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.
Homework before hand is an anti pattern IMO. It assumes people aren’t busy in the rest of their day and the meeting scheduler is inflating the toll of the meeting with a hidden prep tax. This is how people end up with 12 hour days.
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.
All bezos did was explicitly make the homework a required part of calling a meeting. Correctly putting the majority of the prep work on the person calling the meeting to begin with.
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.
I might disagree on this. For a meeting that covers any moderately complex situation to be productive, the attendees need to understand the context. That sounds like what Bezos was after. Doing “homework” beforehand ensures that people aren’t sitting idly while one person is reading the report for the first time or otherwise trying to bring themselves up to speed on the context everyone else already knows. I don’t think that’s the best use of everyone’s time, unless you expect meetings to be the primary objective of those attendees. It sounds to me that leadership should be delegating decisions to people who understand the context rather than spending time at every meeting going over background. Of course, that only works well in high-trust environments.
How do you ensure everyone does their homework? If they are busy, they won’t. If they’re managers they’re probably in back to back meetings all day. Do they prepare for every one of them? This implies they should be working 11 hours a day just to keep up with homework for their baseline meeting load? In my 35 years I’ve never seen a busy manager or even IC show up having read the material ahead of time. Especially a very senior person who gets scheduled in 16 x 30 minute sessions in a day. It’s impractical and they’ll just show up and tell the junior people to explain the material and do a presentation while they ask questions. Pointing out the inefficiency for everyone else who prepared is a nonstarter as they’re busy and more senior.
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.
In my experience the biggest issue with homework beforehand is that a substantial portion of the attendees won't do the homework. Frequently it's the people who you most needed to have done the homework. Now you need to rehash it for them anyways and everyone who did the homework has their time wasted. That's one area where the Amazon Silent Read shines. The other way I found it very useful is that people leave comments on the areas that need discussion and now you can spend the rest of the meeting just on those points. Would be great to have left the notes before the meeting but that's where reality sabotages things.
I’ve admired meeting stewards who will adjourn the meeting if people aren’t prepared and reconvene it later. If that person has authority and is well respected, it only has to happen once or twice, but obviously it can’t be applied everywhere.
Often, the purpose of the meeting is to get a busy VP to listen to some proposal and then say “yes.” That VP was booked solid for three weeks, and is booked solid for the next three weeks. This is his only 15 minute free time slot.
Aint no way anyone’s going to adjourn this meeting just because someone isn’t prepared.
>> 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.
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.
Man people who talk like you must work in absolutely miserable companies.
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.
'Tech lead' in a lot of companies is a hybrid track that gets funneled into a 'director' level roles, which is almost fully management. Just like scientists evolve into PIs, which also entails mostly management.
IMO management positions are mostly lobbied for/created by try-hard social climbers, at least initially. "We're taking a lot of X work, maybe I should lead a team to deal with that?" "Y has so many reports, maybe I can form a subgroup to help with that?" Creating new positions for people who want to be more important than they are right now is the main mechanism by which private orgs expand.
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.
I have a suspicion managers will become redundant sooner than tech workers, although certain big CEOs love to try to say otherwise... (wonder why...).
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...
>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.
Which just feels like efficiency if you're the owner: less people reaching out to you with problems!
>“nobody was considering me for the management track”
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).
Promoted to their incompetence. The Peter Principle or as I prefer: "growth mindset meets reality"
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.
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.
Excellent list! I want to add a point about keeping people aligned. One thing that becomes very apparent when you lead a group of more than one small team is how you need to communicate everything multiple times, phrase it in multiple ways and blast it through multiple channels. As a former boss of mine once said "if nobody is rolling their eyes you need to say it more often". Even though I intellectually know this I've still had cases that blew my mind where is repeat something I've been saying for weeks and one person is genuinely surprised and calls out how helpful it was to hear this (one might think this was a prank but the person was definitely the opposite personality type for that and sometimes struggled a little with English). This makes that portion of the meeting or email boring and a waste of time for many attendees but there is no getting past it.
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.
Yeah I hate those team calls too though. I don't give a shit what others in the team are doing. I'm not a team player at all. As such I always manoeuver myself into owning a particular topic which works well because I'm not slowed down by others. But these calls are something I just tune out on. I wouldn't even read the summary because I just don't care.
Well I'm on a team now managing a cloud SaaS package. Meaning most problems just involve finding workarounds for their incompetence.
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.
I stick to IC roles but personally I prefer meetings over your alternatives.
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.
