The problem is these meetings are so low information density even an AI summary is not worth my time. And it’s not some elitist mindset. It’s like the entire reason there are these regular meetings is to make some mid level person feel better. They like giving directions vocally because that authority is harder to question than if they wrote up a memo and all the receivers can poke holes in it. I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills.
They are "low information density" because that is not the point of the meeting.
Meetings are first and foremost about relationship management. You do not get to management and certainly not climb the management hierarchy if you do not at least implicitly feel this.
The actual meeting topic, while it can be relevant, is secondary. You establish and reinforce the pecking order, sense allegiance and subversion, or, feel out potential for reinforcing bonds or mitigating fallouts.
This is why people focussed on 'doing the actual work' hate meetings, while carreer focussed people love them.
Now I have exaggerated all the above, but only to make the point more clear. As always it is not black and white.
And sometimes, it is worse. There are realy situations with managers that schedule meetings and calls because they are simply bored at work. These are the types that when the step into the car to go to a meeting, will always have to get on the phone with some rapportee to have a quick 'update' that might just last the lenght of the drive.
No, meetings are low information density because people are too lazy to plan an agenda and assign homework to a meeting beforehand, so that the meeting can focus on solutioning and actually delivering value.
I noped out of management track to focus on being a top level IC because I could informally do the actually valuable "management" stuff in that role anyhow (documentation, planning, mentoring, client consultation, etc) without the expectation that I'd get sucked into 5 hours of meetings a day. Leadership still knows who I am and what I do, now I just have someone else to relay a lot of the little shit, and when I communicate with them it's about really important shit that needs reiterating.
I have a lot of informal relationships with people because I'm a go-to, so I can still play office politics if I want.
I've led cross-functional teams in multiple organisations (albeit not in tech) and I'd argue it's a bit more complex than that. Regular team meetings can cover multiple needs, e.g.:
* Keeping everyone working on a complex project updated on progress
* Keeping everyone 'aligned' - (horrible corporate word but) essentially all working together effectively towards the same goals (be they short or long term)
* Providing a forum for catching and discussing issues as they arise
* A degree of project management - essentially, making sure that people are doing as they said they would
* Information sharing (note I prefer to cancel meetings if this is the only regular purpose)
* Some form of shared decision-making (depending on the model you have for this) and thus shared ownership
If a meeting 'owner' is sensitive to not wasting people's time and regularly shortens or cancels meetings, it can be done well, I believe.
>Meetings are first and foremost about relationship management.
You might be hitting on a specific personality type, rather than a goal of meetings.
In his book “Never Split the Difference”, Chris Voss relates three kinds of people differentiated by how they relate to time. One group thinks of time as a way to manage relationships. That’s the manager you allude to. But another type is the classic Type A personality who views “time as money.” If the meeting isn’t getting to brass tacks and outlining strategy and tasks, they will be frustrated. The last group thinks of time as a way to wrap their minds around a problem to reduce uncertainty. The authors point is that you need to understand how people view the time spent discussing a problem to really know how to manage the interaction.
If you read many of the responses to your post in this context, it becomes clear which group each commenter belongs to in many cases.
I once worked at a job where an entry level person started crashing any meeting they were allowed in an not thrown out of. I mean people would literally say why is person X in this meeting? And they would just stay there.
So how did this end? Well despite literally ignoring and not in any way doing their actual job because of this, they were promoted to management.
So yeah, meetings are about reinforcing mgmt power above all else.
> The actual meeting topic, while it can be relevant, is secondary. You establish and reinforce the pecking order, sense allegiance and subversion, or, feel out potential for reinforcing bonds or mitigating fallouts.
In other words, a total waste of time for me. I don't care about pecking orders, I ignore them anyway.
> This is why people focussed on 'doing the actual work' hate meetings, while carreer focussed people love them.
Management isn't the only option to make a career in.
I think these types of descriptions are more about the type of environments one work in than meetings (or whatever communication or tool). Most of my meetings are from peers, by peers, for peers - and typically not ones on or interested in management track. They tend to be information dense and less common the more underway the topic is.
i.e. they're useless if you want to get stuff done
and getting stuff done is what makes the company money, "establishing the pecking order" is just leeching from the company to fuel your own sense of importance
> I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills.
That's not entirely it. Some people just won't say something unless put in a setting where they are explicity asked for it. I've had meetings where I ask for a status, and someone says they are stuck on X, and they've been stuck on X for two days.
And I'll ask why they didn't just ask for help. They weren't comfortable asking for help. They were only ok stating the problem when asked specifically for status.
So it also creates that environment were some people are more likely to share.
I have employed a massive hack for the past two decades--whenever asked to do any random task or assist someone, and in particular where the asker is just lazy trying to get someone else to do their job, eagerly and pleasantly agree, but ask the requestor to write up a sentence or two describing said request and email it to you. It's such a small request that no one can't argue it, but so many people (lazy ones especially) are astonishingly bad at this and 90% of the time that request will never come. The next time you see the person, take the initiative and remind them about the email you never received and ask if they could send it. You've now turned the tables on the asker, they may even start to avoid you.
I predict that in "20 minutes in the future" we'll see the industry moving to AI based scrum-assistants with a scheduled daily trigger, that will reach out to each dev to have a check-in conversation and then automatically synthesize the input from everyone and update the project manager (possibly AI-based itself) with insight about how things are progressing and recommendations.
But you can share your daily status asynchronously as well.
This might not scale well to larger teams, but we simply write a short message in a dedicated channel each day. It contains a short status and a few bullet points to plan the next day.
Slack makes this conventient because you can write a top level message and then use the reply feature to add more details.
It's usually possible for the person running a small project to ask everyone for status and know what everyone's going to say in the meeting before the meeting.
Then the meeting is pointless. But not all projects allow for that.
You are talking about juniors mixed with severe introvert persona. Most juniors in dev are a variant of that. Its part of seniority to overcome these self-inflicted mental barriers (reverse doesn't obviously work - an extroverted dev can still be as green as spring lawn, even if loaded with yet-undeserved confidence).
If you need to babysit bunch of juniors thats fine, but it should be clear from one's role in team/project that this needs to be a continuous effort (at least till they grok how to step up, but it takes years if at all for some).
> And I'll ask why they didn't just ask for help. They weren't comfortable asking for help. They were only ok stating the problem when asked specifically for status.
This is a real thing but it should only be temporary. If your culture is good and amendable to this sort of thing, then the IC should learn fairly quickly that they need to ask for help.
This behavior in ICs is, believe it or not, trained. I'm sure they've worked somewhere before or with a different manager in the past who would get annoyed at them asking for help. So they've tuned their behavior to that.
I've worked with people who want you to put the effort into writing a document or proposal, or even just answering a question on Slack or on Linear, but will spend zero effort themselves actually reading what you give them.
Instead they'll just wait until the next meeting and basically ask you to give a tl;dr or 'context'. I wasn't sure if it was a case of just having poor literacy or just some bullshit power play on their part.
In the most egregious cases I started to get petty and just read my message aloud, verbatim, while they had it open on the screenshare. Not as if their time is automatically more valuable than mine.
