Bloomberg reports how Shopify is canceling recurring meetings with more than two people to kick off 2023.

Tobi’s taking a lot of flak over it from middle managers on HN (my favorite from the high drama category: “Tobi has done this a couple times […] it comes from a place of narcissism”). I think it’s a great idea. In the early 2010s at Heroku I’d started to think that at least as far as tech was concerned, meetings were a solved problem. It was an engineering-driven culture, and most engineers hated them, so we’d schedule as few as possible, with only a few key ones per week. But then I got to Stripe and realized that I’d been living in a bubble – an uncomfortable truth of the universe is that most people love meetings, even if they think they don’t, and doubly so for well-pedigreed Stanford types most likely to work at top Silicon Valley firms. Far from being an element of change, tech was only the latest continuation of a long tradition in big American business. Every satirical pane from 90s Dilbert cartoons held perfectly true.

Based on testimony from Shopify employees, Bloomberg gets a few points wrong:

• Meeting cancellations aren’t permanent. The move wipes the slate clean, but important meetings can be put back on the docket.

• It’s not the first time Shopify’s done it. One person says that these events were originally aimed to occur every rand(600) + 300 days.

Targeting recurring meetings specifically is the right move. These get slapped onto calendars, often for large groups, and their tendency is to stay after their inertia’s built. Before long no one can even remember a time without them, and it’d be heresy to challenge their existence. Ending recurring meetings by default shifts the burden of proof to the right place – it’s now on middle management to re-justify their existence rather than falling to a maverick engineer who has to burn social capital in a risky attempt to argue for their discontinuation.