your own with MS Graph Data Connect but also it costs.
I've worked a place that tried it. It does nothing. It's a random number that nobody cares about. Everyone quickly concludes that running a company is expensive and gets used to that. It's not their money, after all. They don't get to spend the saved money on a fancy lunch or something. It's just more money going into the pockets of owners/investors.
People have meetings because there's a need for a decision that requires conversation, and they're often late because they're coming from other meetings that ran late because they were having difficulty coming to a decision. Awareness of cost doesn't affect these at all. The decisions still need to happen.
I came to a similar conclusion. What about measuring enjoyment? Turns out people enjoy meetings more than work!
I was bad in being on meeting discipline. The only thing that consistently works: start on time, end on time, and don’t wait for late arrivals. If someone joins late, they catch up from notes/recording.
There’s a famous example from the Lucasfilm/Pixar deal: a Lucasfilm exec used to arrive late as a power move, until Steve Jobs started the meeting exactly on time without him. The exec walked in 5 minutes later and had already lost the room. And Jobs gets the deal.
> The only thing that consistently works: start on time, end on time, and don’t wait for late arrivals.
Agree, but that doesn't solve the problem of back to back mtgs. In some cases people have to physically move from one mtg room to another, or they need to use the restroom, etc.
Having the 5 min gap really is needed for those types of things.
How about just be punctual, respecting the time others have agreed to meet with you? Simpler solution than what this article suggests. People will abuse that system just the same anyway.
How do you plan to show up on time if one of your meetings ends at 2pm, the next one starts at 2pm, the meeting rooms are 3 floors apart, and you need to go to the restroom because you've been in meetings since lunch and need to pee? You're going to clone yourself?
1:55 pm “I gotta run to my next meeting” and slip out the door.
Tell the people in the first meeting at the start that you’ll need to leave a few minutes early, to set the expectation and make sure any important stuff is done early. Then when it hits your transition window, politely tell them you have to run and leave.
And have some subset of people in each mtg do that every mtg every single day?
I personally prefer the 5 minute gap, it's a simple and clean solution.
You have to reject one meeting invitation and tell them why.
Isn't the easier solution to stop meetings 5 minutes to the next meeting slot?
At the start of the first meeting, you annouce that you need to leave at 1:50 and ask the meeting to respect that.
The thing is, a lot of meetings start with presenting evidence of a problem, then have some discussion of the problem and potential options, and only in the last 10 minutes do the proposed actions turn into firm decisions with names against them.
And often if I'm in a meeting it's because I think the problem is important and I want it solved. Getting permission for my team to fix things, or getting other teams to agree to fix things, is the point.
In my experience, this is a time management problem. Meetings tend to fill the time available. Rarely are there meetings that have to last a full hour and could not have been over after 50 minutes.
Or what makes 60 minutes so magical that you can wrap up a meeting quickly once that marker approaches? People need to leave, that's why. If it had been clear from the start that people will leave after 50 minutes, you can wrap up by then, same way you wrap things up at 60.
There is a lot of slack in meetings. What you need is someone to manage the available time and move things along, make sure that there is room at the end to get to a conclusion. You will have these last 10 minutes after 40 minutes instead of 50 if you pay attention to time and keep things moving.
This can be done, even with time to spare for pleasantries. I know this because I've been in meetings and I have run meetings like this. It helps if you can start on time and don't have to wait for stragglers in the beginning who needed a break between their back-to-back meetings.
I'd rather have a 5-minute break built-in for everyone by starting 5-past and actually enforce meeting end-times. Behaviors would change if people knew they had 25 or 55 minutes for a meeting and that folks would just leave when the time is up.
Seen from within the meeting, it does not really matter if you start 5 minutes late or end 5 minutes early.
I think the point is to reduce meeting time from 60 minutes to 55 or even 50 and be firm about it. People need to expect to start and end on time; giving them a natural break between helps make this happen even for people whose job requires them to be in back-to-back meetings.
Personally, I think starting on the hour (or half-hour, etc) and ending "early" is better, because it tends to sync well with the calendars of external folks.
