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.
Bezos forbade pre-meeting homework at Amazon for this reason. He was having a hard time keeping up with everything and the meetings were basically people recriminating each other for not being prepared then having to take up the first part of the meeting with catching everyone up anyways. So he structured meetings at Amazon as an introductory period of reading so everyone was always on the same page once discussion began. No slideshows, just reading a document of n pages where n is less than 6.
I personally find the high level IC pseudomanager role sad. I went back to IC to be closer to the metal. But the expectation is I’ll be a product manager, program manager, and people manager all in one while the focused roles work in a self limited silo.
Then they simply moved the implied 20-30 minute prep time everyone should be doing anyways into the meeting block itself.
If a meeting isn’t important enough to prep materials or an agenda for the meeting should be canceled.
My theory is all standing scheduled regular meetings are basically useless. If I run a startup again they will be outright banned for my org. Meetings about a specific topic or issue are different.
He meets with all the stake holders, determines their desired outcomes, makes sure they are all prepped.
Starts the meeting, sets the goals and the ground rules.
As soon as the meeting exit criteria are met (either another meeting, more homework or a decision has been made) the meeting is over. Done.
Most meetings with this guy lasted 12-17 minutes.
His job was toilsome, but he saved everyone else. I am getting teary eyed just thinking about it.
It’s not about delegation. Everything that can be delegated should be but often there are decisions that need to be made that involve more capital or other outlay/risk than delegates are entitle to have discretion over. Further there are cross organizational decisions where the “join point” is a fairly senior person and they need to tie break between delegates.
Amazon was pretty good about delegation and independent empowerment, at least at aws. But there were certain decisions that always went to Jassy or bezos. People moaned about how much work it was to prepare for those and what a friction it was but those frictions and efforts were throttles and high risk decisions to keep entropy from eating them alive due to the scaled and delegated nature of most processes.
To your point, I think this tone has to be set by the senior person or else it won't take. It has to be ingrained culturally.
Correct me if I'm off, but it seems like you're saying these things are true:
1) There are certain high-level decisions that must be made and only certain people can make them because of the risk.
2) Those people are busy and in meetings almost all of the day.
3) Because they are busy they can't do the homework.
All of that points to the decision-maker as being the bottleneck. Certainly I'm missing the nuance, but that doesn't sound like an organization that delegates effectively. Real delegation, where people are delegated the authority to make important decisions, could reduce the need for all of the above. What exactly are they being delegated if not the authority to make high-level decisions? It's sounds like delegation in name only, or a more superficial version of delegation. Sometimes I think leaders think of “delegation” as “allowing someone else to do the stuff I don’t really want to do.” That’s not the type of delegation I’m alluding to.
The thing Bezos did with Amazon was create a scale free organizational culture which is resilient and highly adaptable. You can’t do that by adopting processes and organizing artifacts that depend on perfect execution by everyone everywhere all the time against some ideal. You have to build processes that are resilient to inadequacy and even incompetence yet still be successful at all levels reliably. When you’re managing an organization of over a million employees with a pretty flat org structure this becomes even more important. Saying “delegate effectively” is not a resilient thing - setting up a structure that ensures delegation happens but executive leadership is aware of and involved in enterprise critical decisions is hard to do.
One way Andy Jassy does this is he requires the documents to be read in his meetings to always use a specific style including Oxford commas. If he reads the document and there aren’t Oxford commas he ends the meeting and you have to reschedule - which can take months. So, you really are certain you have made the most succinct document according to a protocol that’s very low cognitive load for him. He delegates most decisions to his team and they to theirs but at the scale of aws or Amazon, there are some decisions he is a part of. And that number is a lot because Amazon is enormous, not because he doesn’t trust his team or delegates.
But some things he doesn’t. At aws he never delegated pricing decisions. He scrutinized any pricing change in detail. If you did a good job and everyone on his team already was bought in he invariably had something incredibly insightful no one else thought of. He would send it down and his subordinates would often be empowered to approve it. But he always reviewed pricing at least once. This was less about micromanagement and more about choosing to apply his time against what he felt his org should really care about. Margin, cost, scale, and customer experience of these things.