I think this is normal for most people, but I've found that one-on-one's are a way more effective tool for revealing these sorts of situations. A good manager, though, is very rare. Maybe there's some surface area here for AI, to identify landmines workers are stepping on. Who knows, maybe AI should just be the ones attending meetings.
I also used to think that work meetings are low information density.
Then I attended our first parent-teacher conference at kindergarten. It was incredible: 2.5 hours of discussions and ridiculous complaints ("why does my child has to put on splash pants on rainy autumn days, putting them on is just such an ordeal!!"), and not a single bit of relevant information was transmitted. Not a single decision was made. I went home in utter disbelief.
Currently, our parents' council is trying to organize a party for the children who will be going to school after summer. What should've been a TODO list where parents can write down what food they will bring and who will help with what escalated into 2 evenings of discussions, a Skype meeting, and a Whatsapp group where several fractions of parents have been fighting over whether T-Shirts should be printed to celebrate the end of kindergarten for over a week now.
I don't think the existence of "even lower information density" attempts at communication justifies the low density of work meetings, but you're right--trying to communicate anything to more than one person at a time in a child-focused setting is close to impossible.
There's this huge difference in quality between execs who work in writing and execs who NEVER write _anything_ down, which is surprisingly common. In my experience it correlates closely with toxic behaviour and I don't know why it's common for senior management in many orgs to allow people to operate in this style.
Most modern companies drift toward the non-written style (effectively managing by the seat of the pants) because it has the appearance of being more effective, even when it is in fact the opposite. Business myth makes the guy who is always having meetings to appear more dynamic and effective, and is consequently rewarded by upper management.
> The problem is these meetings are so low information density even an AI summary is not worth my time.
I've been in my share of useless meetings.
However, I've been fortunate enough to be able to cut down the useless meetings at most of my jobs (with one exception, which was awful).
The problem now is that the AI note takers are turning even the good meetings into useless exercises. It's obvious that the AI note taker participants have no intention of participating during the meeting. Then 3 hours later you start getting follow-up questions that they should have asked in the meeting.
Everyone knows "This meeting could have been an e-mail" but fewer people recognize when "This 50-response e-mail conversation spanning 3 days could have been solved in the 30 minute meeting"
The root problem is people trying to transform their own work into async at the expense of forcing everyone else to accommodate them.
We can’t have people going back and forth over chat to work out an issue. I need to start a meeting so I can monologue the portion people already understand again and then I can complete the work because my portion is complete.
I already completed my work so I don’t need to change with these back and forth messages finding oversights or conflicts. I can just sit back and coast.
Also when it’s in chat everybody’s messages are the same size and you can’t just skip over them. By holding a meeting, I can disable everybody else’s mic and the chat or just talk over anybody else and win the discussion. By talking louder, my opinions are better and correct.
I don’t like when some random person causes me more work by speaking up in chat so that’s why we need to have meetings. Plus there’s a whole paper trail and it’s just messy and inconvenient.
It's not even that, they do the meeting to appear personally leading something. Modern companies confuse leading meetings with true leadership, because hardly anyone knows how to do the later. It is a fast, effective way to give an appearance of leadership and say they're doing something, while doing close to nothing.
Let's not pretend someone who sends an AI note taker, which also implies they have time to read notes taken by an AI of a meeting they couldn't find time to turn up for is someone lacking in time.
The prerequisite of reading notes written by an AI means you have time.
They should just be honest and say "I don't need to be in this" or "I don't want to be in this" rather than pretending they do.
This doesn't follow. Plenty of hour long meetings could easily be summarized in a paragraph. Having the time to read a paragraph does not equate to having time to sit through an hour long meeting.
> They like giving directions vocally because that authority is harder to question than if they wrote up a memo
Authority is also much harder to deliver in an asynchronous format. If someone can just _not read_ the memo, it functionally has no power. The risk isn't that your memo might be questioned, it's that your memo might never be read.
I have to disagree since I can also just not listen/pay any attention to what is vocally delivered in the meeting, which I find to be an abhorrent waste of my time in the first place. If the directive is in writing such as an email I (or the person who issued it) can't point to that and say "you did not read this" which shifts the onus entirely on the person receiving the directive.
About a year ago, I nearly quit my job over this, going so far as to put my two weeks notice in as a way to hold a gun to their head, repeating my frequent request that all directives handed down from on high _must_ be in writing if they are expected to be followed. My company had (still does, to some degree, but we are still working on it) a cancerous culture of he said/she said that was being abused to avoid any accountability from upper management, which was both impeding the actual work being done as well as demoralizing to th workers. We even ended up losing some talent over it before I used my own value and authority to put my foot down, making me wish I'd done it sooner.
Verbal directives only stroke the ego of the person delivering them and their meaning either evaporates or gets twisted as soon as everyone walks out of that conference room or logs off that video call. If the person issuing them is not willing to have their directives questioned when they are in writing, then they should not hold the position they do. It's not about questioning someone's authority, it's about ensuring the directive makes sense with the work being done and adds value or guidance to the existing processes. Screw the fragile ego nonsense.
> It’s like the entire reason there are these regular meetings is to make some mid level person feel better.
Higher ups like meetings too, everyone likes feeling better about themselves by showing status. Perhaps A.I will be able to relieve us of that eventually ...
Just today I had a "communication 101" training session that was telling me, among other things, to be concise and targeted. I don't know what's either concise or targeted about an 1h session that doesn't differentiate by job description or amount of work experience.
Meetings can be low information, but they don't have to be. The point of meetings is to create a space where people with different knowledge sets working on the same project can ask questions and get answers in a zero latency feedback loop. This is quite useful at certain times.
The last sentence is it - most people can't communicate much less write well, hell, I don't write well, but I hope my ideas are at least clearly communicated.
When you can't write well, you "resort" to using a lot of body language and facial nuances in face-to-face communication, which works acceptably. Unfortunately, this doesn't translate well on zoom.
This "writing well" as a form of good communication is needed, but while in school, those same people who cannot write well also likely were complaining about learning how to write essays and such. Over time, this sort of lack of learning has resulted in poor written communication into adulthood i reckon.
And with the advent of LLM and all these chatGPT-esque bots writing for them, esp. in school, the level of literacy skill is only going to continue to drop!
In the past, companies had people specialized in translating conversations into written documents: secretaries. And executives took seriously the task of reading these documents. All this seems to be gone.
In software, you have the privilege of writing succinctly to communicate facts. In every other industry, the message needs to be packaged with courtesies like a greeting, cushioned delivery, and salutations. It’s a big waste of time and people stop reading your messages. But don’t put a bow on it and you get labeled as an asshole. At least the AI note taker can make me sound more palatable.
But if you do not hold the engineers accountable for reading the memo, that's on you (or whomever has the authority to do that). This is why having things in writing is important and verbal directives have about as much value as a fart in the wind.
I bet there are a bunch of people in upper management who hear about this phenomenon and think that employees are skipping meetings to slack off (appearing to do work but they're actually playing Mario Kart).
In reality, it's more likely that they're being judged on their attendance of BS meetings, but if they attend the BS meetings, they won't be able to make the BS deadlines they're responsible for hitting.