But in the end, moving start or end time is only part of the solution. This is a time-management problem, and in addition to constraining the available time, it also needs proper management of the available time within the meeting.
> Seen from within the meeting, it does not really matter if you start 5 minutes late or end 5 minutes early.
It matters because there sometimes are meeting where it is very important to know how much time you have to prepare appropriately. As long as the expectations are set beforehand, it matters less.
I roughly agree with the rest of your post. "Just be punctual" is a cop out that ignores the fact that I need to have enough breaks between meetings before I can even think about being punctual. Make space for breaks and enforce the time allocated is imo the solution, it matters less where exactly the 5-minute break fits (but I tend to agree that people would more likely end on the full hour, so that would mean we need to start 5 past).
This. In my experience you have to call out people and tell them politely that you expect them to be on time.
Otherwise, people will simply come 10 minutes past if you start 5 minutes past.
From the article:
This is more a statement to the lack of respect for other's time than anything else, as evidenced by the presumption; "you will likely talk until 2:00pm anyway."Engineering Managers which see value in giving coworkers a five minute break between meetings ensure the breaks exist. Those which do not and only pay lip service to the concept will burn through predefined breaks no matter where they exist on a clock face.
In my experience, the recipe for having meetings interface smoothly with the time that surrounds them is twofold:
1. Constrain the meeting duration to a slighly smaller blocks than natural time.
2. Be diligent and efficient in managing time within the meeting.
That means, for 60 minutes of natural time, 50 minutes of meetings.
You start on time, you end on time.
The first few minutes are for pleasantries (important!) and getting everyone focused on the topic and goals of the meeting. This gives people the possibility of running slightly late without missing anything too important, but they still come into an ongoing meeting and are noticeably late.
But: you quickly move on to the meat of the meeting, even if people are still missing, and keep things moving while having an eye on time. (Sometimes, you can even start without key people there and at least get everyone else synced and thinking about the topic.)
Once you get close to the end (that is, 40 out of 50 minutes of runtime for an "hour"-long meeting, but depending on subject and people), you make sure to come to a conclusion and wrap things up by the 50 minute mark. If it's clear that's not enough time, you move to wrapping things up enough and discuss how you will keep the discussion going after the meeting time runs out. In any case, you have some time for parting pleasantries, while the meeing is officially over on time and people are free to leave.
This leaves a bit of slack, while people expect to start and end on time, and it crucially gives everybody enough time to move between meetings with some breaks, even those unfortunate folks whose jobs consist of lots of back-to-back meetings.
Starting on the (half) hour and ending after 50 (25) minutes works well, in my experience, and syncs well with the calendars of external meeting participants.
I know this works, because I have been in meetings like this, and I have run meetings like this. Of course, this will not work in 100% of all meetings, but it can go a long way in making a lot of them much better.
I've found myself watching and waiting for at least 3 people to join a meeting before I connect to avoid the inevitable minutes of greetings and unrelated discussion that always happens. Our meetings always start 5-10 minutes _past_ the scheduled time.
In my experience the unrelated discussion is usually the only fun and tangible value I get out of most meetings
Depends. If it’s with ICs, sure. But as soon as some manager or someone with a leadership position joins, then it’s just plain work. So I dislike chitchatting with such people.
I know we don’t get to choose our coworkers and teams necessarily and experiences vary, but I am sorry you dread/dislike a little chit chat with your teammates:(
I think it's likely a problem with me specifically - I said no to going to celebrations like christmas lunch etc. But at the same time our team doesn't interact with each other socially in any other way. I'm very new to the job, so it isn't that I pushed everyone away from me, there just wasn't any closeness in the first place. It doesn't really help that I don't much like the job either.
But there are other times for that, why in a meeting? I chitchat during day 1-1 (virtual/irl) with my teammates, I don't, for etiquette, have to do it again when starting a meeting.
I agree maybe ideally not in a meeting, but humans are imperfect and the larger the number of people invited, the greater the chance it’s going to take a few mins for everyone to arrive. So inevitably the folks who are prompt do some water cooler talk while waiting, and depending on the day/group/topic the water cooler talk might even extend a few mins after everyone has arrived, especially if people are enjoying the convo.
