While your point is extremely valid, I think it's interesting how different the reaction would have been to a fun tool like this 15 years ago. I doubt this would be the top comment, which makes me wonder how many startups that grew from fly-by-night experiments into giant companies then would no longer be possible now due to everyone's hyper-sensitivity and risk aversion around anything tech-related (which again, is certainly valid).
Makes me wonder if this cycle of internet innovation is over, and whether we're now going to be subject to 50+ years of stagnation and increasing regulation while the more risk-averse personality types start dominating. Similar to what happened in the automative industry -- think of the insanity and lack of concern for safety that went on at auto companies in 1920s Detroit that also simultaneously allowed for the core innovation and fast iteration in automotive to happen.
I think it's interesting how different the reaction would have been to a fun tool like this 15 years ago.
My guess would be, even more "do not want". 15 years ago, "cloud" was not even really a thing, and many were understandably very averse to it when it was introduced. If anything, the megacorps have only convinced us to give up more of our privacy since then.
I have the complete opposite impression. Sure, Facebook an co. do partially depend on people oversharing. But people being careful about their data have seriously turned down their expectations. 10-15 years ago it would be a huge scandal if some software phoned home your software configuration. Today people are ok with unique advertising IDs.
Some say data protection today inhibits development. I do not think there is much merit to arguments of this kind.
I don't even believe the most important innovations wouldn't have been possible with more data protection at all and that includes huge datasets to feed AI.
Maybe the market for data being sold would be smaller. But that isn't innovation really.
Dude. Do you realize how many companies (of all sizes) use things like Trello, putting proprietary information into a free website that can do anything it wants with the data? Meetings are barely the tip of the iceberg.
In the same vein, it's very funny to me how many people are feeding proprietary information to LLMs without giving a damn about their employer's stance on data privacy.
Why wouldn't people do this? Employees are there to:
- Collect a paycheck
- Enjoy their job as much as the employer will let them
- Progress in their career
In 2023, there is usually zero loyalty in either direction. Much of management is about how you get people who fundamentally don't care about you (beyond the above) to do something in your interest.
This goes all the way up to most CEOs, so "your interest" means the CEO's interest (while not being fired by the Board).
Ethically speaking, you owe your employer the labor you promised for the wages agreed on. If they ask you to care about a data policy, and they're paying you to care, and you took the money, then you should care.
Morally speaking, you can decide that the employer doesn't have loyalty to you, so you won't have loyalty to the employer. But if that's your morality, then there is no rationale for being either loyal or disloyal, because you'll just mirror what someone else does. This makes the decision less meaningful than tossing a coin; it's a morality of randomness, which is dysfunctional and anti-social. It's better to live your own principles (such as loyalty) regardless of whether someone gives you the same back.
Practically speaking, doing your job the way your job wants you to do it (caring about data privacy) helps you in your career and improves the business, and improving the business keeps you in a job and again helps your career.
It's also a quarter of your life. Don't you want to do your job as well as you can, so that all that time wasn't a waste?
Your employer is a corporation, not a human. Corporations are an abstraction. There are two ethical perspectives one can take:
1) Mutual loyalty. This changed in the eighties, as jobs became transactional. Typical SWE tenure is three years today, and human resources are treated as just that, resources.
2) Improving the world. Would you rather individuals act in the interests of Shell Oil, Phillip Morris, Microsoft, Lockheed-Martin, or in the interests of society as a whole? Why do you care that a particular corporation survives or dies, rather than everyone being better off? If Google is replaced by DuckDuckGo or Bing, and customers / investors / employees switch over, what's the moral value of that?
It makes rational sense to do your job as well as you can, but "as well as you can" isn't defined the same as "to the benefit of maximizing shareholder value."
Most people I know switch viewpoints after a decade or two in industry. It takes an event or understanding the internals of corporations well enough.
As a footnote, "doing your job the way your job wants you to do it" doesn't even make sense. A corporation doesn't want anything. It's a collection of individuals. Your boss might want something, the CEO might want something different, yet a different thing might be in the interests of shareholder value, something completely different in the interests of customers, and a policy document stored on the intranet might dictate something yet different.
Loyalty doesn't solely mean staying at one job forever. You can be loyal to the terms of your employment and the expectations therein and still change jobs when it's in your best interest. You can also show loyalty later by refusing to share sensitive details about your past employer to a competitor, or referring people looking for a job.
Acting in the interests of a corporate entity and the interests of society aren't mutually exclusive. It's extremely beneficial to society for ethical people to work at large corporations to ensure the corporation does not harm society.
Well clearly a corporation does want things, as a corporation is a capitalist entity. It wants to increase its profits and maximize shareholder value. The rules, regulations and bylaws of that corporation are what it wants executed by its employees (and which you are contractually obligated to comply with).
Doing one's job as well as one can means weighing many different competing forces and making the best choice you can. The same happens in your own personal life. Do you eat an entire pizza every night because it's tasty, or do you moderate how much pizza you eat to stay healthy? These are two competing interests (your tastebuds vs your health) that you have to juggle and make the best decision you can.