So they're likely buying themselves time to do the actually important work, while still attempting to meet unrealistic expectations around meeting attendance.
100% this. As some who’s regularly derided by his colleagues for “hating meetings”: I don’t “keep meetings to a minimum”, I “keep meetings to a benefit”.
If I’ve called a meeting it’s because there’s a benefit to the instant vocal communication. If you’re not there, you’ve not attended the meeting, no matter which tools you use to record, transcribe or translate.
Conversely, if I thought I didn’t need to be in a meeting, then I wouldn’t send a tool to gather stuff for me to then just ignore the tool output - because I don’t need it.
These tools are a sign of cultural rot from both participants and the fact people are even making them shows deep flaws in how we communicate in the modern workplace.
Even if the final nod of agreement happens in real time the actual decision making process for critical product features should involve planning, thinking, research, etc. There should be a strong paper trail such that everyone knows what the decision is going to be prior to the "everyone gets together and declares this is how things are going to be" step.
If them missing some meetings means they're in the dark as to how those features were decided on then I can't see that as a defence of attending every meeting so much as a statement of BS meetings being so predominant in the company that all decisions are made through a BS process.
It is helpful to communicate in advance what is the specific agenda of each meeting, so that people can make an informed decision on whether to attend.
Also, it may be helpful to have the meeting organizer send meeting notes after every meeting, including action items assigned to specific people. The notes don't need to be extensive, but there better be an executive summary of what decisions were made, if any, and any unexpected roadblocks that were found.
That's how things were done at one of the mega corps where I was employed and it worked great.
We had an internal RFC comment/discussion meeting on a proposed engineering standard. In that exact meeting, a dev flipped out and expressed exasperation that they weren’t asked to comment on the proposal. In the exact meeting that was one in a series of opportunities to comment on the proposal…
I had an engineer once show up to the re-scheduled "lets get the engineers ideas meeting before the yearly plan ships" meeting that we scheduled so they could be there who then proceeded to spent 15 minutes complaining how they didn't get any input before finally asking what the meeting was for, and finding out they had 45 minutes remaining to give feedback (they had skipped the meeting the previous day, and I wanted to make sure they gave their impact). (I tried to interject earlier but was asked "please let me talk" so I did).
> and I don't know how to tell them its because they skipped some meetings where they could've been part of that discussion.
That there was a meeting where that decision was made between 55 minutes of crud doesn’t really mean anything to me though. I’m not wasting an hour of my day every day on the off chance today’s meeting will contain anything of importance.
I've even had one coworker, higher level than me, get repeatedly praised for how they multitask so much. But I've had them countless times distracted during meetings, and then they get irate some time later. "I wasn't consulted" "nobody told me" "nobody asked me permission" "I don't remember that meeting." If I'm in a meeting and say "my plan is to kick the computer until it works", don't come to me 2 months later and say it was a stupid plan, and worse get upset that you weren't asked. The point of the meeting is to have a forum for everybody to weigh in if needed. Not just to charge the program for an hour while you okay candy crush or listen in on another meeting.
I'd tell them directly.. "You were invited to the meeting on 2025-MM-DD to discuss this, but you did not show up, nor did you follow up with organizers later. Sorry, you've missed your opportunity to comment"
Seems direct and uncontroversial, and IMHO most people react well at this.
> But then there's those engineers who don't show up to meetings and then a month later come to you with a
>
> "I don't know how we're deciding on some of these critical product features"
>
> and I don't know how to tell them its because they skipped some meetings where they could've been part of that discussion.
What else was discussed in these meetings? Was everything in there relevant to this one developer? This is what I find an issue in a lot of meetings, the majority is just not relevant to me; do I need to spend an hour of my time and attention span just in case there is something relevant? It's so draining.
IMO someone organizing / fronting a meeting should fine tune the agenda of a meeting so that it's maximally relevant to everyone attending. Anything that is more broadcasting / announcement / "for your information" should be done async, not just because people want to skip a meeting but also because they may be absent, sick, living in another timezone, or needing the information down the line.
> "I don't know how we're deciding on some of these critical product features"
You shouldn't be using a single channel to make critical decisions and this stuff should be documented and people should have multiple ways to be part of the decision making process.
If it's critical it should always go through emails. And you can always tag everyone in the team to read the email. TBH if they ignore the emails they would also ignore whatever new features mentioned in the meeting because their mind is absent.
Just add an agenda. Every meeting. What is the topic. What will be covered. What decisions are being made.
No deviations without a new meeting or at least they need a settling time before they become concrete and people need active followups if they’re absent. People also need to read agendas and be prepared and also know what context this is about.
“Is JavaScript better than java” isn’t a valid meeting agenda item. What are you even talking about this isn’t a comparable question. Is your team confusing java and js?
You need to add context to the meeting that appeals to every person in it. Not just the Java vs js project you’ve been dealing with as yourself and 2 other people and now this has escalated to 5 teams and a 20 person emergency impromptu call with the director. You need to slow down and give context. Explain that this is in the context of candidate interview questions and not live engineering code being deployed.
Meetings also need to have a timeline. 5 min overview 30 min demo 15 mins questions. Don’t just ramble on in the overview for 50 minutes and then say oh I guess we’re over time but I have no conflicts so I’m just going to keep going. No. Other people have conflicts and now they can’t participate in the decisions section that you’re choosing to gatekeep by ambushing surprise information in a meeting. If the meeting was deemed necessary in the first place why would it suddenly not matter now?
That should be on the agenda. Again. No surprise information. Don’t ambush people on the spot with hidden topics. Engineers working on database integrations don’t need to context switch to answer random request to walk through how css works in a repo that was last updated 8 years ago.
This causes all work progress to be delayed and momentum reset and there’s multiple of these every day because of random vague meetings doing this.
Managers are responsible by default here. They are at fault if their team feels they cannot waste time in meetings because their time is not being respected. They need to ensure their team is at meetings they have decisions to make. They need to make sure or at least help escalate people hosting meetings are sticking to the agenda and having clearly defined and scoped questions that aren’t random or going to get lost in a sea of noise.
That's the thing, these meetings are B.S. Engineers need a task, time to think, and write about the solution and its cost. Period. Talking in a room full of people who love to hear their own voices and love to stroke their egos does not actually help engineers do their job. When engineers need to communicate, they communicate with their colleagues. There are tools for such communications that do not require talking and immediate responses. Being reactive (which is what meetings enforce you to do) costs more, as reactive and forced responses will be far more technically unsound.
You missed the part of the process where the results of the meeting were summarized and made available so said engineers can look up the results and see what decisions were made.
> while still attempting to meet unrealistic expectations around meeting attendance
I've routinely seen people attending a meeting from the office on Zoom camera, all gathered in a single big conference room, all looking and typing on their laptops for the entirety of the meeting, saying something maybe once or twice. I suppose they were simply working on their assigned tasks, listening to others in the background. How effective is that - I don't know.
These days I don't care. I'm 100% "at work" when I'm in the office, so whatever. I just pull up my phone and plan my next vacation trip or whatever. When I'm remotely I take my laptop to the kitchen and start preparing stuff for dinner. Life is too short for this mess.