Yeah, it could be. But why would I want 5+ small 5 minute interruptions when I could have a single 20 minute interruption? Assuming all interruptions have a minimum of a 5+ minute context-switching time, the 20 minute meeting is 25 minutes whereas the 55 ends up being 510=50 minutes.
Are you an actual engineer with a degree and subsequent accreditation through a professional body? or an "engineer" by role? Those mean very different things depending on country, quality of education and skills or...how many Microsoft Points you have.
This drives me up the wall so much. I had a boss that used to introduce me to customers as an engineer, and I'd correct him on the spot. And now that I'm looking for another job (not because I pissed off the boss), I keep having to search through "engineer" roles because people can't get their terms right.
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.
>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.
> 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.
They are in 95% of situations. Most managers and product people are just insecure about the fact that they know next to nothing technically about the products they manage, and instead of getting out of the way of the people who do, they feel the need to constantly insert themselves in the process, directly lowering project efficiency, to justify their roles existing at all. “Managing (internal) relationships” provides no value to the company’s clients whatsoever, it only exists to reinforce a company’s culture or prop up someone whose job is probably not that important in the grand scheme of things.
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.
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.
this is literally something my team already does —- you don’t need AI but this does fit with my running theory that AI makes it easier for people to see stupid processes they should change
That's been around a while in various forms. It's still no replacement for synchronously asking follow up questions and being available for decision making.
But that's what a modern AI agent can do, which previous ones couldn't. If a company gives it full access to the project management system, your previous conversations with it, and its prior conversations with the other team members, I believe it can be quite good at follow up and recommendations. I do absolutely see managers giving it some limited decision making (e.g. "Yes, we should split this subtask off into next sprint") very soon.
Yea but that's not quite the same social pressure and implication of urgency; people are more motivated if they know they're talking to a human. That's my impulsive guess, anyway.
Not if there's a ticket you're sort of but not quite stuck on, and feel uncomfortable updating the ticket status, as it could then prompt your lead to say "well, have you tried X already?" and feel clever about their contribution, while the reality is more complex and then you have to get into an awkward chat with them about why X is a poor idea in this case.
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.
As you said, async doesn’t go well with scale, and async comms is OK if statuses are all you’re gonna write there. But in meetings you get to have back-and-forth, and while you can also have that in async, you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. Which they might not do altogether.
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.
The problem with all processes is that people aren’t interested in sticking with them.
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.
Same manager with right-sized stand-ups wouldn't cost anymore money, unless that manager is making many multiples over what any of their team makes. It seems more like a kneejerk reaction to not "waste" the manager's time at the expense of the actually-more-important-but-hierarchically-less-important employees.
>But in meetings you get to have back-and-forth, and while you can also have that in async, you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. Which they might not do altogether
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.
> you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read.
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
When you get to that point, those two people should take the discussion outside of the sync call. The purpose of a sync is to figure out whether your current work is on track and, if not, who and what is needed to fix that.
Over the years I've moved away from thinking of the daily standup as being a way to update everyone on what we're doing. The value in it is having a daily time when everyone on the team sees each other's faces and has a brief conversation. Sometimes it'll be a quick hello, other times we'll talk for half an hour about nothing in particular, but that's valuable on a remote team where it's all to easy to forget that everyone else is a real person.
No thanks, I have my own hobbies and friends. Activities that primarily benefit work, including team building exercises, should be during paid company time.
You don't have those things when working remotely. You need to foster social relations at work too; after-work socializing is not a substitute for a collaborative work atmosphere.
You don’t “need” to foster social relations at work. They will naturally arise as people work together. This idea that we need to turn the workplace into a big “family” is nonsensical corporate propaganda pushed by HR departments primarily staffed by women. I promise, most men don’t give a single fuck about “fostering social relationships” at work. The guys I have respected and became the most friendly with at work have been the ones I’m in the trenches with, designing, building, etc. I don’t need to know what Susan in HR’s kid did over the weekend, it’s legitimately useless information to my entire life.
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.
Why would they want to be in trenches with you, collaborate on a project, start a company, or otherwise stick their neck out for you, if they don't know you? They'll pick someone they enjoy rapport with.
People are real whether or not you see their faces or chat daily. Framing daily standups as "humanising" can end up dehumanising those who find enforced face time and small talk uncomfortable or exhausting - especially neurodivergent team members. Inclusivity means recognising that not everyone bonds the same way.
