Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

Same in Germany. Times are usually assumed to be ct (cum tempore) and start XY:15. When something starts sharp, it's specified as st (sine tempore).

It also allows you to have "1 hour" classes that are at 10am and 11am, and you aren't forced to leave early or arrive late. A 5m gap isn't enough for huge numbers of classes in many campuses.

I confirm, we have it in Italian universities (it's called "quarto d'ora accademico" in Italian).

This thread is absolutely fascinating — American, never heard of this practice (esp ct/st), and desperately want it in my life now!

Times are given as "c.t.", cum tempore.

In Poland "academic quarter" has a sense that if the teacher didn't show up and it's 15 minues past, the students can leave. They still need to show up for the class at 00 every time and are scolded to varying degree if they showed up after the teacher started which they do right after they arrive.

Same thing in Sweden in the 1980s

Same in Denmark. Actually often needed to get from one auditorium across campus to another auditorium

>And he would give negative points on assignments.

I remember reading (maybe from Nate Silver) of a professor who would use this technique to teach about uncertainty. You could weigh your overall grade with a proclamation about how certain you were about the answer. Right answers with high certainty could really amp up your grade, but conversely if you claimed 100% certainty on a question you got wrong, you’d fail the course!

I have a medical condition (autoimmune hypothyroid, extreme edition) which I wasn't aware of, but was suffering from severely, during my University years. Waking up was extremely difficult for me and as a result I was often late. At the time I couldn't understand why I seemingly had a problem that nobody else did, and presumed I just lacked self control. Nope, I just needed (a lot) of medication.

Your Prof Ramsey would have penalised me for this unknown condition. This isn't behaviour to be celebrated.

AKA "Fashionably Late"

> it had already been mostly abolished

c.t. is still standard at many German universities (and at all Bavarian universities I know). However, I know at least one university of applied sciences where lectures start at full hours.

Those are strange annotations; it looks like at least one word is missing. They mean "with time" and "without time".

> The 10-minute transition time will move before the hour instead of after the hour. Previously a one-hour class with an official start time of 9:00 a.m. would begin at 9:10 a.m. Under the new policy, class will begin at the official start time but end at 9:50 a.m.

https://www.michiganpublic.org/education/2018-02-20/universi... / https://record.umich.edu/articles/university-updating-start-...

Sad.

Malicious compliance would involve reviewing the action items from the 50 minute meeting at the beginning of the 10 minute meeting

I always love seeing stuff like this on reddit /r/oddlyspecific

I think I even saw a 5.25 mph sign once!

This is a dadhacker post, including (especially) the "cow-orker".

Are you just reposting or are you the real dadhacker?

Because if you are, I was reading your blog since I was like 14. Sad it's down now. But absolutely great stuff that helped prepare me for today's industry :)

I love this. Not only the reminders that time's a wastin', but also the unattractive aesthetic, making the meeting space a less pleasant place to linger, and maybe even taking people down a notch from their very important people meetings. The bird calling "cuckoo" could even be commentary on the discussion.

I've been stuck in meetings like that. I'd just walk out saying, "you know where to find me if my input required."

Even remotely I try to get the team to keep meetings short and sweet. If it has to go over 45 minutes I’d book two separate meetings with a 10 minute break in the middle.

Nothing worse than meetings that drag on, where everyone starts to lose focus, and where one or two vocal participants sidetrack it into a 1:1 conversation. Just get shit wrapped up and have your other conversations without demanding the time of people who don’t need to be involved.

I don't mind if a meeting is an hour, but I'm genuinely a bit peeved every time I'm in a 50 minute meeting that just automatically rolls over. If you want to do an hour, book an hour.

(All I actually do about this is be the person who pops up in meeting-chat at XX:51 with a "time-check: we've gone over".)

I started replying "No agenda, no attenda" after being in a few too many meetings where things dragged on, or where I clearly was not needed. Didn't matter if I was telling this to someone at the same level as me, or someone at the head of the department: the humor in the wording lessens the sting of the implied "stop being disorganized" message. I made it clear that if there was not a clear agenda in the meeting invite, I would not be attending.

Following this with "What outcome should we expect at the end of this meeting? If there are next steps, what would we like them to be?" helps cut to the chase, and in my experience, things got better across the board. Sure, there were one or two folks who still struggled to create agendas for meetings - but it wasn't long before they were updating their LinkedIn profiles. Accountability can do that sometimes.

This works great except 95% of the places I've been with bad meeting culture, it comes from the top.

Long winded execs enjoying open ended meetings without any structure to constrain them. Which is to say, the kind of shops with micromanaging management who keep themselves busy with meetings with their own team.

With my current team lead, 90-minute standups aren't common, but they've happened. 30 minutes is "short", and most take 45 minutes. The previous lead kept things to about 10-15 minutes. The new guy has apparently never in his life said "OK, let's discuss this after standup".