Many meetings I've been on only require my attention for a small part. So I've been doing my work and listening in background; once they start talking about part I care about I stop my work and start to actually participate.
> bet there are a bunch of people in upper management who hear about this phenomenon and think that employees are skipping meetings to slack off
Everyone I know in senior leadership sees this as a plus. It’s known that middle managers waste time with performative meetings. Their value add is just seen to outweigh that drag. So if they can perform and employees can work, that’s sort of a win-win for shareholders.
> it's more likely that they're being judged on their attendance of BS meetings
Some middle manager types in my company track emoji reactions to their messages in slack. I got written up for it, no joke.
That was easy to automate though.
I skip meetings in order to play Mario Kart. Why? Two reasons:
1. My company offers no promotion path. I asked for a raise, and my manager gave me a project that is impossible to complete. Recently he admitted that the project is indeed impossible, but the upper management expected him to spend a year trying anyway.
2. I am often given very vague task descriptions, and when I come up with a solution, we keep having meetings until my solution is remolded into whatever my manager wants but didn't say explicitly.
It's very difficult to stay motivated in such an environment, but I'm afraid to change jobs because what if I end up with a similar manager except I'll be expected to actually attend the meetings instead of playing Mario Kart.
I agree that this probably says a lot more about the lack of value these meetings provide the attendees. I’ve been to enough where the organizer will stall and small talk to stretch them out to the scheduled time that I know some people are using these events to fill out their time card.
In my experience, at least, it's because a lot of "meetings" aren't actually meetings, they're presentations that are actually better consumed async after the fact, but historical precedent demands that everyone be invited to attend the live taping and emote and cheer politely.
At my previous company, one I started, I would try to organise a meeting with only the most essential people and then people would forward the invite as people would be upset they were not invited (normally because it is a prelim meeting to a wider meeting), the meeting would go from 4 people to 15, people would attend the meeting find it was irrelevant to them or too early to them, which is why they were not invited in the first place, and then complain about too many meetings. Ugh.
This is my experience too. My meetings tend to be presentations of results. I invite the bare minimum of people who are likely to be interested, and like you, end up with a full meeting room plus others connecting online, often all over the world.
I figure, they're consenting adults, they're responsible for managing their time.
I'm sympathetic to this knowing how few people actually read their emails (and slacks etc.). If you've ever sent out a 30 second survey to your coworkers, you know what I'm talking about. But I also know people don't really pay attention in these meetings either.
I feel async communication could work this way with the right cultural hygiene (e.g. consistent labeling, brevity, novelty, and relevancy), and some places I've worked were better about this than others, but they all tend to suffer from tragedy of the commons. If anyone works somewhere where you and all your coworkers actually count on each other to read emails, please tell me where!
It is historical precedent. Having everyone sit slackjawed through twenty minutes of droning is no more proof that they received the relevant information than emailing them would be - that’s why schools have exams and other assessment on the knowledge they intend to impart.
As well as those standups which are just micro-presentations where each person talks in turn about their respective card but there's no discussion. The teams that moved to async standups where they just post status updates in Slack and amigo only when needed seem happier.
The worst part about the standup ritual is that no one talks outside standups.
With async text communication channels you'll post when an issue shows up. With the standups you'll wait until the next standup and maybe forget the details until then, or forget about the issue entirely and that will lead to technical debt.
> when an issue shows up
Advanced usage: post proactively before you reach the task/issue. This way people have time to comment on it and when you do get to it it's been clear what to do for 1-2 days.
Text-only stand-ups also have a tendency to devolve into just posting text into the void than nobody reads, so you may as well move to the even simpler "I need to discuss" flags which reduces communication even more. But then some people don't like that.
I am afraid there's no perfect solution, and it just boils down to people's preferences and the skills of people involved. And the chemistry between them.
I've been in teams which flip flopped over time between "communication worsened" and "wasting everyone's time". Being remote for 15+ years I enjoy the "convivial" side of stand-ups but I hate when they devolve into rote status reports.
I would have agreed, but the reporter shares multiple anecdotes where that's not the case. Most crazily, the person she was meant to be interviewing sent an AI note taker in his place, very much not a presentation and she just sat alone with the AI until it became clear he was a no-show. I don't get the thought process there, just cancel the interview if you're not going to show up.
In general I think people need to be more comfortable both calling out useless meetings, and calling out people who are making meetings useless by not being engaged or "multi-tasking" (a.k.a. not paying attention). When I facilitate meetings if I see people aren't paying attention or it's very low engagement, I call it out and ask honestly if people think the meeting is worth their time. The first time people hear that they think I'm just being passive-aggressive, but colleagues who know me well know they can be honest and if the meeting isn't valuable we can stop and in the future we'll either have a better agenda/facilitation, do it async, or not do it at all. Even if the meeting would have value if people were engaged, if I fail to get people's attention then it becomes useless and I would rather not waste my or anyone else's time.
I've totally sat through one of these "dry run" VP presentations before they do it before an exec audience. "All the metrics and dashboards are green". Next day: Layoffs and reapply for your job, also introducing Dopinder who will shadow your succession.
I feel this is a symptom of poor meetings, where they are used for information exchange (which I think should come before the meeting) instead of collaboration and problem solving. You could save your time and a bunch of AI-generated notes you'll never read with the simple rule of "no agenda, no attenda". Remote has allowed us to adopt meeting policies that would never exist in-person: giant, long, back-to-back sessions with no purpose, plan or opportunity to pee.
I've been using this mentality for the last three years. Some responds with hostility and some see the benefits, but most are just indifferent to it sadly.
I've also been observing people just throw in a short sentence or some AI generated shit list which is then not followed during the meeting.
But those who take this seriously usually have pretty darn good meetings (e.g not book the full hour, force people to stay on topic, shares notes after the meeting etc)
>Remote has allowed us to adopt meeting policies that would never exist in-person: giant, long, back-to-back sessions with no purpose, plan or opportunity to pee.
Oh, if only that had been true, but pointless, aimless meetings have been a plague forever. Maybe less so the no-peeing.
But "no agenda, no attenda" only works if you're in a position to refuse. Often attending meetings is seen as part of the job, either formally or in the managers' eyes, so ignoring them without good reason isn't allowed without repercussions.
After working for a company where every meeting had a clear agenda and meeting notes with action items were sent afterwards, I would never want to work in a place that didn't follow the same pattern.
> Remote has allowed us to adopt meeting policies that would never exist in-person: giant, long, back-to-back sessions with no purpose, plan or opportunity to pee.
I'm genuinely confused by this. Those sort of meetings have existed in the entire 20-something years I've been working corporate jobs.
It's not a new problem. In a previous job long before remote, we had a 1.5 hour long biweekly meeting named "Team Meeting". No agenda, no goals, never went less than the full alloted time.
I work at FAANG annd after a certain point in seniority your entire job becomes a solid meeting block. A trend I’ve seen in at least thee companies is that my peers start scheduling fake meetings out of desperation to get 2-3 hours of real work done (Because any calendar gap is immediately filled).