> But there are other times for that, why in a meeting?
If you're in-person in an office, there are plenty of times for random social interaction. If you're full-remote, pre-meeting/post-meeting time is a low-friction source of social interaction.
I do love that zoom feature that shows the avatars of who’s joined already. Although I don’t like the game theory of it when every attendee is watching those icons…
Same! If I see the first people joining are managers or above, I just wait until I see other engineers join. I hate managers talk, I couldn’t care less about them.
Those awkward 5 minutes of greetings and unrelated discussion are because other people don't join until 5 minutes past, and sitting in silence would be even more awkward.
I suppose this may be the case for a lot of people. In my case it is always the two managers talking about their life and/or child's successes. This still occurs when _they_ are the late ones.
Glad to know I'm not alone
This is borderline anti-social and a bit past introvert haha
> introvert
This has nothing to do with being introverted.
This. Can’t stand those fake “how’s your day?” and fake socializing bullshit.
"How was your weekend?" I really don't care.
Seriously.
> How was your weekend?
Fine, just like literally thousands of previous weekends before this one. And now I’m going to ask you the same and then zone out for 5 minutes because I literally couldn’t care less.
It’s been shown before that a couple minutes of pleasantries helps the meeting. I’m guessing it helps regulate everyone on a similar vibe. A lot like saying hello to someone and maybe how are you doing before launching into any requests.
I work in a university environment.
The teaching model is much like that proposed by the originator of this thread. Classes are 50 minutes instead of an hour (and similar for 1.5 hour classes). The start time is 5 minutes past the hour and the end time is 5 minutes before the hour. This gives students and professors enough time to get from one lecture to another (unless they have to commute across a big campus, in which case they simply do not sign up for classes that are too close in time).
I've served on a big committee on campus that solve the timing problem simply. It starts exactly on time. Every item has a designated number of minutes. And if it appears that we will not finish on time, there is a vote on whether to extend the meeting by 30 minutes.
I realize that a lot of the discussion on this thread involves bosses and employees, which is quite a different thing, of course. There's no point in starting a meeting at a designated time if the big boss is running late.
That is because the purpose of meeting is often only to keep the big boss informed of what their team is doing. The team can operate without the meeting. The big boss cannot. Their job is to know what their team is doing.
I have found significant frustration since the pandemic in the most unexpected place: the new expectation of punctuality for online meetings. In meatspace, in the before times, if a meeting was set for 2pm in the board room, everyone understood this to mean 2pm was the time to come through the door and chat for a bit while everyone got comfortable. The actual meeting would start at 2:05-2:10.
Online, there is no equivalent to walking in the door for a bit of a chit chat. Everyone just materializes instantly and then we’re supposed to be ready to go by 2:01. I miss meatspace for meetings and the more casual, human-matched pace.
I do connect 5 minutes past, but after the start of the meeting, just to miss the 'how was your weekend', 'let's do an introduction round' and other nonsense (the email invite already has intro's; i know people don't read, but that's not my problem).
We mostly turned our internal and partner meetings around these days; meetings are organised and distributed by who thinks they are needed, everyone who could be needed is included (they basically have to answer when called upon during the meeting; that also keeps the meetings within bounds as no-one is going to answer anymore once the time passed) but they are called in only when needed which is to say, almost never in reality. This showed us the enormous waste of these meetings before.
In my experience, if the meeting is important enough policies like this don't matter.
People magically show up on time and pay attention and the meeting ends on time or early.
I have to assume this discussion is about the 90% of meetings that could have been a group chat or email chain.
Alternatively, join my meetings on time. You click End Call, then Join. It takes 3 seconds.
You get Outlook reminders 15 minutes in advance. Webex/Teams notifications 5 minutes in advance. I’m sure you can make your watch vibrate or something.
People at my office join every meeting 5 minutes late because no one expects meetings to start on time anymore. So I guess we’re following this advice in all but the nominally scheduled time. Drives me nuts.