Wow, was it actually 90 minutes of standing?

Did anyone faint?

I do this at 60 minutes, even though my meetings are all over zoom these days. "Sorry, I need to step away to get some water. I'll be back in a few minutes."

> neither side understands the other.

Being late is viewed as rude or lacking respect for others by a lot of people.

Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?

> meetings continue, regardless of the wall clock, until the next group of people come and kick you out.

The meeting itself might continue, but as an individual, once the meeting passes the scheduled finish time, you stand up and say "sorry, I've got another meeting to get to". The worse your company's excessive meeting culture is, the better this works.

You can NEVER knowingly trick yourself with clock tricks.

Because all it will do is make you really good at time math.

I've seen it even back when people would set all their clocks in their car and home 5 minutes fast, they just got real good at doing five minute math.

Well that's the claim, isn't it. People tend to see an hour tick over and think "well, better wrap up". The impulse is much less strong at ten minutes to the hour. It's a bit like pricing things just below a round number because it doesn't feel quite so expensive. GP's comment makes sense to me.

My team does this, most scheduled meetings are scheduled 5m/10m after the hour. Meetings usually end at the hour or before. Our calendar defaults to start/end on the hour so sometimes one-off meetings will start/end on the hour but those are usually 2-3 people and focused on solving some problem so they don't usually last the full time anyway.

For the larger scheduled meetings, if they drag over the hour because of some conversation our culture is that people leave/drop if they're not interested.

If "30" minute meetings start 5 minutes late, then you can only go 5 past reliably.

Long ago when I was a newb fresh out of college, I worked at a company that religiously enforced the standup rule “If it’s not relevant to EVERYONE in the standup, don’t discuss it in standup.” Then an exec walked in and started taking over the meeting and for some idiotic reason I chimed in with “this isn’t relevant to me, can you bring that up outside standup?” Things got super awkward and later I overheard my boss apologizing to the exec.

My point is, there can be rules about what is and isn’t allowed in a meeting, but the people at the top can always change those rules on a moment’s notice…and those of us who are less socially adept won’t catch on.

> generally to make sure everyone is on the same page

If everyone is on the same page then there should be a 'page' resulting from the meeting; something to look back at to represent what everyone agreed on. Those are the 'decisions' being made.

The worst meetings are ones where people share ideas, nod their head in agreement, then write nothing down. Inevitably this leads to an identical meeting later down the road, after people have forgotten key details and the game of telephone has distorted others. Then later it leads to upset people when they find, often close to delivery time, that their understanding conflicts with others on the team.

If there's no desire to have updated plans or documentation after the meeting has concluded, then I question the true intent of the meeting. Was it because the person calling the meeting felt out of the loop? Why was that allowed to happen in the first place? Why were the requirements and the team's progress not easy to observe at a glance?

If we're being totally honest, a good percentage of meetings in many workplaces are work surrogates. Lots of people happily meeting and accomplishing nothing for the purposes of having the accomplishment that they attended a variety of meetings.

To be honest, just getting up and leaving is a bad way to end a meeting on time. You should be conscious of the time you have left, and start steering the meeting towards conclusion at 5-10 minutes mark.

Agree - and it can come about out of positive intentions -- "I know you care about the XYZ Component and we didn't want to leave you out of the loop about our plans for it"... but if in fact your inclusion was primarily just to keep you apprised, it may have been better to send you the briefly summarized agenda ("We plan to add a reporting feature to the XYZ Component which will store data in ... and be queryable by ... and are discussing how to build that and who should do it") and if you decline because you have no input to provide, just send you an "AI Summary" or transcript after the fact so you know what they ended up settling on. That's what I hope the addition of AI stuff to tools like Zoom will lead to, ultimately.

I'm completely NT here and I agree with you 100%. Maybe it's also that I've usually worked in buildings where finding a free conference room (either on short notice or even in advance) was a nontrivial amount of trouble. So, using an open 10 minutes instead of essentially burning at minimum a half-hour by starting at :00, is doing the whole floor a big favor.

It might have been malicious compliance. It might also have been your coworkers having a reasonable (if incorrect) expectation that their coworkers at a leading tech company understood how to schedule meeting time using the calendar their company produces. Or maybe both.

Malicious compliance is one of the great tips from the Simple Sabotage Field Guide. And it is one of the few effective ways to escalate pain in an organization. If you don't get shit done because of rules, and a boss asks you to simply break the rules for efficiency's sake, you can return the favor and just ask to simply abolish the rules for efficiency's sake. It may surprise you how fast stupid rules can be abolished, even in large orgs.

I don't see how it undermines the intent here, or has an unintended result. It's actually reinforcing the order by forcing other teams to comply with it.