The amount of lunacy and idiocy going on during these "quick" meetings has been driving me nuts. Imagine a room full of VPs, each making no less than $200K a year, discussing the need to spend $1K on hardware.

And the punch line - we just spent more salary $ during this meeting, than it would take to rent these for a year from OVH or AWS.

I wish companies had a "meetings budget" and had to justify the ROI of each meeting... One can only dream :)

So we might see posts like $2k for a planning meeting show up on the report, and suddenly people started paying attention to what time was spent on - both for meetings and otherwise.

And making arguments like the one in your example. It also meant being able to make actual estimates over whether pursuing a certain optimization would be worth it vs. buying more hardware.

Amazingly each place I've done this at, they were initially confused why I wanted to do this, as apparently it was weird and unusual to have engineering issue such breakdowns

By "longer than 90 minutes", he means that the total time spent by the people participating in the meeting should not be longer that 90 minutes (so 2 participants -> 45 minutes, 3 participants -> 30 minutes, etc.).

This fits your logic perfectly.

That committee included one of the founders (I can't for the life of me remember if it was Yang or Filo). I had to buy $4k worth of hardware once and they spent 20 minutes grilling me about load data etc. from the current server.

It just baffled me at the time that a multi-billion dollar company saw it as worthwhile for one of its founders to spend 20 minutes discussing a $4k purchase.

Not to mention the signal value about how little they trusted the judgement of their engineering team.

I concluded that it basically was about two things:

1) to keep said person away from more important decision, at the cost of annoying a lot of other people. 2) as an intentional barrier to make people think twice about asking for more. To #2 on one hand I appreciate fiscal responsibility, but at the same time I've seen too often how making people overly stingy often wastes huge amount of resources trying to engineer around something that could be solved for a tenth of the cost by throwing more hardware at it.

I agree with the spirit of the article, but the problem remains that most meetings are, at best, fora for discussing things that could be discussed in a more decentralized manner, and, at worst, complete wastes of time where one person is flexing control muscle in order to inflate their self-importance.

The problem with "meeting culture" is completely unrelated to the problem addressed in the article, except to say that the problem addressed in the article wouldn't be such a problem if the "meeting culture" problem were addressed instead.

Don't call a meeting if you don't really need one. Hint: most projects really only need 2 meetings: one at the beginning, and one at the end. Everything in-between can be dealt with in a much more streamlined manner. This, unfortunately, includes "Agile" development "stand-up" meetings. With the correct tools they become completely unnecessary, and only serve to hinder (or artificially accelerate) development milestones.

I'm sure that there are some teams out there who do this correctly, but I haven't been lucky enough to come across any yet.