Surprised by the downvotes, honestly. Inclusivity isn't about asking everyone to conform to neurotypical norms - it's about creating space for different ways of working and communicating. If even mentioning that feels unwelcome, that says something worth reflecting on.
I think the issue it that you're speaking to an ideal that doesn't tend to stand up in reality. The reality is if people stop seeing your face in meetings people are less likely to think about you. This may feel good to the stereotypical introvert who just wants to get things done and be left alone. But it can be a career killer. This is very apparent in hybrid companies where folks in the office with incidental face time have an easier time advancing than remote employees regardless of value added. We can state that it's not fair and things should be different and more inclusive but that doesn't do anything to actually make environments more inclusive.
Calling it a "career killer" to avoid constant face time ignores the reality that many people are masking disabilities just to survive daily interactions. Burnout from that kind of masking _is_ a career killer - just a quieter, slower one. We wouldn't tell someone in a wheelchair to "get more visible by taking the stairs." Yet we build ramps, pat ourselves on the back, and ignore invisible disabilities entirely. The fact that this kind of exclusion is still seen as normal - even strategic - should be a source of shame, not resignation.
You're looking at this through a neurotypical lens. I've worked in teams where I never saw most people’s faces, and yet we had genuine camaraderie and trust -built through shared work, not video feeds. For many neurodivergent people, faces and expressions aren't sources of connection - they're noise. Video calls can turn into a performance: "Does my face match what I'm saying?" "Did I laugh at the wrong moment?" "Is it my turn to speak yet?" That constant second-guessing burns cognitive energy that could go into actual contribution.
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.
> But you can share your daily status asynchronously as well.
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.
So add yet more process and bureaucracy instead of following tried and true management techniques of having a synchronous meeting lasting 15 minutes every morning?
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.
> It's usually possible for the person running a small project to ask everyone for status
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?
Why do you think a larger meeting is a remedy for this? Quite the opposite, if you can't get a personal status from a large group, doing the meeting is completely pointless because it demonstrate lack of preparation.
It's not. That's not what I meant or said. I said not all projects allow for getting status ahead of time.
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.
Seriously. This sounds like, "I can't manage my direct report, so I need to waste the time of everybody else on the team just so the little punk realizes he can't hide forever."
A team meeting should not be the go-to solution for "Bob is bad at communicating"!
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 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.
An exec writing down minutes can also come back to bite them in the ass if there's a lawsuit or criminal investigation. Email can have retention policies. That's harder to enforce with paper, especially when it's someone's personal notes.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Fair point in your case, but my experience across companies and industries is that people just don't read. It's true in any customer facing experience where tutorials etc are routinely unread and ignored, it's true for execs who are always short on time and want the exec summary in order no to read a whole memo (however misguided this may be in certain instances), it's true for seasoned professionals who prioritize and decide to ignore certain requests until they are clear enough / repeated enough, the list goes on.
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?
This matches my experience, with email in particular every organisation I've worked for it's been normalised that it's OK to not read every email, particularly if it's long or detailed. Clearly if the CEO emails you alone about something important that doesn't hold but for the vast majority of emails it was seen as acceptable to not read them and to even openly admit that. I remember being phoned by a department head once asking what an email was about - they weren't going to read it until I explained why they should.
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.
> 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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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!
Don't forget the number of people who think they write well but don't. These type of people tend to litter their communications with ghastly MBA-speak, passive voice and super-tired business cliches instead of just writing in plain language.
Which is frankly appalling in this day and age. We write all the time, sure, the vast majority of it aren't essays or any kind of dense text, but expressing ideas in writing is something we do constantly.
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.
I wish I had that privilege. I've had a manager make a paragraph-long question about if I had any training courses that I'd want to take, and when I answered with a "No", I got chewed out for not being communicative or something.
Personally I don't mind spending several hours solving a problem over "async communication" if that means I'm free to work on other stuff while the other party is formulating a response. Then I also get the benefit of having something in their writing to refer back to.
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).
This risks breaking the guidelines about being snarky, being curmudgeonly, fulminating, sneering and generic tangents.
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 don't know about anyone else, but contrary to my general disdain for meetings* I have found product owners/process managers to be useful in the regard of having one central person to funnel things through on a particular project. The bottleneck also creates a nice buffer of accountability in both directions and they typically offer either new or refined SOPs after solving the same problems over and over again. Plus, they can sit in on the meeting while I go do something useful.
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
There was a big step change in my experience, enabled by the adoption of Teams for remote work and the resulting ease of scheduling meetings. Previously meetings had always required the organiser to book a room.