This argument is nonsense in that a corporation does not "wants to increase its profits and maximize shareholder value" or want anything "executed by its employees." A corporation is a signed document usually in Delware, and a collective belief in it's existence by society-at-large. It doesn't want anything anymore than my computer, my car, or a my fence wants anything.
I do maintain my car so it continues to work for me, but it doesn't "want" oil or gas. I want it to work for me.
The same is true for corporations. Corporations are a useful construct for keeping society free and productive (relative to, say, command economies or feudalism). I want the retirees who invested in the corporation to be able to retire, customers to be happy, and employees to have a healthy work environment. The extent to which that aligns to what you think a piece of paper in Delaware wants varies. It sometimes aligns and sometimes doesn't.
Beyond that, there is no fundamental moral imperative for helping your employer grow anymore than there is for oiling a car.
There is a moral imperative to doing what you agree to do (which includes contracts), the strength of which varies by context and culture. I can go into that in much more depth.
I never said there was a moral obligation to helping your employer, I said there was an ethical obligation, which there is (even more so depending on your occupation).
Morally you have an obligation to yourself and other people, and following moral principles in relation to a company should be considered the same as moral principles applied to people. Like you point out, companies are made of people, your actions impact people in and through the company, hence your morals apply to the company.
You don't have any moral obligation to your car. But if you don't eventually change the oil, someone is going to be impacted by it; the people stuck behind you in traffic, the tow truck driver, the mechanic, your kids stuck at after-school practice, etc. And even further, you impact yourself by not maintaining this machinery, by failing to live a principle of hard work, responsibility, caring for others impacted by your actions, the environment. You also fail to treat yourself well through the maintenance of the vehicle you own and use, losing a valuable asset. Pick your philosophical poison, there's not a lot of moral justification for these things. But you're right, you don't do them because you owe it to the car.
That's web link #1. Further links showed a few more distinctions, but none which matched what you wrote. It sounds like it's an important point, but I don't know what it is.
In terms of obligations to car (or corporation) versus human beings, it's not a "pick your philosophical poison." I'll give distinctions:
- If I have a friend who in need of help, and a car which would be damaged if driven without maintenance, the ethical behavior is to kill my car and help my friend. If, on the other hand, my spouse is sick, and helping my friend involves neglecting bringing my spouse to a hospital, I should probably "maintain" my spouse's health.
In corporations, a few examples:
- Pricing. I can set pricing to maximize profits / growth or to maximize customer benefit (which involves the company surviving, but not necessarily growing).
- Legal anticompetitive behavior. I can focus on harming my competitors (which may be best for shareholder value but contributes negatively to the world) or on building value
- Spyware / privacy. Profits may be maximized, but customers are harmed.
- Sales, litigation, etc. are all activities which mostly take away value from the world. It's good if people know about what solutions exist, but the profit-maximizing investment goes many times beyond that.
.... and so on.
In many cases, "good of the world" and "good of employer" align. If I'm working on a word processor, it's best for everyone if it works well, doesn't crash, etc. The distinctions come in when there's a misalignment. If all people pick "good of the world" over "good of employer," individual companies will be less competitive, but the ecosystem will be more efficient overall, and the world will work better.
What a bleak view. This is not my experience at all and doesn't match that of most of my friends either. Many have been loyal to their employer for years, and it goes the other way around as well.
True. And it does happen. But I don't think it happens at the scale the post I replied to seems to suggest. I hear about it sometimes, but not so often that it would be an endemic thing that has to be assumed to be the default in 2023.
I wonder which jobs you are thinking about here. Quite a lot of people work in a retail or food service position and I can assure you this feeling of "nobody caring" is absolutely present at that level.
I assume people on this forum immediately picture high paying engineering jobs and not the average worker's job.
I'm assuming the kind of jobs where asking ChatGPT (which was the context) could be in any way relevant to the job at hand, and I don't think retail is a particularly practical fit here. Yes, I'm talking about engineering jobs and the like.
This is inherently not the same, though. Sure, companies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but a company's first and foremost interest is profit for the shareholder. For a person in a relationship, it's about finding a partner that makes them happy. In addition, you are expendable to a company, whereas people build a relationship and become more and more invested over time. Way more than a company becomes invested in an employee.
No, a company's first and foremost interest is not profit for the shareholder.
Corporations don't have interests. They're abstractions -- ways of organizing people to be productive members of society. Individuals within those corporations have interests.
If you look at a company as if it were a sentient human, you'll get to the wrong conclusions. There is no moral imperative for a company to survive. There's a moral imperative to make sure everyone has gainful, productive employment, healthy levels of stress, etc.
If you're at Google, and you can work on:
(1) an advertising user-profiling technology with no social benefit but contribution to Google's bottom line
(2) a civics-focused open-source project with no benefit to shareholder value, but significant value to society
Which would you pick?