I'm absolutely baffled by colleague who somehow manage to be five minutes late to an online meeting while working from home. Because you're right, you get a reminder 10 - 15 minutes in advance, you just need to click the join meeting button, you're already at the computer. We have, for remote meetings, a five minute buffer at the start of every meeting, for people to "settle in" makes no sense, just start the meeting.
In general a lot of people just aren't being serious about meetings, which I guess is also why many hate them. So key indicators of a bad meeting is: runs more than 60 minutes, no meeting plan, documents or talking points provided in advance, more than five people (unless the meeting is more of a briefing).
> So key indicators of a bad meeting is: runs more than 60 minutes, no meeting plan, documents or talking points provided in advance, more than five people (unless the meeting is more of a briefing).
So 99% of my meetings?
Seems about right, but wouldn't you agree that the majority of those meetings either could have been an email, or could have been handled in 20% of the time, if they had been planed?
Maybe, I think most people just don't give shit about any of this and for them wasting an hour feels "productive", like they've achieved something. After all, nobody can hear your beautiful voice over email.
TBH unless the meeting has a clear agenda and not just a vague title, I only join it when someone mention me. This allows me to be able to actually work and/or take breaks.
We got bunch of internal meetings starting at quarter past instead of full hour and mostly we can get it finished in 45mins.
Gives people room to breathe for those who are back to back scheduled full day. When they have calls with customers or other departments they are usually late anyway and don’t have time to go to toilet in between because as always other meetings run past time.
Doesn't anyone have to hit the can between meetings?
Or are we all using catheters now?
My video is off for a reason!
and wireless headset - i've done everything from cooking lunch, answering the door, toilet, walking around the house, laying in bed. When you aren't required to be watching someones screen, there is a lot of freedom. This doesn't work well if you don't have a microphone though. though you could just join from your phone.
That’s so inefficient. I just ask Claude to pee for me.
A norm of scheduling the “start” on the hour or half hour while really starting the meeting five minutes later also works. That way, attendees have an opportunity to arrive “on time” and chat if they like, building relationships in the process. The freedom to arrive at any point during the first five minutes also helps to create the kind of ease that’s conducive to serious discussion. This second part is particularly important when power dynamics might otherwise derail real discussion.
Because five minutes of pure chitchat can feel excessive to some folks, though, a three-minute norm probably works better—-especially because the off-centeredness has the informal aesthetic that, again, forms a better backdrop for serious discussion.
Whether it's planned or not, that seems like a pretty normal dynamic. "Let's give people a few minutes and then we'll get started." Especially with back to back meetings which are the norm for a lot of people, they need a few minutes to grab coffee/water, use the bathroom, etc. (And, of course, with in person meetings they usually need some time to run to the next room.)
Yep. In general, when you see social solutions emerge in the wild from the free choices of participants, there is an underlying logic that’s doing important work. It’s easy to think you can improve over these natural solutions, but usually you can’t.
I recall working at this place that prided itself on starting meetings a minute early, as if trying to prove a point. The early starts did prove that, yes, you could get people to scramble, but not much else.
If you truly believe in this, just effectively block Teams between :55 and :05 every hour. You can always allow exceptions with presubmitted motivation.
Shifting everything from :00 to :05 is theatre at best, and a slippery slope more often.
A similar concept has been used for university lectures to start 15 minutes after the full hour. This was due to nobody having watches and everything being synced to the church bells ringing at the full hour. Then you had 15 minutes to get to the next lecture (in another building). Starting time was given as ct (cum tempore, with time) or st (sine tempore, without time). Usually only st was marked as everybody assumed the 15 minutes delay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing...
Apart from just a quick breather between back to back meetings, it also provides a critical bio-break time for your attendees.
Meetings run long so frequently that we now recommend starting the next meeting late to compensate.
This will surely solve the problem.
Also known as Oxford Time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_time
For fully remote workers, that few minutes chat before the meeting starts is one of the few opportunities for unstructured chat with their colleagues
I think unstructured chat with colleagues is undervalued, though I also respect people who want no part of it.
At one place where we were remote, we had a morning daily (I don't care to argue the usefulness of dailies, though).