>scale free organizational culture
The fact that the meetings are bottlenecked by decision makers ability to synthesize information imply it is not, in fact, “scale free”. Scale free would imply there are not such bottlenecks.
I agree it’s about developing resilient processes. What you allude to is not that, because it implies single points of failure within decision-making, bottlenecks etc. It doesn’t come across as a clear understanding of true process-oriented culture.
>he reads the document and there aren’t Oxford commas he ends the meeting and you have to reschedule
I can’t know, of course, but I suspect this has more to do with ensuring due-diligence than document formatting. It’s the same thing Van Halen did in the 1980s by requiring brown M&Ms removed from the bowl in their dressing room. It was a quick heuristic to ensure the venue read their rider/contract completely and adhered to it because a lack of due diligence in set design, pyrotechnics etc. would have been a major safety issue. I’m willing to bet checking for a lack of Oxford commas is shorthand for “what other details did they miss?”
>And that number is a lot because Amazon is enormous
Again, this implies the opposite of “scale free” culture. A true scale free org wouldn’t have any nodes with a large number of connections. A large number of decisions does not mean any single individual has to involved in those decisions directly. Why is he not willing/able to select someone capable of making those decisions? (Honest question to understand the dynamic).
Aint no way anyone’s going to adjourn this meeting just because someone isn’t prepared.
Honest question, how many people have this happening at where they work?
Most of the meetings where I work at now are on Teams, and are (for the most part) recorded so if people need to drop, or miss it because they can't make it for some reason. This also allows people to go back and watch at a faster speed or skip to presentations or important parts. The huge advantage is those meetings have a transcript so you can also read or scan the transcript instead.
I'm just wondering if in 2025 people are still having meaningless meetings.
Meetings at my workplace are to the point, never longer than they need to be, and while yeah I weasel out of as many as I feel I can, I don't send an AI notetaker nor do I need it summarized. We meet for a topic, we discuss that topic, usually bullshit for a little in and around the topic, and then we get back to work. I would say most of our half-hour scheduled meetings are 10 minutes, and most of our hour scheduled ones are about 30-40 depending what it is. If we have a LOT to do, VERY occasionally, we actually use up the full time and then end things promptly because we all have more to do.
We don't backstab or plot on one another, our work relationships are built on mutual respect for one another's contribution to our goals. Meetings (nor even being in leadership) are not about jockeying for power, they're about enabling the best of us to help push our goals forward.
I'm getting whole new kinds of appreciation for my job and it's deliberately small, flattened structure because apparently the default state of business is to turn into high school with higher stakes, and I would genuinely rather run into traffic than work at some of these places.
“I noped out of the management track” = “nobody was considering me for the management track”
Doing this is considered proof that this person is a natural leader who steps up to solve organizational problems and get things done. You can guess why this leads to many many layers of management mostly just having meetings with each other, and a confused bottom layer of people who have to use this deliberately broken human telephone to communicate with their real ultimate bosses, the owners.
An (good) AI manager is far more efficient than any human manager, and doesn't need to resort to this tiered system. In theory, they are far faster any any human manager too, meaning the company can scale around them without any issue.
Maybe you still have a board that reviews decisions at a high level, and an office of human manager cogs that can review the individual AI decisions, but then your company structure can become such that a corp of 1k+ individuals can _directly communicate with their customer(s)_
Now, of course I'm not going to pretend that this won't come with its own share of issues, but that's what the "manager cogs" are for...
Which just feels like efficiency if you're the owner: less people reaching out to you with problems!
I don’t know if this holds any more than saying “the only people who get into management are those that couldn’t hack it in the technical side”. There are many people who get recruited for certain management tracks and turn it down so they can put more focus on technical problems.
IMO at the end of the day, every job is about solving problems and it’s up to you to choose the track that aligns with the problems you want to work on. Some want to focus on people and administration, others want to focus on technical problems. A problem arises when orgs only have one route to promotion (eg, you must get into management if you want to be promoted).
It would be like me saying I noped out of the starting lineup of the LA Lakers to with on the custodial staff.
This thread is insane. Plenty of people have turned down managerial opportunities. The inevitable path for any IC is this offer. Countless have told stories of their regret for either path.