> Remote has allowed us to adopt meeting policies that would never exist in-person: giant, long, back-to-back sessions with no purpose, plan or opportunity to pee.
This is absolutely not new and was as bad if not worse before remote work.
If I have back-to-back meetings, I'll leave a few minutes early (with apologies) and also apologise to the next meeting if I'm late. If anyone calls me out, I'll apologetically claim "biological imperative". If they don't understand, I tell them that my bowels wait for no one. That is enough to get everyone to move on. No one wants to talk about someone else's bowels.
Lots of talk here about writing being far superior to talking. This is entirely true. The thing you guys have to realize is that most people, like truly 80% of the population and probably some large subset of sw eng, hate reading and writing.
People see reading as a chore. The last full book they read was in an elective in college and even then they skimmed the spark notes. They see writing as a stupid thing they have to do, a word count they have to hit, not a communication mechanism at all. Seriously there are so many people out there like this. If you give them something to read and force them to read it, they won’t get half of it because they’re just waiting till the chore is over when they get to the end.
This is why chatGPT was trained to produce bullet points and why people do PowerPoints. A paragraph of the written word is scary to a percentage of the population, certainly most “normal people,” and definitely a large subset of engineers.
That’s just the way it is. But these are your colleagues you have to figure out how to communicate with them.
Trying to be more charitable, I would say that it's not so much that people don't like reading and writing but that they are saturated with it.
Reading is a chore because, in a typical corporate job, you have to do so much of it and the material is generally pretty bland. There's the hundreds of emails per day, the meeting notes, the presentations, the endless stream of messages. Not to mention the code, the docs and all the role specific stuff you'll encounter along the way.
Perhaps we should be pushing people to be more succinct and thoughtful in their writing? Perhaps AI could do that ;)
> Lots of talk here about writing being far superior to talking. This is entirely true.
Writing and talking allows you to formulate and explore concepts in different ways. Writing forces you to be specific and put thoughts in a linear order. Talking allows you to explore less defined ideas in haphazard ways.
I recently had a meeting where understanding snapped in place right at the end of the meeting. Writing might have gotten us there too, but I'm not convinced that it would have been more efficient. The idea wasn't well defined to start with and we talked about lots of things randomly.
Now writing is needed to make sure that we capture what was discussed and agree on it.
Both has a place in collaboration with other people.
ps. not to make the argument for useless meetings where managers drag you along for body count, I've slept through my share of those. And would probably also sleep through the AI summary of it
FWIW, I see talking and listening as a chore, and I don't think many people are good at them. Each is better in different contexts and there is overlap, of course
If you give them something to read and force them to read it, they won’t get half of it because they’re just waiting till the chore is over when they get to the end.
This is not different from talking to someone who is too busy (or just doesn't want) to listen. Writing exists in a form that can always be referenced. There's no risk of playing telephone, no memory required, etc. It'll be waiting for when the person is ready to read it.
Heh, I agree that writing is superior to talking, but not in the way you do. I much prefer to take meeting notes than to listen to a bot munge names and concepts. Any mistakes in note-taking are mine, and I can own that.
If it's multiple people tag-teaming in the same doc for meetings it's even better. It's a whole new level of collab during the meeting that helps tighten the relationships and keep track of what's going on. It also captures the tone better.
I get that AIs work best offloading the tedious parts of life, but I guess for me note taking isn't tedious.
> Lots of talk here about writing being far superior to talking. This is entirely true.
This is simply not true. Writing - particularly in the context of instant messages sent during work - cannot convey tone, and it is far less asynchronous than being able to have a conversation with someone.
> A paragraph of the written word is scary to a percentage of the population, certainly most “normal people,” and definitely a large subset of engineers.
>This is simply not true. Writing - particularly in the context of instant messages sent during work - cannot convey tone, and it is far less asynchronous than being able to have a conversation with someone.
It is though. The amount of thought that can be put into writing is at least 1-2 orders of magnitude greater. The amount of thought that can be put into conversational speech is limited to roughly one second per second.
Writing also has the benefit of maintaining a record of what was said. The number of misunderstandings that could have been a avoided by writing is staggering.
Don't be fooled. My take is only cynical if I don't acknowledge that there are different types of intelligence. Multimedia, kinesthetic, emotional, interpersonal, spatial, logical...
For example: I can write. Maybe I can write better than a D1 basketball player. Am I smarter than them? ehhh, maybe not. Their "physical intelligence" is far superior to mine. I respect it as equal to my "verbal/writing intelligence." I am scared on the basketball court, it's foreign territory to me because I'm basically a nerd who spent my time reading books. They spent their time moving around on the bball court. The magnitude of the intelligence vector is large, it just points in a totally different direction.
If anything, I think this perspective is sorely missing. People respect reading and writing as an "smart person" activity but I think that's a stultifying perspective. Intelligence is incredibly broad, that's why you have to meet people where they are -- and many times that means communicating in a different way.
However, same as how "kinesthetic intelligence" correlates to basketball, "writing intelligence" correlates to engineering. The best software engineers are good at reading and writing; there are few exceptions in my experience.
Certainly I should have said, writing is superior in this context. We're on the proverbial basketball court in this conversation :)
My company started to use an AI note taker for interviews. I was skeptical but had no say and decided to reserve my judgement. What surprised me was how many notes it produced. it will write hundreds of bullet points which ends up feeling exhaustive to try and review. In addition it makes lots of mistakes, maybe due to misinterpreting what a candidate said, accents/audio issues. So while I didn’t have to type during the interview, I still have to write my own overall impression anyways. I’ve found practically zero value from it, it just feels gimmicky.
It kind of does what a human would do but in the most artificial and bloated way. It doesn’t have that extra thing that a human does to highlight things and filter out the garbage
Exactly. It treats all parts of the interview as equally important and ends up being excessive. Ultimately a few moments in an interview are going to be more memorable than some small talk / follow up / clarifying questions interwoven throughout the interview.
What a nightmare. First a week full of useless undefined meetings, largely so that everyone can cover their asses, and now most don’t even bother turning up because they can automate covering their asses. I can see the prompt now… “let me know if there is something that affects me or which I need to know or take action on in order to cover my ass”.
I’m pretty strict. Meetings are for decisions and only parties to the decision are invited and attend. The agenda and decision required is circulated beforehand. Only the time to make the decision is scheduled. Need 10 minutes? Then the meeting is 10 minutes.
Catch-ups, get-togethers, presentations, status updates, and brainstorming sessions are labelled as such explicitly and are treated differently. The event and attendance needs to be justified.
Such a system works quite well. Perhaps worth mentioning that I also refuse to be CC’d on emails that do not require a response, just as I do not CC anyone if no response is required. I also require that people be left alone to work without interruption - how contrarian.
It just sucks if you have incompetent management that doesn’t allow or implement such things.
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Meetings are first and foremost about relationship management. You do not get to management and certainly not climb the management hierarchy if you do not at least implicitly feel this.
The actual meeting topic, while it can be relevant, is secondary. You establish and reinforce the pecking order, sense allegiance and subversion, or, feel out potential for reinforcing bonds or mitigating fallouts.
This is why people focussed on 'doing the actual work' hate meetings, while carreer focussed people love them.