When I joined as an IC, I added an emphatically-optional 15 minute "coffee chat" meeting preceding it on the same video chat link. Most people pretty consistently joined at some point before the start of the daily. Sometimes chat was about work, most often, it was just social.
IMO, it was worth it. It was low friction because it was next to a scheduled meeting at a time where a morning beverage was reasonable, and people felt no pressure to join.
> They arrive by 1:05pm, ready to work.
You can tell this is written by a manager who has never written a line of code in their life. For me as an actual programmer, meetings were always the time where I had to stop working. It's staggering to me that managers still think real work happens in meetings.
At my job, when the meeting time is over it is over. So everyone knows that they need to work the thing during the allocated time. People might skip or leave the meeting at any time or simply say they need more context before attending.
Zero BS If there are conflicts, the technical points, pros and cons should be on the table, or at least raise that it seems likely that people will receive those soon.
If the meeting detects a failure, we find a way, if we already completely failed we raise to the upper levels and we refresh the plans. We trust people to be professionals though we understand personal matters can always be on the way.
The counterpart is no one has a career ladder, there is little to no feedback. People can't raise so they leave the company if they are not happy. The only way to take the lead is when someone leaves
For some larger meetings during the pandemic, managers started scheduling them 5 minutes after to give people time to join, but because people's reminders triggered at the same relative time all it meant was people started joining meetings 5 minutes later negating any perceived benefit.
This whole thing is giving me a certain Spinal Tap vibe…
Why not set the alarm for 5 minutes prior and everyone shows up on time?
Hour long meetings are a red flag. Meetings should be a maximum of 30 mins.
For companies using Google Calendar as the primary meeting scheduler, one issue with this is that there's a setting for short meetings, but it only supports ending the official meeting 5 or 10 minutes early: "End 30 minute meetings 5 minutes early and longer meetings 10 minutes early".
But if you're in a meeting already, people are expecting that they have time until the hour or half hour point, so in spite of the meeting officially ending at H:25, it really almost always lasts until H:30 unless you have someone who wants to leave early and can enforce it by actually leaving.
It surprises me a bit that even engineering managers at Google agree with this policy and yet it's not an option in the Google Calendar settings.
When I lead a meeting, I start right on time no matter what. Guess what? People come on time.
Exactly. I had a manager who said "Standup with start exactly on time", and stuck to it. And after a couple of meetings with some people coming in a minute or two late and realizing he was for real... everyone started showing up on time.
No need for hacks, just better managers
The worst offenders are usually other managers.
this is exactly the way to do it. i have a recurring large meeting where the first 5 minutes is ALWAYS "lets wait for a quorum". Guess what time I show up to the meeting? 5 minutes late, of course.
Creative idea, however most calendar software clients offer meeting start times rounded to increments of 15 min.
Setting meetings to start at :05 or :20 or :35 or :50 adds friction.
Defaults matter for habit formation.
There is your golden opportunity to point out internal Gemini to the Calendar codebase and make it become reality.
I suggested this to management at my company and they shot it down almost immediately. Narrow-minded middle manager types generally aren't receptive to this kind of out-of-the-box thinking unless they think it's an idea they've come up with.
It's equally silly to the method my mom used for clock in the bathroom when I was a kid: she would set the clock to be 5 minutes later, so we would rush to get to school on time. Needless to say, I just learned to subtract 5 minutes from it and that was the end.
Can this be solved by a random clock? A clock which never tells you the real time - it adds randomly 1-10 mins every morning
My question is if people can't adapt to it, would it be a helpful technique?
It would be interesting to experiment with providing people only with a sundial. :)))))
When the start/end doesn’t matter as much for my team as changing the default duration to 25/50 minutes. This way even if a meeting would start at the quarter hour you would always end up with a small gap between.
If you have so many back-to-back meetings, maybe put in a school bell that chimes at 5 minutes before and 5 minutes after the hour. Please just put this in your conference rooms so those of us who know how to evade meetings don't have to hear it as well.