* 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.
Similarly I've had so much feedback that people wanted to have a better idea of what everyone else in the department was working on. So various things were tried. Summary emails, brief section in monthly all-hands, yet many of the same people who asked for it didn't pay attention in the meeting and didn't read the email.
Still if you want to stick to what you know, that’s fine too.
I tend to grab the more interesting issues, which is easy because nobody else wants them. But in general I hate my job and I can't learn much from it.
I have to admit that if I was in a more fulfilling position I'd be happier to collaborate. But I'll never be a "team player". I just don't have this in me.
- 2 . Use Zulip - and integrate them with project management tools.
- 3 . Zulip is good for this also
- 4 . Unless you need to share screen and explain things , you don't need meetings for that.
- 5 - Chat please
- 6 - Brainstroming is only place where meetings are needed.
Project management tools are there for the long view and tracking, I don't want to juggle priorities of a JIRA backlog, it basically pushes the burden of PM to me. With a meeting if someone has a blocker thats on me I prefer if they raise it in front of the team and we agree if it should get done now or later. Other than that I share what I am currently focusing on and ignore the rest until I have to deal with it. Multitasking and context switching is a PITA and I will gladly delegate that to PM and hop on a meeting to sync with everyone.
I don't want to be spammed with JIRA updates on dozens of tickets I might be needed on, only to forget about them in 15 mins when something more important comes up.
And written communication takes more effort, it's a tradeoff for sure.
Reductionism is easy, and cheap.
I work with engineers - actual electrical and chemical engineers that design processes and controls - and I make the software side of their ideas happen. They can't do their job without me, and vice-versa. But I'm a SCADA integrator, not an engineer, dammit.
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.
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.
A client buying your product couldn’t give two fucks whether your manager asked you an ice breaker that ate 10 minutes of a 30 minutes meeting. And managers that don’t understand this are self interested parasites, or just completely inept. Most of the management I’ve worked with have been a combination of the two.
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.
It will tell you how much time you spent working on tickets, and how long to spent working on the perfect reply for hacker news.
Much easier said then done. Especially if this really goes towards technological unemployment.
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.
Anyway, I’ve come to really dislike async comms. If something is being communicated to you over async, it’s something not important enough that you can ignore it, in many cases indefinitely. Meetings are still the best way to keep everyone in sync and it’s a structural strategy to keep everyone accountable for making progress at their jobs.
Sync is even worse at scale. I had the pleasure of attending standups in a 20-person team. It was a nightmare where I said two sentences and then wasted the next two hours of my life listening to things I either know or are unrelevant to me.
>you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read
Great, because skipping three pages of unimportant conversation is faster than skipping 30 minutes of banter between two extrovert UI developers as a backend specialist.
>structural strategy to keep everyone accountable
Sounds exactly like something mid level managers say to themselves. Structural synergy? Keeping people accountable? I just want to work, damnit.
Why is your team 20 people if the majority don’t do anything you’re remotely close to? Someone should have split the team or at least the standup.
Why doesn’t your lead enforce a time limit and script?
It can happen the other way round as well. My team is small but only I ever stick to the script. Every one else talks in detail for 2-3 minutes. Their updates could have been 20sec.
You wouldn’t be complaining if someone actually did something about it.
Again the problem is that no one is interested in processes to make things better or more efficient and then people blame the process.
The process might have plenty of short comings, but we’ll never know.
All of that can happen just fine in a real-time team chat as well - and give people the chance to provide actual context and links, and also check back at the actual discussion later.
What? Instead you are punishing everyone to sit on a meeting, hearing two people discuss something that could have been a dm. I get that some people prefer meetings but to me every meeting with more than 3 people is a massive waste of time
I’ve got ~90 years on this planet at best. I’m not interested in wasting 1/5th of my working career in meetings, listening to people I don’t even know, telling me personal details about their lives I will not retain for more than 5 seconds. To me, it’s genuinely insulting to my time to waste it with these pointless fake displays of familiarity instead of getting to the work at hand and ending the meeting early.
Don't even be sure they're real; there are increasingly people who outsource their work to bots these days.