If you're at Enron pre-scandal, and can either:
(1) successfully cover up evidence to prevent the scandal; or
(2) blow the whistle
Which do you pick? That's where the moral imperative sits. These things are much more complex with a partner. There's a moral imperative not to betray your partner, as well as one to not support immoral actions, and some balance. With corporations, there is no such moral imperative. If an unethically-organized corporation dies, and resources move into ethically-organized ones, the world is better off.
I think the key, in both cases, is to learn more about relationships, and in the later case, about the nature of corporations.
It's perfectly reasonable to make a commitment to "not be evil," and to "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That was the founding mission of Google. That's very different from loyalty to a colorful logo, a set of incorporation documents, and an abstraction.
Actively assisting a crime is very different than passively doing something a little wreckless.
Do you think contractors shred plans of your house after you hire them for a remodel? Or do they just throw them away in a dumpster, with your address on them, behind their offices.
Work ethics dictate a duty to other humans, not to corporations.
The two are sometimes the same, and sometimes very different. To the plumber point, if you work for a plumbing corporation which requires you to up-sell unneeded repairs, you have no ethical obligation to do so, and indeed, you have an ethical obligation to subvert that particular requirement.
On the other hand, you do have a duty to do plumbing right.
I'm lucky because at the moment I work at a public project that is meant to be public and there is no issue at all with checking an LLM.
That said, lately I have favored Kagi FastGPT for two (three) reasons:
- I trust Kagi a magnitude more (or even more) than I trust any FAANG company except Apple [1][2].
- It seems to be way more up to date.
- (It seems a bit less shy.)
[1]: Why? Sound business plan, incentives align.
[2]: Does it mean I trust them? No, that would have meant I hadn't learned a thing from WhatsApp. And no, after the photo snooping stunt from Apple a couple of years ago I don't trust them either, I only consider them my best option at the moment.
I'd appreciate it if you could elaborate on where your trust for Kagi comes from? I'm baffled that an ex-GoDaddy employee reselling Bing search results at a premium, with a history of "attracting customers at one price, then increasing the price substantially" (I won't use the legal term, as IANAL), who flags HN posts bringing these facts to the public's attention, has generated so much enthusiasm here. Maybe I missed something?
Quite true, but "bait and switch" is an actual legal standard that Kagi likely technically sidestepped, given that (for now) he's still in business. I want to make sure my posts are factual, and I'm not even sure which jurisdiction Kagi operates in, so I won't speculate as to whether the deception technically reached the level of fraud, even though the phrase "bait and switch" is commonly used by laypeople to refer to non-criminal types of deception. Nevertheless, it's fascinating to see "Kagi" and "trust" in the same sentence, and I wonder if this trustworthiness was actually demonstrated somehow. It's more likely we're witnessing some kind of cognitive bias like sunk cost fallacy.
> I'd appreciate it if you could elaborate on where your trust for Kagi comes from?
As written above: "Sound business plan, incentives align."
> reselling Bing search results at a premium,
Should I also refuse to deal with ex-Facebook employees? Ex-Google employees?
These two companies has created a lot more hassle/stress/worries in my life than Godaddy.
> reselling Bing search results at a premium,
With the value add he offers it makes it a great deal for me. I don't care if other make money on me, even lots of money, as long as it is a good deal for me.
In fact, I actually see it as good sign if people make money on the services they provide me, as it will both incentivize them to continue providing these services as well as encouraging others to start competing providers.
> with a history of "attracting customers at one price, then increasing the price substantially"
I got in at an really low price and got grandfathered into a deal that is still the best in the market. They have announced the change in a clear way and since I was free to cancel anytime I wanted I cannot complain.
Had I been tied to the service somehow I would probably have been annoyed even if the service was the same and the price hike was the same, but I wasn't and I find this to be within expectations for an early stage start up.
> who flags HN posts bringing these facts to the public's attention
I'm not aware of this. Would you care to link some sources?
If not I would just expect it was a totally unreasonable post and some happy customer like me flagged it. (And on a side note: While non YC companies aren't bound to YC standards I really hope most companies who frequent HN stick to the standard of not flagging complaints against themselves.)
Edit:
> has generated so much enthusiasm here. Maybe I missed something?
For some of us, a working search engine can save us significant amount of time every day. After first having had a working search engine for years, then lost it and struggled for years with workarounds, I'd say my enthusiasm is rather understandable.
And I know this is not everyone's experience, but with my search patterns, and in the bucket Google has put my account, I get irrelevant results all the time and I get irrelevant and insulting ads all the time.
Thank you for the thoughtful response and useful info. I don't have visibility into who actually flags posts, but you could very well be correct. It's concerning to me that people find value in this product, but I'm glad you're enjoying it.
Not sure why Trello was picked as an example. Trello respects the privacy of its customers. It does not profit from collecting user information. Private company data remains private in Trello, even if the company doesn’t pay. Data is not shared and cannot be freely accessed by employees.