Now I have exaggerated all the above, but only to make the point more clear. As always it is not black and white.
And sometimes, it is worse. There are realy situations with managers that schedule meetings and calls because they are simply bored at work. These are the types that when the step into the car to go to a meeting, will always have to get on the phone with some rapportee to have a quick 'update' that might just last the lenght of the drive.
I noped out of management track to focus on being a top level IC because I could informally do the actually valuable "management" stuff in that role anyhow (documentation, planning, mentoring, client consultation, etc) without the expectation that I'd get sucked into 5 hours of meetings a day. Leadership still knows who I am and what I do, now I just have someone else to relay a lot of the little shit, and when I communicate with them it's about really important shit that needs reiterating.
I have a lot of informal relationships with people because I'm a go-to, so I can still play office politics if I want.
* Keeping everyone working on a complex project updated on progress
* Keeping everyone 'aligned' - (horrible corporate word but) essentially all working together effectively towards the same goals (be they short or long term)
* Providing a forum for catching and discussing issues as they arise
* A degree of project management - essentially, making sure that people are doing as they said they would
* Information sharing (note I prefer to cancel meetings if this is the only regular purpose)
* Some form of shared decision-making (depending on the model you have for this) and thus shared ownership
If a meeting 'owner' is sensitive to not wasting people's time and regularly shortens or cancels meetings, it can be done well, I believe.
You might be hitting on a specific personality type, rather than a goal of meetings.
In his book “Never Split the Difference”, Chris Voss relates three kinds of people differentiated by how they relate to time. One group thinks of time as a way to manage relationships. That’s the manager you allude to. But another type is the classic Type A personality who views “time as money.” If the meeting isn’t getting to brass tacks and outlining strategy and tasks, they will be frustrated. The last group thinks of time as a way to wrap their minds around a problem to reduce uncertainty. The authors point is that you need to understand how people view the time spent discussing a problem to really know how to manage the interaction.
If you read many of the responses to your post in this context, it becomes clear which group each commenter belongs to in many cases.
https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926
So how did this end? Well despite literally ignoring and not in any way doing their actual job because of this, they were promoted to management.
So yeah, meetings are about reinforcing mgmt power above all else.
In other words, a total waste of time for me. I don't care about pecking orders, I ignore them anyway.
> This is why people focussed on 'doing the actual work' hate meetings, while carreer focussed people love them.
Management isn't the only option to make a career in.
They add no value, except for themselves.
and getting stuff done is what makes the company money, "establishing the pecking order" is just leeching from the company to fuel your own sense of importance
That's not entirely it. Some people just won't say something unless put in a setting where they are explicity asked for it. I've had meetings where I ask for a status, and someone says they are stuck on X, and they've been stuck on X for two days.
And I'll ask why they didn't just ask for help. They weren't comfortable asking for help. They were only ok stating the problem when asked specifically for status.
So it also creates that environment were some people are more likely to share.
This might not scale well to larger teams, but we simply write a short message in a dedicated channel each day. It contains a short status and a few bullet points to plan the next day.
Slack makes this conventient because you can write a top level message and then use the reply feature to add more details.
Then the meeting is pointless. But not all projects allow for that.
If you need to babysit bunch of juniors thats fine, but it should be clear from one's role in team/project that this needs to be a continuous effort (at least till they grok how to step up, but it takes years if at all for some).
This is a real thing but it should only be temporary. If your culture is good and amendable to this sort of thing, then the IC should learn fairly quickly that they need to ask for help.
This behavior in ICs is, believe it or not, trained. I'm sure they've worked somewhere before or with a different manager in the past who would get annoyed at them asking for help. So they've tuned their behavior to that.
Instead they'll just wait until the next meeting and basically ask you to give a tl;dr or 'context'. I wasn't sure if it was a case of just having poor literacy or just some bullshit power play on their part.
In the most egregious cases I started to get petty and just read my message aloud, verbatim, while they had it open on the screenshare. Not as if their time is automatically more valuable than mine.
Then I attended our first parent-teacher conference at kindergarten. It was incredible: 2.5 hours of discussions and ridiculous complaints ("why does my child has to put on splash pants on rainy autumn days, putting them on is just such an ordeal!!"), and not a single bit of relevant information was transmitted. Not a single decision was made. I went home in utter disbelief.
Currently, our parents' council is trying to organize a party for the children who will be going to school after summer. What should've been a TODO list where parents can write down what food they will bring and who will help with what escalated into 2 evenings of discussions, a Skype meeting, and a Whatsapp group where several fractions of parents have been fighting over whether T-Shirts should be printed to celebrate the end of kindergarten for over a week now.
It's like... people, is your time not worth more than this thirty minute bun-fight over summer clubs?
Still hate meetings though.
I've been in my share of useless meetings.
However, I've been fortunate enough to be able to cut down the useless meetings at most of my jobs (with one exception, which was awful).
The problem now is that the AI note takers are turning even the good meetings into useless exercises. It's obvious that the AI note taker participants have no intention of participating during the meeting. Then 3 hours later you start getting follow-up questions that they should have asked in the meeting.
Everyone knows "This meeting could have been an e-mail" but fewer people recognize when "This 50-response e-mail conversation spanning 3 days could have been solved in the 30 minute meeting"
The root problem is people trying to transform their own work into async at the expense of forcing everyone else to accommodate them.
We can’t have people going back and forth over chat to work out an issue. I need to start a meeting so I can monologue the portion people already understand again and then I can complete the work because my portion is complete.
I already completed my work so I don’t need to change with these back and forth messages finding oversights or conflicts. I can just sit back and coast.
Also when it’s in chat everybody’s messages are the same size and you can’t just skip over them. By holding a meeting, I can disable everybody else’s mic and the chat or just talk over anybody else and win the discussion. By talking louder, my opinions are better and correct.
I don’t like when some random person causes me more work by speaking up in chat so that’s why we need to have meetings. Plus there’s a whole paper trail and it’s just messy and inconvenient.
It's not even that, they do the meeting to appear personally leading something. Modern companies confuse leading meetings with true leadership, because hardly anyone knows how to do the later. It is a fast, effective way to give an appearance of leadership and say they're doing something, while doing close to nothing.
The prerequisite of reading notes written by an AI means you have time.
They should just be honest and say "I don't need to be in this" or "I don't want to be in this" rather than pretending they do.
Authority is also much harder to deliver in an asynchronous format. If someone can just _not read_ the memo, it functionally has no power. The risk isn't that your memo might be questioned, it's that your memo might never be read.
About a year ago, I nearly quit my job over this, going so far as to put my two weeks notice in as a way to hold a gun to their head, repeating my frequent request that all directives handed down from on high _must_ be in writing if they are expected to be followed. My company had (still does, to some degree, but we are still working on it) a cancerous culture of he said/she said that was being abused to avoid any accountability from upper management, which was both impeding the actual work being done as well as demoralizing to th workers. We even ended up losing some talent over it before I used my own value and authority to put my foot down, making me wish I'd done it sooner.