When we treat visible presence as a proxy for being "real," we exclude people who can't - or shouldn't have to - mimic neurotypical behaviour just to belong.
In practice, this is harder because people don't speak up unless prodded. And on Slack, I spend a lot of time and effort prodding people for that update, whereas a stand-up takes 15 minutes, tops.
Not attending stand-up is a lot more visible than silently ignoring an async update request on Slack.
If a second "please respond, I need the answer now" Slack message is not enough, you have bigger problems
Then the meeting is pointless. But not all projects allow for that.
Perhaps, for efficiency, they could ask everyone simultaneously in parallel, or at least roughly around the same time?
To maximize creativity and opportunity, perhaps we could then figure out some way to share each person's status update with every other person on the team?
You still don't need a meeting for that if everyone actually does it.
This is a nice way of saying that some people just won't tell you what they're up to async, you have to wring information out of them synchronously. They're just bad at communicating.
On a well functioning team I can rely on people just reporting status themselves when something relevant happens and reaching out for help. But some people just don't do that, especially people from other teams, departments, etc.
Like, you explicitly ask them in an IM and they don't tell you?
Not telling you on their own, I can understand. If the former happens though, you have bigger problems, that asking on a real-life meeting wont solve.
A team meeting should not be the go-to solution for "Bob is bad at communicating"!
> But some people just don't do that, especially people from other teams
Hope this helps.
If you're the manager, YOUR job is to figure out how to get the information from the people who owe you a report, not weaponize my presence at a meeting to ferret out people you can't manage to reach.
But honestly the condescending tone of this whole exchange tells me everything I need it to about why you struggle to get information out of people.
You're reading things into what I'm saying that aren't there.
My job is to defend my direct reports from having their time wasted and clear blockers for them. Sometimes, yeah, this means meeting with people to ferret them out.
I'm not weaponizing anyone's presence at a meeting except mine.
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.
Also the opposite effect, where the most productive and important engineers seem to cause most problems and seem incompetent.
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.
Even people getting @mentionned on slack or in emails seem to find it acceptable to say routinely they didn't see/read whatever it was they were specifically asked to look at.
You're right, and that tracks with my experience too, sad as it is to have to admit.
However, if you're not holding people accountable for not reading the directive/memo, then that's on you. When you have something in writing that you can point to and say "look, there it is, I provided you with the information, you chose to not acknowledge it," it's very damning to the person who ignored it.
Without getting into details about the time I nearly left my company, I can tell you that one of my greatest weapons was (and still is) being able to literally recall emails, SOPs, and SMS messages that had been ignored. It makes me a thorn in the side of lazy managers and legacy hires that turned out to be freeloaders in my industry.
The people at the bottom of any organization have a responsibility to hold the people at the top accountable, just as it works the other way around. This is extremely hard for those of us near the bottom of an organization to do, I know, but if we don't, we are giving permission for the problem to persist and make our work that much harder. We all know that managers and those above them will avoid doing as much work as possible at any given time, but willful ignorance is not admissible in court of law, so why should it be any different in the work place?
It's a side effect of the information noise we're all subjected to, if we all received 6 messages a day we'd probably read them all but as we often get hundreds (thousands if you're getting automated messages) it's "OK" to miss a few.
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.
by people with low verbal IQ
The kind of person who takes hours to explain something in written form are unlikely to explain it in 3 minutes in person. More likely, they set up a meeting where they waffle on about an issue, expecting the receiving end to distill some valuable information from their ramblings, and then inevitably end up complaining when the solution doesn't match their expectations (which of course were never formalized anywhere).
I'm inclined to believe you're closer to management than actual execution: when you say "resolved" I hear "owned".
Why is every meeting 1h+ then?
As I asked in just the past couple of days, please make an effort to observe the guidelines. You seem to be relatively new here, so it's understandable to take some time to understand what's expected, but please make the effort if you want to keep participating here.
I'm 51, have been working in software my whole professional career, this isn't something that started with COVID.
The massive increase in tech hiring might have made more of these people exist in absolute terms, but they have always existed.
I may just have been lucky with the few I've had to work with though, so your mileage may vary.