This didn't start with COVID. Remember that scene in "Office Space" where the big boss had that banner up that said "Is this good for the company?" and everyone was nodding like they'd just been given the secret to life? Yeah, I've seen those kind of things in real life.
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.
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.
This might not be quite what the previous poster meant, but in my experience it's often not that the developer missed a meeting and now doesn't know some critical piece of information. Rather, it's often that the developer has some knowledge about the code that changes how something should be implemented. Because they weren't at the meeting, nobody else knew about this, and it's only later, when the developer sits down to write the code, that everyone finds out.
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.)
The point in the parent comment still stands. There should be a paper trail so that the developer would have to confront the need to add such a detail. If the decision was made in the meeting alone, then it was lost in time as not all developers can be expected to be in every meeting.
How? Meeting notes can never contain all the detail of the meeting and, if they do, there would be so much content that you'd likely miss them when you read the documentation. That's to say nothing of the time investment of the person to catch up on every document produced.
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.
If decisions are being made about the code or implementation, then the person working on that code should be in that meeting, surely. Otherwise there's no point making that decision.
I realize introverts don't work that way, I know, I am one. But I've had some of the most brilliant ideas come through purely on a discussion nay sometimes an emotionally charged argument.
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 an introvert, too. I have no troubles participating in, or leading, or even fighting in group activities. Does it exhaust me? Yes, it does. I literally feel physical pain if I have to stay in company for more than maybe an hour. But value is created through interaction, not some process, paper stacks, or a lone wolf hiding in the closet, so I learned a long time ago how to communicate effectively, give and take feedback, organize tight meetings, and facilitate decision making.
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.
Most people in meetings don’t type very fast, and find it easier to talk than to write.
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.
In my org we have rotating minutes takers - it effectively takes them out of the meeting, but they do pipe up if an issue affects them directly. Of course people's meeting taking skills vary widely but I still find the human-made minutes far superior and accurate to whatever Copilot cooks up.
I wasn't so much saying that there should be plenty of documentation generated during a meeting as saying that there should be plenty of documentation prior to the meeting. That the meeting is based on.
I've also read a thing (dunno if it was opinion or fact) that posited that people's reading ability is directly correlated to a preference for video, I suspect it's the same with meetings. I read / write all day (including on here lmao), meetings are draining in comparison. But the people in those meetings don't read / write nearly as much as I do.
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.
I administer reading comprehension tests and typing speed tests to all candidates I consider hiring.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
No matter how they're used, AI companies will create the artificial need for every company and essentially every worker to use these tools, even if they're not needed.
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…
Did they get to read the RFC before the meeting? If they had access but didn’t use it, then this is out of line. But if they only got the RFC during the meeting when they were asked to comment, then flipping out is overboard but the feeling is understandable.
Fair Q. It was a multi-week process where the doc was published/open for written comment and then we had a series of meetings for live discussion as well. The engineer in question just completely mis-read where we were in the process and thought this was being announced as a mandate in the one particular meeting.
Yes, this is pretty universal I think. Some people think software engineering in a team is writing code as much as possible, and doing anything else is bad.
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).
Why didn't you put "lets get the engineers ideas meeting before the yearly plan ships" as the meeting topic in the invite then? Otherwise you're expecting a whole load of people to turn up for a meeting with no idea what it's for.
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.
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.
> 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'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.
Not OP but yes and those meeting notes are turned into tasks with callbacks to the meeting they came from. Yet we still get the “where do these priorities come from” questions.
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
> 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.
Feature development is rarely so cut and dry that you can hand a developer a task and let them run with it.
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.
> 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.
Seems like when you say "engineers", you mean "people with my exact personality"
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.
A lot of mine at the time were workshops. I find workshops work best when there is an agenda and small teams, then you present to the wider group when ideas are more developed. A lot of the time, when additional people attended they would be seeing too early of a concept or idea and too many people would debate little details. I believe the best productivity is in small teams.
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!
The reason people don't read email is that companies have poisoned their communication channels. If an important email is right beside a practically junk message, it will be lost.
90% of the work emails I received were indistinguishable from spam. And they were sent by my employer.
“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.
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.
However, it's a lot more socially acceptable to say "I missed the email" than "I sat there for 30min while you were talking but didn't actually listen"...
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.
> With async text communication channels you'll post when an issue shows up.
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.