Their terms may have changed after they were acquired, I dunno. But Atlassian has something like two dozen different legal documents covering their software. How do you know what they do/don't do until you've had your legal department vet it?
As a random example: Trello can list any customer in their promotional materials (you have to dig through the legal docs to find the opt-out email). As the CEO of your own company, how would you like to see your company listed in a Trello ad when you're trying to do business with a Trello competitor, or gain a customer who competes with Trello?
Point being: employees use 3rd parties all the time in ways they shouldn't, often leaking a lot more data than meetings. It's why DLP is so popular.
Exactly, which is why you need to consider this stuff and not use those types of services if you have actual confidential data. Find a provider with clear contracts that prevent these types of changes. Self host. Whatever, just make sure to pay actual attention to what you're doing.
Trello is owned by Atlassian. Not saying it's impossible, but they'd be shooting themselves in the foot big time if they pulled some shady shit that alienated their corporate user base.
I'd imagine they offer Trello for free to entice you to start paying for Jira (or god forbid, Confluence).
Leaking user data (or "anonymising" it and then selling it) doesn't alienate a corporate userbase, because corporations broadly do not care at all that user data gets leaked. Unless it materially affects their income, this is something that is ignored.
I work for a GMP manufacturer of pharmaceuticals and they use the free version of Trello and put tons of proprietary client information in Trello. Each client is a different company and they are never supposed to see data from the other one. It’s an absolutely insane thing to do in my opinion. I’m beginning to see why we are losing clients.
why is open source different? you are either hosting your own service instance or you are running something you dont control with no hard guarantee that the code matches what is running. (not to mention compilation env differences and other intermediate possibilities)
Well, with private/company data, I for sure would skim the source and keep some network inspector open if I didn't have sufficient grounds to trust the app.
It's not black-and-white for me, more like an intuitive estimate of probability of mishandling data, colored by relevant policies. But some specific examples from work:
- I wouldn't use Trello or GSuite without clearing it with corporate; however, I would still trust the two much more than a random Tinder for Meetings app, because the two are well-known multinationals (read: stationary targets for lawsuits), while that Tinder for Meetings thing is a small thing, and could easily be a scam / data exfil attempt by someone who'll disappear the next day, never to be found;
- I use O365 tools, because corporate has signed appropriate deals with Microsoft and I can safely assume those tools are OK to use;
- I'm not worried about third-party packages from MELPA exfiltrating proprietary data via my Emacs, because of a combination of Free Software culture, Open Source culture, Emacs being niche, and this never happening before to my knowledge;
- I am worried about third-party extensions to VS Code, because it's more mainstream software culture, has mass appeal meaning it's a good target for scammers, and the entire ecosystem is thoroughly infused with analytics and surveillance bullshit;
- I use ChatGPT for various things (via API, through alternative frontend), but I do not use it for generic, non-company specific things, always triple-checking that I'm not accidentally revealing any IP; this is in line with recent company policies;
Accountants are hired under confidentiality agreements. Connecting random third parties to your systems that have "we are allowed to do anything we want at any time" agreements is kind of the exact opposite of that.
As others said, accountants are hired under confidentiality agreements. What that means is, should said accountant breach my trust, they're an easy target to hit with a lawsuit. The possibility discourages scammy behavior and establishes some baseline trust.
Big corporations are also good targets for lawsuits - they may not be easy, but they are stationary, and if you have a good case, chances are many other people have one too. This is, again, establishing some baseline of trust, even in absence of a proper business contact.
Random SaaS / fresh startups? They're a highly-mobile targets. There's a good chance they may close shop and disappear overnight. There is no baseline of trust there, and much more thorough due diligence is required.
Confidentiality agreements aside, the scale isn't the same.
Accountants have tens of clients, online apps have thousands or millions. For an app, the relative benefit from skimming a bit off every client is higher, the relative cost of losing one client who notices is lower.
There is a regulatory body for CPAs, which include things like ethics. There are "generally accepted accounting practices" (GAAP) which are adopted by regulatory bodies like the SEC and IRS. There are laws that are related to all of the above.
Point is, my dealings with my accountant(s) is highly regulated, and there is expectations of confidentiality, trust, and privacy -- with rules and laws to back that up.
Not the case with some random app handling your corporate data. Plus Outlook and other calendars integrate with many other systems, and there are a lot of nasty hacks if you can get someone's email. Lotta risk for negligible gain.
Definitely totally 100% unrelated, but do people notice that their security teams often focus on minuscule unlikely scenarios instead of potentially-company-ending bugs and exploits?
Things like your MacOS install being on 12.3.1 instead of 12.3.2, blindly listing off AWS/GCP recommendations without any consideration to how the service is implemented and/or how the infrastructure is used, or making engineering teams jump through seventeen hoops to deprecate an endpoint..... all while there's like a SQL injection in the primary public-facing customer API or something.