*or as the song says, a little less conversation, a little more action please
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.
The only way you know that you didn't need to be at a meeting is to be at the meeting. Catch-22 is a fun game.
With dictation tools and analysis you can have meeting notes and then you or AI search for things that might affect you so you can reach out and correct the record.
Simply put in modern larger companies there is too much going on at any given time. Most companies of any size are made up many purchased companies and their applications that are kind of glued together into a corporate structure. You can blame culture rot on the participants, but most of the time they are being asked to do too much in a dysfunctional organization.
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.
In this case, there's nothing to document from the meeting because the information wasn't shared in the first place. The information could only have been shared if the developer had been in the meeting.
(FWIW, I've rarely seen this from a developer not being in a meeting entirely, but I've seen it a few times where a developer has treated the meeting as a "read-only" event, i.e. expected that other people provide all the requirements and not used their own expertise or experience of the code to push back on decisions.)
In that case, you're essentially relying on the people in the meeting to know they should document that thing as important which, given the person who knows it's important isn't there, is pretty unlikely.
Even in an ideal world, we'll have developers not in the meetings they need to be in. My contention would be that we should try to get people in the right meetings and, over time, the number of issues where someone isn't in the right meeting will be lower than if we just don't have those meetings.
Important decisions are almost never 2+2=4, if they were, they wouldn't be important and yes you wouldn't need a meeting (like I admitted, there's definitely a lot of unimportant meetings).
But important decisions are almost always an exercise in coaxing, cajoling and persuasion, which is just extremely low fidelity on paper.
Most engineers will look at their team leads and say "I don't believe in this strategy on paper", and all their team leads can say is "I was at the meeting. You had to be there"
I'm actually a bit tired of introverts hiding behind their disposition. You can do something about it, and it's more than complaining.
EDIT: Sorry, that was more rantish than I wanted. But I'll leave it here anyway.
This means that prior to AI transcription/summary bots, there wasn’t much written documentation about the decisions and conclusions from meetings. Now hopefully that will change.
I did once think that if the meeting were to be transcribed, people are outputting paragraphs of text in a short amount of time, just verbally. But keeping up with that is pretty draining, as you have to listen and process it, whereas with reading you can skim and re-read things easily.
I sometimes think people's basic skills - reading and typing - are underdeveloped or not assessed, and they should be assessed when applying for a job that involves reading and typing. But I don't even think people consider reading/writing skills when looking for staff since the assumption is that everyone's is good enough.
It’s overlooked.
Good ones who can’t type fast, I assign them typing lessons their first few paid days on the job, and a half hour twice a week thereafter for a while.
I’m an outlier and can type 120wpm without trying very hard, but I expect 40-50wpm (touch typing, not hunt and peck) at a minimum from staff that work with computers and aren’t disabled.
> Good ones who can’t type fast, I assign them typing lessons their first few paid days on the job, and a half hour twice a week thereafter for a while.
This is very interesting to me - I’ve actually been building https://www.typequicker.com recently and was curious about potentially adding features and marketing it towards businesses who then can use it to train their workers.
Typing quickly is extremely overlooked and since I learned touch typing, it completely improved my productivity and career trajectory. (Went from 40ish to about 100-120wpm depending on what I’m typing)
What are some tools that you use when you say you assign lessons?
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…
If you don't tell people what the meeting is for, you're implicitly saying that they don't need to know the topic until they arrive, and so you're signaling that they're not expected to be giving input and they're just there to listen to something - and in 90% of such meetings, they could be done better by e-mail.
If you wanted feedback from the engineers, giving them a heads-up that this was their opportunity would have given them time to form their ideas into a succinct coherent point rather than an off-the-cuff ramble.
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.
You’re not asking for meeting notes you’re asking for a transcription which has the same problem as an email - people don’t read rhem
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.
To get there, you need a confluence of context and expertise from several domains:
- what problem needs to be solved (user story)
- what options are available (interaction design, technical capabilities)
- what the cost of implementing each option is, and the opportunity cost of each level of implementation / each option (technical capability, resource management, sales, user research)
- managing group consensus on the path forward (communication to technical and non-technical audiences)
- break down of any large chunks of work into smaller tasks that can be done and planning the work to be done in series or parallel (resource management, technical capabilities)
Finally, after all of that, you have a task (or several) that can be handed off.