> With async text communication channels you'll post when an issue shows up
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 didn’t mention they’ll wait til the next daily update. They’ll wait until someone messages them on slack or pings them on jira/linear or the sprint planning
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)
Lol I've seen this happen, people feeling they're too important to attend meetings and then complaining when something happens in them.
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.
It's "the boy who called important meeting" - if the first 9 meetings in a series provided zero value, you shouldn't be surprised that someone refuses to attend #10.
It's not about being a prima Donna. It's about business value. Too many meetings over the years should either be better planned, not taken place at all or could have been an email/chat message.
Meetings with an agenda are generally better, but that doesn't mean meetings without one can't have any business value. If you skip it, you make sure you at least don't contribute to anything decided in it.
>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.
The amount of thought that can be put into writing as a function of total time thinking/communicating is probably nearly the same or less than talking. That is, if you spend a second figuring out what you're going to say, you can put more thought into your words.
> 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
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.
People attribute tone to text that the writer may not have intended. For example, someone might write something that is very brusque, but still meant it lightly, and people may interpret this as overly rude or aggressive - while had they spoken it, their tone would've conveyed their intent.
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.
Finally, the meetings that should have been emails are being turned into emails for the organizers of such meetings. The only meetings that will survive are those where genuine discussion is warranted. If it’s simply an “all hands” address to your reports, it can be transcribed, summarized, and read in a fraction of the time.
I recently became an active user of some AI note-taking tools, and I've noticed that they are really great. As long as I set up the account, they send a robot to the meeting and write down almost everything, especially when there are people from different backgrounds and ACCENTS! God, they saved my life a thousand times, I would say. And reading summaries or even transcripts are so much more efficient than attending the meeting in person.
Reminds me of the scene in Real Genius.. where more and more students were leaving tape recorders on their desks to record a lecture and then eventually their professor left one playing a recorded lecture to a room full of tape recorders.
> [EU regulations] gives people a degree of control over their personal data, including the right to ask for it to be deleted.
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!
I disagree. The common sense position is by default we're not recording each other. We shouldn't have to start every discussion with a disclaimer when most people aren't recording each other most of the time. Taking some notes in a meeting is fine and very different from transcribing it in totality using a tool that has high accuracy.
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.
These comments are creating exactly the feeling that troubled me about in-person engineering meetings and I still can't quite express it. It's like we all know we don't want to discuss this topic and can't help but do so. I get the same feeling whenever I see a bot introduce itself and then someone immediately replies "read stop". It's pretty close to a mixture of regret and disappointment.
I'm going to buck the trend I see in this thread and say that the AI notetaker we've used has been helpful. After the meeting it sends a list of action items and meeting highlights that links to the timestamp in the meeting where we were talking about it in case we need to refer back. I've found it nice to have.
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.
I'd prefer to reduce meetings as much as the next guy but when I am in one, I take notes. Detailed notes. It helps make sense of what's being said and gives me a deeper understanding. I park the notes when done and can refresh my memory if I need a follow up.
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.
These apps are cancer. Otter.ai for example, by default, will scrape the call's contacts, and email every single one, saying they can access the notes if they sign-up. A 300 person meeting, their spam bot sends out 300 emails. Totally captive audience, and the person who installed the notetaker is often none the wiser that it happened.
Even if just one person installs it, it resets the iteration and can begin again.
My take on this... a small meeting among close people can have big payoffs. Much of the payoff is fast transfer due to total communication (body language, casual, back and forth) and then that loses it's power as the meeting gets less intimate. The unexpected face to face conversations and the overall environment are what makes in-office work well. Big meetings lose much of that power. Zoom meetings lose much more of that power. AI note taking sessions... might as well not even bother. Just send docs that of course nobody will read. This is just cargo-culting.
Each time I'm in a meeting with an AI note taker I am very tempted to prank the AI / person sending the AI. Maybe I should create a AI meeting mayhem bot that plays out some ridiculous scenario for the note taking AI to transcribe.
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 was thinking of using AI generated voice to play out some dialog, but adversarial audio could also be interesting - ie some in-audible sound for humans but that gets transcribed by the AI note taker
So our company has reasonably liberal usage of Zoom's AI Assistant. To provide summaries etc. How good the summaries are is a matter of debate..... Sometimes they are fairly good, often they get small details wrong/confused. Overall I view them as a "this will remind us of high level conversation points if needed".
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.
In my opinion, sending an AI note taker to a meeting basically means that for the attendee, a recap email written by the meeting organizer would be enough - except that in my experience at least, most meeting organizers aren't writing these.