Security teams focus on requirements and objectives which are set by far removed entities and at vastly different generality and abstraction levels, often with objectives other than "make sure we and our customers don't get hacked", such as limiting legal liability and navigating a complex landscape of regulation and best-practice recommendations, ignoring which can also lead to legal liability. It should be no surprise that these have little overlap with actual security problems arising in their particular context.
A good security team will manage to find the time to also identify and address the actual concrete security issues.
Yes same issue in all my jobs. I've found that security and compliance standards for technology companies are created and maintained by accountants, not engineers. In a way this is good because if the engineers fix "the real issues" and the accountants focus on the "generic list that doesn't matter", you still end up catching some different things. Problem is the amount of fake work, as well as slowdowns created in exchange for no extra security.
We have to have some level of trust. Otherwise we will need to manually and personally verify each line of each software that we use. And unfortunately this is impossible.
This is no different than using Reclaim.ai or Calendly with your work calendar. Obviously you should do your diligence with what software you give access to your calendar, but this likely isn't the first SaaS that has access these days...
> Your alarm bells should be going off at that point.
Whenever the erosion of privacy comes up, folks here point to regular folk being ambivalent until their identity is stolen. But even among the tech literate? Chill, don't worry, everybody is reading your work email!
If you like the idea of swiping left on meetings to cancel them then you're going to have to either pray someone makes a privacy respecting version of this that meets your standards (or make it yourself) or give up some level of privacy to use someone else's app and take the good with the bad.
Does Privacy Policy even matter? It feels like those walls of texts are a kind of "privacy theater" to show users that the company has their shit together.
I'm wondering how many Privacy Policies are read by at least on employee of the company, and how many are copy-pasted from the competitor's web.
In the U.S. anyway privacy policies identify the company doing business, provide contact information and are legally enforceable by the FTC and states.
Microsoft, who provides our mail and calendar service, has a tool for this available in Office 365. So no need to connect an outside service. Otherwise, self-hosting is an option. Or you make the decision that the risk of using a third party is alright in your business and do that.
I get it - you’re mocking the parent’s framing of this as a security issue.
Perhaps it isn’t an issue for you, but in case it’s not obvious, calendar entry titles and descriptions can (and have) contained confidential information that would present various forms of business risk if leaked. BigCo corporate IT policy often forbids placing such information on untrusted third-party hardware/software/services.
At a job a few years ago, managers and project owners were in the habit of canceling meetings last-minute if no agenda.
In principal this was great - give people back time - but it was unfortunately unilateral and too late. Basically, if you don't see the Slack message about "hey, anyone have stuff for this meeting, if not I'll cancel" in the thirty minute window before the meeting, you didn't get a say - so in practice this meant the managers/project owners were the ones making the decisions and upward and sideways communication just didn't happen very frequently. E.g. if manager A has a standing meeting with individuals B, C, and D, and A individually was up to date on what all three of B, C and D were doing, A would cancel the meeting and B/C/D wouldn't be up to speed on what they were doing unless they all set up more individual meetings taking up more time than the original one "gave back."
That was less of a problem in-office where others are likely to bump into each other anyway, but when things went remote it was isolating.
If it's a recurring meeting, you can attach a google doc or whatever to it in calendar with meeting notes/agenda. People can add to the agenda whenever, and if there's nothing on it the meeting can get cancelled.
I've always found this to be one of those "manager schedule/style" vs "engineer schedule/style" things.
Hard blockers get added, but otherwise I've found ICs to be very hesitant about adding to the agenda. Especially when it's just "I want to know what's going on in the other teams/projects" because nobody wants to admit ignorance.
That tooling is helpful, but because of asymmetric dynamics, many individual contributors who have things on their minds don’t put things on that agenda. You have to work to make that agenda not “manager domain.”
As a manager, I often reach out on the “opposite” day (Monday if the meeting is on a Thursday) and ask if there are things they want to talk about that are not already there. I also put things weeks ahead to give some sense of structure.
Same for the team’s meeting agenda: people, especially senior team members, are more keen to edit that one, though. Often, I try to copy elements that they add to our 1:1 to discuss their concern ahead of time.
When another team member raises a concern about another member, I ask them to tell them to add it to the agenda. That hasn’t worked, ever, but it highlights the role of that agenda as an asymetric way to handle the relations.
Just decline any meeting that doesn't have an agenda with a comment of "I don't think I'd bring any value to this meeting."
If the meeting does have an agenda but doesn't have any goal decline it with a comment like "I don't have a strong opinion about the goal here, so I'm happy to accept whatever the outcome is."
If there's an agenda and a goal then attend that one because you don't often get to see a mythical creature.
Ok, and then the person whose meeting you declined doesn't come to your meetings when you need them to. Or you get side/back channeled. Or you risk a worse review because they think you're an asshole, or not a team player, or have poor social skills, or begin to dislike you and notice all your other faults, and that makes it into the review directly (they're part of it or provide direct feedback)or indirectly (they ask your manager wtf is your problem).