There's really no way to get here without at least some thought into the implementation details, as the business can't make the decision on which options without knowing rough timelines.
Seems like when you say "engineers", you mean "people with my exact personality"
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!
“Did you know HR has an XYZ workshop” or “Look at what your coworkers are saying on Internal Company Social Network” (that I never once logged into). Literal spam. It’s no wonder I became completely desensitized to email notifications from my own employer’s domain.
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 do this all the time, but often no one cares about the issue I raised at that time. So I have to wait until next day standup anyway, because then I can raise the issue in group and force someone to comment or reply.
You clearly work with excellent teams who don’t need this then. My experience is that a large number of people, even competent people will not post when an issue shows up and will wait for however long until an update is asked of them and then say they couldn’t do it because they’re blocked.
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)
If not. Then I'll have to either live with the decision or at least give feedback on it.
Nothing is final until you build it (from a developer point of view).
Skipping meetings because they aren't organized the way you like is pretty passive aggressive. I agree with all the criticism about poorly organized meetings, but I think the non prima Donna thing to do is push back on their existence or format, not just skip them. That's part of why a job is a job.
Business value first
But the other poster was saying it’s prima donna behavior to skip a meeting without asking the organizer if they can add an agenda first.
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 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).
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.
> 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.
Not everything needs to be recorded - and when it does, one can record the conversation, or take notes.
Not to mention, misunderstandings crop up in text all the time, often due to lack of tone being conveyed
Can you elaborate on this? "Tone" is something that inherently has to be interpreted, so it doesn't make sense that you're attributing this as a quality that shields from misunderstandings.
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 :)
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.
The reason I think all-party consent laws are bad is the same reason I find the above sentence silly: If you say something out loud that is no longer your exclusive “data.” If you want to keep it secret either don’t say it, or say it under NDA or in a customary fashion such as telling a reporter off the record.
If you speak to me, I ought to have the right to memorialize it however I see fit (including note-taking with pencil, recording, and AI transcription) unless you and I agree otherwise (I do believe one should be bound to honor those commitments though).
Note: I live in an all-party consent state so I don’t record anything in actuality. But one should be free to — especially when dealing with corporate entities, who all force this recording unilaterally on everyone as a condition of ever speaking to them!
If you haven't grown up with every semi-publicly spoken word recorded and made searchable, you aren't used to restrict what you say to those that you are OK with being recorded.
But, even more importantly, even if you do, you might later change your mind about things.
Part as a problem is that we, as a society, don't really deal appropriately (at least in my opinion) to old recordings. If somebody said something slightly offensive 10 years ago, and it wasn't recorded, basically nobody cares. If it was recorded, there's too much outrage, considering that this was one thing of literally 100k things they said that year.
The fact that I thought and wrote the notes is a very important part of this. Sure, an AI transcript might be useful to refer to but writing things down as the meeting goes is a great way to aid understanding.
I think of the scene, in Real Genius, where a tape recording of a teacher lecturing is playing to an auditorium of students' tape recorders capturing the lecture.
Better still, of course, stop these foolish meetings.
Even if just one person installs it, it resets the iteration and can begin again.
Just like malware.
If you use meetings for something useful, then AI notes won’t be of any value anyway.
Naively assuming that everyone wouldn’t just have their agent attend all of their meetings. Turning Zoom into a 5 second diff over an api.
Someone needs to invent some form of electronic mail.
I can already hear the panicked phone call asking if Alice okay and how on earth could her whole house get swallowed by a sink hole without the wifi cutting out :P
I'm interested if there is also audio that is noisy/ not really noticable humans that will disrupt the AI.
Best would be the meeting organizers to leverage their AI attendee to write a draft meeting recap and sending it out after review.
I'd like to know if the company is doing well financially, but I don't really care about the specific deals they made in all departments.
I'd like to know if we're adding a new component to the product and what it is, but I don't care about the implementation details if I'm not implementing it or asked to give my opinion.