I'd recommend taking this even further. Start every meeting 30 minutes after the hour, and end it 30 minutes before the hour.
You don't understand. If I arrange everything into written words and send out an email with a link to the document, noone will read it.
Instead, I must invite 10 people to do other things while I talk on a zoom call! "Sorry, I was multitasking"
I mean you can't make people read an email but I feel like you would have a much higher success rate if the content was in the email itself. You're competing with the other work that people have to do and actually get graded on, why add a layer of indirection?
People don't read the email itself, they just want to 'over it together' because lazy/no reading comprehension/whatever the reason is. So many meetings have 10+ people there who have no clue what this meeting is about while the agenda, questions, possible answers etc are in the email. So I usually start (if it's my responsibility to do so) with; how about you read the email for a few minutes before we start. Which is usually met with 'why don't you go over it line by line with us, share screen and read it'. Drives me bonkers. Granted, these are usually very big partner companies for which the employees (including middle management) see this as some break in their day, so they don't really care about the time spent or the outcome.
We meet in person and have a culture where closing your laptop is followed pretty well.
TBH, if everyone involved is invested in what is being said, you don't need to be in person and you don't need to shut laptops.
If that is the majority of your meetings, you are in a good place.
The mistake is to think the rules are what makes the meeting useful. Having the right audience, an agenda, and appropriate expectations for the outcomes are the useful things.
That's so quaint, you all must be in the same place!
Except for the guy who built the thing who lives elsewhere and can’t join the offsites
Got it, 24 hour long meetings it is.
Except for the weekly release meetings, those can be 48.
I for one, support this...and reduce the Agenda to NO bullet points.
[flagged]
The problem with these kinds of advices is that it requires ALL teams to have buy-in to this idea.
As soon as a few teams start booking meetings on the hour or half-hour, this whole idea goes out the window and downsides begin to outweigh the positives.
The other downside, as others have mentioned, is that eventually meetings begin to run late.
The best advice about meeting is, in my opinion:
1. Don't have back to back meetings
2. Try to have at least 1 clear point for the agenda
3. Give at least some heads up. Don't pull people into meetings suddenly.
Maybe I’m just a silly lab engineer who doesn’t know how big companies work (i did work at a startup for a time but that’s even more anti meeting than a lab) but I feel like maybe if you have so many back to back meetings that you need to plan around them you should have fewer meetings?
Also why is there a hard end time rather than a maximum time? What is even going on? How are you getting work done?
At large companies, there's just a lot of coordination needed. Which means a lot of meetings typically. Probably more than there is needed but one of the points of a large company is having a critical mass of people pulling in roughly the same direction(s).
>also why is there a hard end time rather than a maximum time?
Depends on company, culture, and individuals. If you get through the purpose of the meeting, the meeting organizer may well say "Let's give everyone 20 minutes (or whatever) back." I do think that it's a worthwhile goal to default to <1 hour meetings.
In any case, agendas and thinking about how the meeting time should actually be spent is worthwhile.
At least at my multinational company, we have teams iny department that are 12 hours ahead of us. That makes the window of overlap time we have small, so we often have blocks of meetings during that overlap time that compete for time slots for staff that make higher level decisions.
Our org does 5 minutes past for a 30-minute window, and 10 minutes past for an hour or longer. Works great once everyone gets it. Can be confusing for new hires.
I don't remember the last time i had a meeting that was productive. Last time i worked in the office, the hallway discussions where the productive ones and now working remote most of the time is just being able to work with good people that understand text and work by messages that works good. Even video meetings with good people tends to be waste of time.
yeah, 90% of meetings are wastes in most companies
Where I work, we have company-wide breaks between 10.00-10.15, 12.00-13.00 and 15.00-15.15. These cannot easily be enforced with external parties, but running an internal meeting over a break will need an explanation. What I noticed is that back-to-back meetings are more likely "capped" at 2 hours, so it's easier for people to show up on time and energized.
You are treating the symptoms by doing this. If you are a serious manager then you should be serious about time management. Making sure your team has discipline is a manager problem and consistently being late shows that there are fundamental, principle discipline problems with your team.