If you want to be an edgelord about accepting meetings it's not going to work in your favor for most people/companies.
Based on when this conversation happened I expect it is a cultural difference; people who think this is normal are Indian/European and I am American.
In my experience in American bigtech, an engineer who rejects all meetings that don’t meet their own personal set of rules for what constitutes a worthwhile meeting (or I’m sure more accurately, applies those rules whenever they don’t want to attend) would be viewed very negatively. We’re expected to collaborate a lot by default, and by American standards it’s also a very snowflakey (making all meeting invites have to conform to your special little rules for you to grace us with your attendance) and aggressive way to express distaste in something.
IME it would be much better to directly just ask the creator if your attendance is truly necessary or even just noshow. But perhaps etiquette is different in other parts of the world.
That doesn't work if you're feeling insecure about your job security, want to avoid looking like a slacker, don't want to offend your colleagues, etc.
And yeah, you can toughen up and decline anyway despite all that, but processes should be based on giving employees the right incentives, not hoping they toughen up. (See also, blameless post-mortems.)
This is really interesting to me because whenever I see anyone decline a meeting I assume it's because they have too much to do and don't have time to spare. If anything, declining meetings should make your job more secure because everyone will think you're swamped with work.
Well, it is a bit more complex. There are meetings which you don't think they are absolutely necessary, but if they take place, you want to attend. To have an invisible flag to signal that you rather would skip the meeting sounds like a good middle ground to cancel meetings no one feels strongly about but is afraid to cancel.
And then... the meeting veers in to something else, a decision is made about something that affects you or... simply commits you to do work.
Insane, but it's happened to me more than a few times. Sometimes directly ("you do xyz") and sometimes indirectly. "Person X will do xyz" really means I now have to manage/oversee/review person X because they're very junior. Push back, and you're "not a team player".
Doesn't happen a lot, but has happened enough for me to be wary in new orgs until I get a few months in.
So far, I've managed to get some mileage out of RSVP-ing as "tentative", with a comment that boils down to "how about you add some agenda to the meeting invite, because at this point I kind of don't know WTF is this about and why am I even on the invitee list?". I haven't thought of treating a goal of the meeting as distinct thing from the agenda. I'll try it next time, whenever it comes - for some reason, I seem to not get all that many meeting invites anymore ;).
This is obvious yet brilliant. I've been working for so long without realising that meetings are a process, not the end. I.e. they have to lead to something.
I have a particularly savage team member who does this all the time. It pisses some people off a lot, but she's an extremely high performer and other high performers love her – on balance I think it's not a bad practice.
I think the parent’s tone/style would be risky for many to take, but I don’t think you could be faulted to ask something along the lines of “what’s the goal of the meeting, and is there an agenda and pre-read materials that will be distributed in well in advance of the meeting so that I can come prepared to contribute?”
If declining a meeting is a sackable offence then you should do absolutely everything you can to get yourself fired from that role. Drop a production database to save yourself from a massively toxic workplace.
This kind of labor power imbalance is fairly commonplace across the US. You're really not going to find a place that'll let you decline meetings because you don't wanna go.
Are people afraid of speaking out against meetings or declining them? I typically am upfront about when I think a meeting is not needed or when I’m not needed, and have no problem discussing it with my coworkers directly.
Larger meetings like all-hands are different.. no way you’re getting every attendee to agree on canceling those, that’s more management politics.
> Are people afraid of speaking out against meetings or declining them?
Depending on org culture, being direct about opting out of meetings can cast you in a negative light at best, or put your job at risk at worst.
The better the culture is around creating safety to be direct and have agency to do so, the less likely these hacks are needed.
I’m am very blunt with the dozen or so people who report up to me: if you don’t think you need to be in a meeting, say so, and drop me a message if I might have to defend the decision across the org or manage up. But all orgs are different along with their politics and quality of middle management.
Right, in most cases it’s not worth it to burn a bridge by being the one person willing to speak up (especially when you can just go camera off and work on something else). There is a collective action problem where nobody wants to be the first to “defect” even if most do.
And IME the useless meeting problem is pretty common when you have an ineffective manager who likes to “hold court” with as many cross team stakeholders as possible. You probably aren’t close enough to candidly tell them the meeting structure needs to change or just to cancel the recurring meeting, you need to be on their good terms because you work with them relatively often and ask favors of each other, the worst your or their team is doing the more you need the meeting as evidence of crossteam collaboration…
At any company you’re going to end up with this problem, maybe at a startup its easier to communicate frankly and weed out the type of person who would do this, but I think it’s still quite possible for an otherwise good employee to make the mistake of creating inefficient meetings/processes where everyone is too nice or polite to give candid feedback.
I was always willing to risk my job over this. I’d rather have to find a job again than spend 10 hours a week in pointless meetings.