That being said, the notetaker is a supplementary component. It's never "in replace of a person". If someone sends an AI to my meeting instead of showing up themselves, I'm kicking it out.
If there is too much going on or too many meetings, learn to use meetings better. Learn to use emails. I'd much rather exchange a few emails than talk at an AI bot. Hell, I'll use my own AI to help me craft the email if I really feel its needed, but at least then I have the chance to make sure its right before I hit send.
Personally I don't mind a meeting that's either:
1) Informal, and short with up to 3ish close coworkers (as long as it doesn't start by someone sending the dreaded "hey, can you jump on a call?" message with no other context)
2) Published agenda well ahead of time, only relevant people are invited, some level of participation is required from all attendees, people are actually paying attention, and maybe most critically it's _well facilated_. Nothing more draining than meeting going off-topic and over-time because the facilitator doesn't feel comfortable telling that one guy to shut up.
I’ve tested these tools a number of times, and if you were in the meeting, it’s easy to look at the notes and be impressed but reading the notes as someone who’s not in the meeting does not give the full picture as it often makes major/minor mistakes. If you were in the meeting, it’s easy to overlook or shrug off, but would be entirely confusing if you didn’t attend.
Also we provide on-prem installation so meeting data doesn't leave your company :))
Also helps if someone tries to interrupts and the live caption can notate who was the breaker so I can call on them without a dumb-sounding "uh who was that?"
(Only for meetings I'm not an active participant, of course. Filler meetings... which is most of them).
Do as I say, not as I do.
Or maybe there's an opportunity for someone to create an "interop environment" where AIs representing diverse persons' agendas within an organisation can come together and agree on outcomes and goals on behalf of their sponsors (maybe not completely serious, but ...)
Yeah, I know TFA is just notetaking but that shouldn't stop us from thinking ahead, right? The possibilities for cost-cutting in middle management are spectacular!
This allows folks who do not need actually contribute to a meeting to catch up on the content at a time that suits them later.
Sounds like a very efficient use of time to me.
I am constantly amazed by allie K miller positioning herself as leader and visionary in every hot trend.
I think with new crop of tools the product of my dreams, a vision-audio notekeeping app, will be possible.
I read this from a video transcript on National Law Review [1]:
> The question becomes, where is it saved? Who has access to it? Is it secure? Is it being disclosed? All the same kinds of questions that organizations face when they are processing sensitive personal data or sensitive company data. That's just to kick it off.
But the wapo article says it even better:
> 'Nothing will be forgotten'
That is not always a feature with meetings, and the more you read the article the more vapid most of the responses here ("meetings dumb. me no have to go now") become.
[1] https://natlawreview.com/article/we-get-privacy-work-assessi...
I think this is a big issue. Lots of people give zero thought to data privacy and security and it ruins it for everyone else because companies need to switch to a culture whereby you can't run anything without permission. Maybe it's better to monitor remotely and take punitive action against those who are negligently breaking the rules that have been clear to them?
Every meeting in person or via Zoom I have been in has been either an useless sales pitch, grandstanding by some manager, brown-nosing by some upstart or some other form of toxic socialization, scheming or conspiracy. I detest all those and avoid them, which is probably why I've become kind of an unpromotable pariah, which is ok, as a promotion would mean attending more of them.
Why do you even have a call with 16 people in it?
compare and contrast the two headlines
For example, on calls with customers/partners, or with a recruiter, or for a job interview.
Thanks, fellow human. You probably just sold out my voice and likeness -- and, if I don't notice and disconnect immediately, the content of our conversation, and any info I might share -- to some ruthless sociopath techbro startup. Which will use and abuse and leak the data. Even though they don't have rights. And it's actually a felony to be recording calls without consent where I live.
This is one of those obvious but subtly inappropriate things that just kind of gets foisted on people. Nobody raises an eyebrow, or their voice, and so it's just normalized. Imagine walking into an in-person meeting to find a camcorder set up on a tripod - and if that isn't weird enough, none of your co-workers make a comment on it or acknowledge its presence. It's like pervasive but discreet cameras in public places vs. Surveillance Camera Man making it obvious by sticking a camera in your face.