Verbal directives only stroke the ego of the person delivering them and their meaning either evaporates or gets twisted as soon as everyone walks out of that conference room or logs off that video call. If the person issuing them is not willing to have their directives questioned when they are in writing, then they should not hold the position they do. It's not about questioning someone's authority, it's about ensuring the directive makes sense with the work being done and adds value or guidance to the existing processes. Screw the fragile ego nonsense.
Higher ups like meetings too, everyone likes feeling better about themselves by showing status. Perhaps A.I will be able to relieve us of that eventually ...
I'd say poor reading skills are even more of a problem
"Do you want these to fit together like this or like this?"
AI would only be able to summarize to the context of this comment.
I thought most meetings take place because people are to report how many meetings they organized/attended as this is considered a productivity metric.
This "writing well" as a form of good communication is needed, but while in school, those same people who cannot write well also likely were complaining about learning how to write essays and such. Over time, this sort of lack of learning has resulted in poor written communication into adulthood i reckon.
And with the advent of LLM and all these chatGPT-esque bots writing for them, esp. in school, the level of literacy skill is only going to continue to drop!
But if you do not hold the engineers accountable for reading the memo, that's on you (or whomever has the authority to do that). This is why having things in writing is important and verbal directives have about as much value as a fart in the wind.
That’s funny, because I actually prefer writing to make up for my poor meeting skills.
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by people with low verbal IQ
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In reality, it's more likely that they're being judged on their attendance of BS meetings, but if they attend the BS meetings, they won't be able to make the BS deadlines they're responsible for hitting.
So they're likely buying themselves time to do the actually important work, while still attempting to meet unrealistic expectations around meeting attendance.
But then there's those engineers who don't show up to meetings and then a month later come to you with a
"I don't know how we're deciding on some of these critical product features"
and I don't know how to tell them its because they skipped some meetings where they could've been part of that discussion.
If I’ve called a meeting it’s because there’s a benefit to the instant vocal communication. If you’re not there, you’ve not attended the meeting, no matter which tools you use to record, transcribe or translate.
Conversely, if I thought I didn’t need to be in a meeting, then I wouldn’t send a tool to gather stuff for me to then just ignore the tool output - because I don’t need it.
These tools are a sign of cultural rot from both participants and the fact people are even making them shows deep flaws in how we communicate in the modern workplace.
If them missing some meetings means they're in the dark as to how those features were decided on then I can't see that as a defence of attending every meeting so much as a statement of BS meetings being so predominant in the company that all decisions are made through a BS process.
Also, it may be helpful to have the meeting organizer send meeting notes after every meeting, including action items assigned to specific people. The notes don't need to be extensive, but there better be an executive summary of what decisions were made, if any, and any unexpected roadblocks that were found.
That's how things were done at one of the mega corps where I was employed and it worked great.
We had an internal RFC comment/discussion meeting on a proposed engineering standard. In that exact meeting, a dev flipped out and expressed exasperation that they weren’t asked to comment on the proposal. In the exact meeting that was one in a series of opportunities to comment on the proposal…
That there was a meeting where that decision was made between 55 minutes of crud doesn’t really mean anything to me though. I’m not wasting an hour of my day every day on the off chance today’s meeting will contain anything of importance.
Seems direct and uncontroversial, and IMHO most people react well at this.
>"I don't know how we're deciding on some of these critical product features"
You write up meeting notes, tasks, etc right?
If you've got engineers who are unaware of functionality because of a verbal meeting being missed you've got deeper problems to address.
What else was discussed in these meetings? Was everything in there relevant to this one developer? This is what I find an issue in a lot of meetings, the majority is just not relevant to me; do I need to spend an hour of my time and attention span just in case there is something relevant? It's so draining.
IMO someone organizing / fronting a meeting should fine tune the agenda of a meeting so that it's maximally relevant to everyone attending. Anything that is more broadcasting / announcement / "for your information" should be done async, not just because people want to skip a meeting but also because they may be absent, sick, living in another timezone, or needing the information down the line.
You shouldn't be using a single channel to make critical decisions and this stuff should be documented and people should have multiple ways to be part of the decision making process.
No deviations without a new meeting or at least they need a settling time before they become concrete and people need active followups if they’re absent. People also need to read agendas and be prepared and also know what context this is about.
“Is JavaScript better than java” isn’t a valid meeting agenda item. What are you even talking about this isn’t a comparable question. Is your team confusing java and js?
You need to add context to the meeting that appeals to every person in it. Not just the Java vs js project you’ve been dealing with as yourself and 2 other people and now this has escalated to 5 teams and a 20 person emergency impromptu call with the director. You need to slow down and give context. Explain that this is in the context of candidate interview questions and not live engineering code being deployed.
Meetings also need to have a timeline. 5 min overview 30 min demo 15 mins questions. Don’t just ramble on in the overview for 50 minutes and then say oh I guess we’re over time but I have no conflicts so I’m just going to keep going. No. Other people have conflicts and now they can’t participate in the decisions section that you’re choosing to gatekeep by ambushing surprise information in a meeting. If the meeting was deemed necessary in the first place why would it suddenly not matter now?
That should be on the agenda. Again. No surprise information. Don’t ambush people on the spot with hidden topics. Engineers working on database integrations don’t need to context switch to answer random request to walk through how css works in a repo that was last updated 8 years ago.
This causes all work progress to be delayed and momentum reset and there’s multiple of these every day because of random vague meetings doing this.
Managers are responsible by default here. They are at fault if their team feels they cannot waste time in meetings because their time is not being respected. They need to ensure their team is at meetings they have decisions to make. They need to make sure or at least help escalate people hosting meetings are sticking to the agenda and having clearly defined and scoped questions that aren’t random or going to get lost in a sea of noise.
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I've routinely seen people attending a meeting from the office on Zoom camera, all gathered in a single big conference room, all looking and typing on their laptops for the entirety of the meeting, saying something maybe once or twice. I suppose they were simply working on their assigned tasks, listening to others in the background. How effective is that - I don't know.
These days I don't care. I'm 100% "at work" when I'm in the office, so whatever. I just pull up my phone and plan my next vacation trip or whatever. When I'm remotely I take my laptop to the kitchen and start preparing stuff for dinner. Life is too short for this mess.
If I’m doing that, I’m taking notes on the meeting. As long as the agenda items are at all relevant.
Everyone I know in senior leadership sees this as a plus. It’s known that middle managers waste time with performative meetings. Their value add is just seen to outweigh that drag. So if they can perform and employees can work, that’s sort of a win-win for shareholders.
Some middle manager types in my company track emoji reactions to their messages in slack. I got written up for it, no joke. That was easy to automate though.
1. My company offers no promotion path. I asked for a raise, and my manager gave me a project that is impossible to complete. Recently he admitted that the project is indeed impossible, but the upper management expected him to spend a year trying anyway.
2. I am often given very vague task descriptions, and when I come up with a solution, we keep having meetings until my solution is remolded into whatever my manager wants but didn't say explicitly.
It's very difficult to stay motivated in such an environment, but I'm afraid to change jobs because what if I end up with a similar manager except I'll be expected to actually attend the meetings instead of playing Mario Kart.
I figure, they're consenting adults, they're responsible for managing their time.