> You might fear that people will start arriving at 1:07pm, but I have seen the opposite. They respect the new time. They arrive by 1:05pm, ready to work.
We do the :05 thing and this is exactly what happens every meeting: all of them end up starting between :07 and :10 since people leave their desk to find the room at :05.
This is the kind of stuff that makes me feel like I’m surrounded by idiots.
Waiting for attendance is simply scheduled into the agenda. The first 5 minutes of the agenda is reserved for quorum. There is absolutely no need for making it any more complicated, or playing games with the scheduled time like the post suggests. Childish nonsense.
But how is anyone supposed cultivate their personal brand and write books and substack articles about this type of meeting “hack”. Party pooper.
;)
Absolutely. Insightful LinkedIn posts from thought leaders who complete every sentence or utterance of a thought with two line breaks...
Like this.
Aren't going to write themselves, are they? :D
This is exactly the problem. I don't know if any other sector of business runs on as much as fad as ours does.
Marketing/Sales?
of wasting 5 minutes?
> The first 5 minutes of the agenda is reserved for quorum
> Starts meeting after 5 minutes
"Uhm, shall we wait for Jeff?"
If you don’t have quorum the meeting is rescheduled.
“Jeff you didn’t show up to the meeting. What happened?”
Jeff is eventually put on a PIP or fired for not showing up to meetings without notice.
I prefer not having back-to-back meetings.
When I have 5 hours of meetings in a given day, I'd much rather have them back-to-back, rather than with a half-hour or hour in between. I try to pack all my meetings for the week into a couple of days, so that I have the rest of the week to do non-meeting work.
I'd rather scatter them uniformly across the entire week, so in the time between meetings I can slack off, I mean, prepare for the next meeting.
MIT does this. Every class starts 5 mins past, and also ends 5 mins early.
We did this at Google too while I was there (only the started 5-mins past part). It works really well.
No need to change the Calendar events though. It's just implicit that we'll start 5-mins past. (Or, well, explicit in MIT's case).
When I attended Lund University in Sweden, classes always started at 15 minutes past the hour, called "akademisk kvart" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_quarter_(class_timing...
They usually do. Scheduling them for 5 past just means they'll actually start at 10 past.
And join early of it's convenient, but actually spend those first 5 on social interaction. Because one problem with online meetings is they feel "all business" without explicitly making time to just be humans.
We do this at Meta. It’s stupid, because all meetings just go 5 minutes afterwards
This works even better if your neighboring teams start their meeting at hour or half hour. Then towards the end of the meeting you can say "I'm getting kicked out of the office".
Perhaps reduce the number of meetings so they're not back-to-back?
We've been doing this at Qualcomm for a while, and I really like it. While meetings do run over sometimes, the practice has still built this acceptance around short breaks between meetings. No one bats an eye if we've got two consecutive meetings together, the first one ends late, and we wait five minutes before starting or joining the next one.
In fact, having done it for so long, it surprisingly really annoys me when our vendors schedule 60 minute meetings on the hour.
I've been doing this for a year or two. Love it, but haven't made it a thing across my team...and I'm not sure they love it as much as I do :P
Seems a mismanagement issue - making sure everyone is on time - transformed into a calendar scheme.
If you can’t tell people to stop being late, you are not doing your job as a manager.
Depends on the booking system. If it is hourly it will usually be X:00-Y:00 and if you overrun that you may have to pay for another hour.
Don't schedule too many meetings to begin with. It's absolutely ridiculous to have your day fully packed with online meetings.
I'd say we shouldn't have more than a couple of meetings a day so it should be eady to not have back to back ones.
Back to back meetings?! Why on earth would you do that?
I don't know about others but if I'm gonna have 3 meetings in a day, I'd take them back-to-back anyday. Then the rest of my day is available for focus work.
I batch my meetings as close as possible to have interrupted time for work.
Better idea: write code. Don't waste your teams' time with back-to-back hour-long meetings.
“More social pressure to stop at the top of the hour.”
False.
This doesn’t work.
Source: a company doing this. Meetings just continue on to the 5 after mark.