I have done what you describe in the last paragraph, and also cancelled team meetings or sent a single representative. I also sent people back to their seats halfway through a meeting if it no longer concerned them. I have no regrets. Nobody complained. My team seemed to appreciate it.
Sound like an org culture you better avoid. Seriously, what good is an employee if it isn't allowed to state your disapproval constructively. You wouldn't ever get an honest answer this way about anything more important than the next meeting.
It’s not that simple, for example I work with several different teams, some of the teams have recurring meetings that they expect me to attend to varying degrees. In one case I’m only needed about 25% of the time and even then only for 5-10% of the meeting, and 33% of the time the meeting is just cancelled a few hours in advance by the manager who runs it. But the manager for that team is kinda pointy-haired, so if I just stopped showing up he’d eventually talk with my manager and be like “we need a representative from your team at this meeting and X stopped showing up, what gives?”, my manager would know already that the meeting is useless for me, but the incentives are such that it’s easiest if I just go (because if I refuse he’d have to go himself and/or send someone less equipped to help).
The actual feedback my manager and I would both want to give is “this meeting is in practice just <other team’s manager> giving and getting a status update we don’t need to be present for, then asking us questions for his projects, we’d rather it be more collaborative or less frequent” but that would hurt that other manager’s feelings. And we need their buy in to help us with things sometimes. And probably we dominate meetings sometimes that the pointy haired guy (or members of his team) goes to anyway. It’s kinda aggro to just refuse to let him hold court and it might burn a bridge we need to be maintained…
I’ve seen the same thing happen with a TL or manager who tries to force a really inefficient process like 30-60m 10+ person standup every day. Yes to an extent status updates are necessary but in this other case the manager is even pointier haired and has no idea how to manage, his ICs are actually quite talented, this is just his way to hold court.
With anonymous meeting feedback you can have a better way of surfacing a signal that the meeting isn’t valuable to most attendees. And you avoid foisting the political risk on whoever is bravest enough to speak out. I know you might think all these failure modes I mentioned are just big company politics, but I think they can happen in basically any situation where there is a power imbalance (even a little startup with a ceo insisting on an excess of meetings with the 4 other employees).
Maybe 5% of meetings are useful, in my experience. But when you are calling out 95% of meetings to be cancelled, well… it’s a bad look. You’re not a team player. You are being negative. It especially looks bad to managers who rely on meetings to give themselves the appearance of doing something.
I brought this up with my manager the other day. He basically said no one is counting how many meetings I go to. Just decline and don't go. And that's what I've done. And no one has given me shit so.. works for me I guess.
You miss out on the few decisions that get made doing this. It's like remote work, everyone needs to be on board or it doesn't work. Unless your truly don't care about anything that goes on.
Well.. I'm not skipping everything. Mostly just 'status update' style meetings so far. If the agenda looks interesting or relevant I go. And everyone seems to be pretty clueless about what's going on regardless. Too many people, too many moving parts.
It may depend on the function of meetings at an organization. If it's a practical thing among peers, then sure, nothing wrong with saying, "I don't have anything this week; can we skip it?" But in a lot of places, meetings are more an expression of primate dominance dynamics. How's a boss going to feel important if they don't have a lot of people in a room listening to them blather?
There are a lot of better and more specific answers about canceling and how useful meetings are.
I can give you an insight into one way to measure that. (Like every time you measure things with a normative proxy, this gets far more controversial than you’d like or expect very fast.)
Measure the speaking time for everyone.
How is that controversial?
Well, you can ask what the goal of the meeting is, but if the point is “discussion” and the boss talked 94% of the time, we are in “this meeting could have been an email” territory. Because the boss is very much a listener, as he likes to remind people, that isn’t a great look. Or rather, whoever suggested to measure who is speaking isn’t a great fit for the team.
I tend to be the one complaining the loudest, but after a while I don't want to be the only one doing so so I have stopped. I think others agree but are too afraid to speak out. Something like this would be a good tool. Although no way it passes security requirements.
It really depends on who is making the meetings and what they want. When the division executive director invites me to a meeting, I might dislike it, but I'm going to show up.
Solved this for my former work by creating a meeting cost plugin - displaying - (time * corporate avg salary * participants). I should revive this. It's jarring when you see it.
My other thought was to seek feedback for meetings automatically - close the app, ask how useful was this. Send monthly reports for the sake of anonymity.
I think there is a balance where you have to be careful here - this same logic can bring you to a place where you never do team days, team building, all hands meetings, customer visits, client meetings etc which are activities which can be difficult to justify objectively on an individual basis but incredibly worthwhile from a soft perspective.
For those on the Middle Meeting rung of the corporate ladder - going to a meeting is at least "billable" as the alternative use of their time is they sit and browse the internet instead.
A very real (and morale boosting way) to put this into action would be to require anyone wishing to hold a meeting with more, than, say, 5 people present buy lunch for all attendees.
Avg corp salary, not individual :-) - at the time I used Glassdoor data. (Or maybe I even just ballparked it?)