I feel async communication could work this way with the right cultural hygiene (e.g. consistent labeling, brevity, novelty, and relevancy), and some places I've worked were better about this than others, but they all tend to suffer from tragedy of the commons. If anyone works somewhere where you and all your coworkers actually count on each other to read emails, please tell me where!
You have a way better chance of getting people to pay attention to a few paragraph email than that same information stretched to fill an hour.
With async text communication channels you'll post when an issue shows up. With the standups you'll wait until the next standup and maybe forget the details until then, or forget about the issue entirely and that will lead to technical debt.
> when an issue shows up
Advanced usage: post proactively before you reach the task/issue. This way people have time to comment on it and when you do get to it it's been clear what to do for 1-2 days.
I am afraid there's no perfect solution, and it just boils down to people's preferences and the skills of people involved. And the chemistry between them.
I've been in teams which flip flopped over time between "communication worsened" and "wasting everyone's time". Being remote for 15+ years I enjoy the "convivial" side of stand-ups but I hate when they devolve into rote status reports.
In general I think people need to be more comfortable both calling out useless meetings, and calling out people who are making meetings useless by not being engaged or "multi-tasking" (a.k.a. not paying attention). When I facilitate meetings if I see people aren't paying attention or it's very low engagement, I call it out and ask honestly if people think the meeting is worth their time. The first time people hear that they think I'm just being passive-aggressive, but colleagues who know me well know they can be honest and if the meeting isn't valuable we can stop and in the future we'll either have a better agenda/facilitation, do it async, or not do it at all. Even if the meeting would have value if people were engaged, if I fail to get people's attention then it becomes useless and I would rather not waste my or anyone else's time.
I've been using this mentality for the last three years. Some responds with hostility and some see the benefits, but most are just indifferent to it sadly.
I've also been observing people just throw in a short sentence or some AI generated shit list which is then not followed during the meeting.
But those who take this seriously usually have pretty darn good meetings (e.g not book the full hour, force people to stay on topic, shares notes after the meeting etc)
Oh, if only that had been true, but pointless, aimless meetings have been a plague forever. Maybe less so the no-peeing.
But "no agenda, no attenda" only works if you're in a position to refuse. Often attending meetings is seen as part of the job, either formally or in the managers' eyes, so ignoring them without good reason isn't allowed without repercussions.
I'm genuinely confused by this. Those sort of meetings have existed in the entire 20-something years I've been working corporate jobs.
I love this phrasing of the principle.
I work at FAANG annd after a certain point in seniority your entire job becomes a solid meeting block. A trend I’ve seen in at least thee companies is that my peers start scheduling fake meetings out of desperation to get 2-3 hours of real work done (Because any calendar gap is immediately filled).
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This is absolutely not new and was as bad if not worse before remote work.
Social pressure is still a thing for some unfortunately. Or maybe memories from school creep in. Just go for a pee.
People see reading as a chore. The last full book they read was in an elective in college and even then they skimmed the spark notes. They see writing as a stupid thing they have to do, a word count they have to hit, not a communication mechanism at all. Seriously there are so many people out there like this. If you give them something to read and force them to read it, they won’t get half of it because they’re just waiting till the chore is over when they get to the end.
This is why chatGPT was trained to produce bullet points and why people do PowerPoints. A paragraph of the written word is scary to a percentage of the population, certainly most “normal people,” and definitely a large subset of engineers.
That’s just the way it is. But these are your colleagues you have to figure out how to communicate with them.
Reading is a chore because, in a typical corporate job, you have to do so much of it and the material is generally pretty bland. There's the hundreds of emails per day, the meeting notes, the presentations, the endless stream of messages. Not to mention the code, the docs and all the role specific stuff you'll encounter along the way.
Perhaps we should be pushing people to be more succinct and thoughtful in their writing? Perhaps AI could do that ;)
Writing and talking allows you to formulate and explore concepts in different ways. Writing forces you to be specific and put thoughts in a linear order. Talking allows you to explore less defined ideas in haphazard ways.
I recently had a meeting where understanding snapped in place right at the end of the meeting. Writing might have gotten us there too, but I'm not convinced that it would have been more efficient. The idea wasn't well defined to start with and we talked about lots of things randomly.
Now writing is needed to make sure that we capture what was discussed and agree on it.
Both has a place in collaboration with other people.
ps. not to make the argument for useless meetings where managers drag you along for body count, I've slept through my share of those. And would probably also sleep through the AI summary of it
If you give them something to read and force them to read it, they won’t get half of it because they’re just waiting till the chore is over when they get to the end.
This is not different from talking to someone who is too busy (or just doesn't want) to listen. Writing exists in a form that can always be referenced. There's no risk of playing telephone, no memory required, etc. It'll be waiting for when the person is ready to read it.
If it's multiple people tag-teaming in the same doc for meetings it's even better. It's a whole new level of collab during the meeting that helps tighten the relationships and keep track of what's going on. It also captures the tone better.
I get that AIs work best offloading the tedious parts of life, but I guess for me note taking isn't tedious.
This is simply not true. Writing - particularly in the context of instant messages sent during work - cannot convey tone, and it is far less asynchronous than being able to have a conversation with someone.
> A paragraph of the written word is scary to a percentage of the population, certainly most “normal people,” and definitely a large subset of engineers.
What a boringly cynical take, too!
It is though. The amount of thought that can be put into writing is at least 1-2 orders of magnitude greater. The amount of thought that can be put into conversational speech is limited to roughly one second per second.
Writing also has the benefit of maintaining a record of what was said. The number of misunderstandings that could have been a avoided by writing is staggering.
For example: I can write. Maybe I can write better than a D1 basketball player. Am I smarter than them? ehhh, maybe not. Their "physical intelligence" is far superior to mine. I respect it as equal to my "verbal/writing intelligence." I am scared on the basketball court, it's foreign territory to me because I'm basically a nerd who spent my time reading books. They spent their time moving around on the bball court. The magnitude of the intelligence vector is large, it just points in a totally different direction.
If anything, I think this perspective is sorely missing. People respect reading and writing as an "smart person" activity but I think that's a stultifying perspective. Intelligence is incredibly broad, that's why you have to meet people where they are -- and many times that means communicating in a different way.
However, same as how "kinesthetic intelligence" correlates to basketball, "writing intelligence" correlates to engineering. The best software engineers are good at reading and writing; there are few exceptions in my experience.
Certainly I should have said, writing is superior in this context. We're on the proverbial basketball court in this conversation :)
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I’m pretty strict. Meetings are for decisions and only parties to the decision are invited and attend. The agenda and decision required is circulated beforehand. Only the time to make the decision is scheduled. Need 10 minutes? Then the meeting is 10 minutes.
Catch-ups, get-togethers, presentations, status updates, and brainstorming sessions are labelled as such explicitly and are treated differently. The event and attendance needs to be justified.
Such a system works quite well. Perhaps worth mentioning that I also refuse to be CC’d on emails that do not require a response, just as I do not CC anyone if no response is required. I also require that people be left alone to work without interruption - how contrarian.
It just sucks if you have incompetent management that doesn’t allow or implement such things.