We start the meeting at 2 minutes past. Meetings end at 10 minutes before the hour (or half hour) - yes, "30 minute" meetings are only effecitvely 18 minutes, but we leave a few minutes of buffer.
Any meeting that goes over an hour has a mandatory 10 minute break at the 50 minute mark every hour.
If you're not on time..tough sh*t we're starting without you. Use the AI minutes or something to catch up.
start at 1pm. end at 1:45 or 1:55pm. known wise pattern for a long time
honor end times so everyone has a few minutes to take a bathroom break or move to a diffrrent room, or prep mentally, etc
> Like good code, a good team is built on small, sane details.
Words to live by.
There's no substitute for leadership establishing a culture of meeting discipline. By and large, every org will follow the example leadership sets.
If leadership blesses this cutesy little five-minutes-late maneuver, implicitly accepting that meetings don't end on time, then meetings won't end on time at 5 after the hour either.
Some meetings are more important than others. So losing 5 minutes of a useless meeting is better than not going over 5 minutes for the important meeting.
Everyone wants to think their time is valuable, but this is relative.
Only host important meetings.
Cancel useless ones.
Start and end on time.
If the person who runs the meeting can't stick to a schedule, it can't be important.
Any meeting without an agenda is a waste of time.
this rule makes all worse sorry. our PO/BE tries to do this but no one cares anymore. why not just start/end at a given time? meeting starts at 9, be there, it ends at 10, rage quit.
How about not having meetings that could have been an Email?
This ensures meetings will begin at 10 minutes past
some teams at my org start 5 mins past some don't... result, some people hop on early and keep waiting and some meetings ppl don't show up for at least 5 mins.
Seems like a technical solution to managerial problem.
I've always wondered at the company cultures between Google and Microsoft - Gcal supports ending meetings five minutes early while Outlook supports starting five minutes late.
At Microsoft it was obvious how five minutes late was optimal - meetings usually dragged on past their end time anyhow, but never started early so it gave folks time to eg get to their next meeting (in person), coffee, bio break, etc.
Does Google have a culture of meetings ending on the dot with finality? I just don't see that working with human nature of "one last thing" and the urge to spend an extra few minutes to hammer something out.
It's just laughable to me to bother with a "ends five minutes early" option. It just doesn't work - you know you're not cutting into anyone's next meeting by consuming those last five minutes. But you can't know that if you push into the next half hour block - maybe they have a customer call up next that starts on time, so you have to wrap up.
> while Outlook supports starting five minutes late
This contrast is an incorrect assumption. Outlook does allow starting meetings late as well as ending meetings early, with somewhat arbitrary durations. [1] I have definitely seen these options in Outlook settings (on web, since I hate Outlook).
However, I haven’t used it because the teams one works with need to be alerted and reminded of it before it sticks in their minds (if nobody else is using such settings).
[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/end-meetings-earl...
Our corporate IT managed to enable that setting for everyone, which made the transition easier. Doesn't stop people from overriding it, alas.
Yes, outlook supports both. At Microsoft though we only ever used "start five late".
> Does Google have a culture of meetings ending on the dot with finality?
Whenever I'm having remote meetings with people using a Google meeting room, right at the hour they'll say "I'm getting kicked out", because the next person is waiting to use the booked meeting room.
The solution I like best is to "pin" issues that would cause the meeting to run long, with select personnel needing to stay late to address the pinned issue but everybody else leaving on time.
#leadership is really sending me on this one
The management is dead. Welcome the new leadership (same as the old management^W leadership).
That PHB pic is more relevant than the author is willing to admit to themselves.
My 2 cents, just make the damn meetings 20 minutes or 50 minutes, and start at sharp. I absolutely hate the 5 minutes past, as I am ALWAYS late on them, or 5 minutes early.
Fixed time makes it so much easier to reason than random stuff.
Well, I simply don't accept nor attend meetings that are setup directly after another meeting. There must be also time to pee, poop, drink, prepare, etc. in between them. At least 30mins gaps between meetings is a must have for me.
But yeah, this guy work for google, says it all.
[dead]