Truth be told, it gets so expensive so fast, even with the entry level salary. Especially once you're over 2 participants. Really makes you think - would I pay this much for what I'm trying to solve here? And yes, it's not perfect, in fact, nothing is truly this reductive, but in lieu of a better metric...
> Really makes you think - would I pay this much for what I'm trying to solve here?
I think this is the potential subtle failure in this thought - it shouldn’t be if you would pay, it should be if the company would pay.
And people will often dramatically under-estimate what a company will pay for something, particularly if it is a sunk-cost and not an ‘actual’ cost they will immediately realise.
This could be used for all kinds of unpleasant corporate decisions. Swipe to agree that someone's UI that they made is ugly. Swipe to vote undesirables out of the company.
Reminds me of Athenian ostracism. I always thought we should have a write-in line on ballots where if more than a third of voters write one name, they’re banned from public office for ten years.
The point is to expel demagogues, thereby incentivising compromise and not demonising a series of minorities. Athenians just banished the least popular person, assuming a quorum was met [1]. (I made up the one third threshold with limited thought.)
I think that would be counterproductive in the long term. Rather, I think, you have to have unpleasant conversations and force people to account for their decisions. I would just stress intellectual honesty, don't make things personal, just extreme objectivity and transparency where appropriate.
It would make things worse. Being unpleasant doesn't mean it's not right. The ugly UI might have lots of needed functionality. The undesirables might be the 1s doing all the work. A popularity contest is the worst thing to happen.
Better idea would be for the company to get its act together and set the right culture and expectations for giving/receiving feedback. Shortcuts like these all cause more harm than they help.
Tech free alternative: if you don't think the meeting is useful you don't have to attend.
Since this app needs approval and getting everyone on board to use it, you can just do the same with the sentence above. It has the advantage that it will also reduce meetings that remain, as well as cancelling ones no one wants to attend.
Urgh. I hate last minute meeting cancellations. If there's not much to talk about, I'd rather have a 5 minute chat, then go back to work, rather than cancel altogether.
This also makes me realise how few interesting products are mentioned on HN lately.
Do yourself a favour and watch "Meetings Bloody Meetings" by John Cleese (I recommend the original one from the 70ies that can be found on the internet archive, not the remake on youtube, also by John Cleese).
It's a funny 30min skit, well worth watching until the end, with a nice recap in the last 5 minutes.
If you follow those guidelines, you will have productive meetings.
In particular, with regard to this app, the meeting would have been cancelled way before any need to swipe, because the chairperson would have not scheduled it (or cancelled it if recurring) in the absence of any agenda items.
Similarly, swiping without knowing the agenda seems unproductive. If there were real issues involved, you've simply postponed until nearer the deadline.
Amazingly the idea of this came up at a party this week end (some drinking and much laughter was involved). And now HN shows that someone had apparently done it. Thanks theonlyriggs! But please stop snooping on my parties.
What would be great is the same feature for rescheduling.
Sometimes a meeting is important and shouldn't be cancelled, but the scheduled day/time ends up being inconvenient for one reason or another. Not inconvenient enough to justify claiming a last-minute conflict, but enough that you would still rather do it another time if it turned out that everyone else was in the same boat.
It should be if everyone (or everyone but one person) swipes left, the meeting is cancelled--can't have a meeting with one person. Or maybe notify the only person so they can revise or reschedule it.
To be fair, if one person thinks the meeting is worth it, it might be worth it. I've been in more then one meeting where everyone think they know what's happening correctly but everyone had a different interpretation and understanding of what actually needed to be done.
Well the person who scheduled the meeting clearly thinks it's important, so they aren't going to be swiping left on their own meeting. I don't see how this gets many meetings canceled, except maybe standing meetings that nobody wants to go to this week.
Glad to see this idea actually built! People kept talking about wanting this on Twitter. Makes a lot of sense inside companies.
Definitely wish I had it at some past employers that had certain regular sync meetings that were pretty useless. People tend not to want to point it out so as to not offend the manager who loves organizing them.
If Microsoft brings osascript back for Outlook on Mac, I'm going to write a local script that does the same thing. Pick some threshold, >50% rejection, meeting is canceled.
Hahaha. I hate my work's insane 1:1 scheduling and flex meetings that throw themselves around. No one really wants to be the dick who cancels on everyone.
First thing that strikes me is genuine alarm that something like that might be needed. It's just red flags all around.
1. If you have such a bad meeting culture in the office that you think something like this might ever be useful. Fix your meeting culture.
2. If "anonymous voting" is considered reasonable or necessary given the office culture. Fix your communication. Have 1-to-1 meetings were you can discuss things like too many meetings, etc.
Maybe this is made as a joke, and if so, well done.
It still leaks information. A sneaky manager might swipe left just to see what happens, then write down on their shit list "employees lack commitment".
There is no source code, and it gets READ access to your meetings!
Please do not make the error and give a non-vetted source access to your PRIVATE data!