Best would be the meeting organizers to leverage their AI attendee to write a draft meeting recap and sending it out after review.
Alternatively it means the person will get 6 months down the line before they realise they missed something important. It's not easy for an attendee to accurately assess the expected value of a meeting beforehand in most cases.
One case would be a topic which is only mildly relevant to you.
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.
I block AI note takers from my meetings. Show up or read the notes taken afterwards (by a human, me). I’m not going to waste my time explaining the mistake your AI note taker made (misheard or misunderstood). I’m not going to deal with a “Why are we doing X when we previously said Y” which could either be the AI misunderstanding or a legit change of decision we made in the meeting (which you would know and would have been able to weigh in on if you had attended).
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.
We have multiple people across our projects using these and they all fucking suck. They mix things up all the time. Wrong todos, wrong people assigned to todos.
At my last company my manager never knew how to end a meeting. After we finished the topic of discussion he would start to ramble and ask people about their day, tell bad jokes, it was horrible. You could tell the guy was just desperate for social interaction and his subordinates were the only social interaction he had.
Wow looks like I'm only one who is happy not talking to bots at my job. I go to meetings to ask questions (maybe answer too). I guarantee if I don't care about the topic I won't read your AI notes email even harder than I won't attend or listen in the meeting. But in case of the meeting you could tell I didn't!
I completely understand sending a note taker to a bloated meeting where no participation is really expected of you anyways, but the anecdotes about AIs being sent to small meetings (even a 2 person interview the reporter scheduled for this very article!) in your stead is crazy.
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 want to mildly off-topic point out that the article is arguing about the "loss of meaning" caused by automated note takers, only to be followed by an AI summary of the comments section.
I work at a large multinational bank. We have zoom, but we have permantly disabled the ability to record, transcribe, or use AI for any meeting. It's been like this since the beginning and there are no signs of changing. Sure, the writer of this article is going to experience AI in his bubble, but we aren't. Things get forgotten every 5 seconds around here. For some of us that's not changing. Although it is a little reassuring that I never have to worry about an AI agent joining one of my calls, lol.
Then they should host the meetings on irc! (not completely kidding.)
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!
On the other hand, I have great difficulty following who speaks what during an online meeting. I think that most people speech arent clearly transmitted, well as a justification looking the live caption, it also contains a lot of mistake
I use live captions for this a lot and find that it's pretty accurate. It's helpful if someone says something that I don't catch and I can just scroll up the captions to make sure I understand.
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?"
What counts as “attending” when AI is present?
If a bot represents you in silence, is that equivalent to skipping the meeting—or attending? This raises deeper questions about participation equity and presence.
How can anyone be sure this story is at all true? Is it taken from an anecdotal story told to a WaPo reporter by a large investor in AI seeking to hype up the ability of AI to take good notes in a meeting, to create a marketing buzz around AI and draw in more investors? The naive credence given to this story in the comment section is probably not justified.
I use AI to take meeting notes too, and it really makes things easier. I can focus more on listening. But sometimes it changes the vibe a bit, like we’re all just talking to a bunch of bots. Now I only use it when I’m leading the meeting, and I always ask if others are okay with it. The tool is helpful, but real human connection still matters.
It’s occurred to me that scrum masters are not long for this world at all. It would only take one engineer to suck up their entire organization’s meetings and then train an AI scrum master on them. Surprised we haven’t seen a Y-combinator company do it yet.
The worst is when someone uses these, blindly trusts the output, and then sends out an email after the meeting with a list of hallucinations that everyone supposedly "agreed to".
We have a lot of sensitive meetings these days, so we aren't recording them. We have had to put guard rails in place to keep people from sending their AI note-takers to the meetings because they don't listen to our CEO when he says not to do that. Few people in our org worry about the security implications of ingesting sensitive information with these tools.
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.
>> We have had to put guard rails in place to keep people from sending their AI note-takers to the meetings because they don't listen to our CEO when he says not to do that.
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?
What TF is "AI notetaker" you need to send in? All our Teams meetings get recorded and all invitees get the link to the recording and a short AI-generated summary.
A bit ironic that the flood of productivity, communication and project management tools in the past 2 decades were supposed to fix the “meeting problem”, and yet it won’t go away.
Considering that most meeting software have built-in call record and transcription features, it is less wasteful and less distracting to automatically send the artefacts to all participants.
Last year, after many years working remote, I joined a company with heavy in-office culture. I grumbled about all the commute, but now I am really really happy.
I haven't had an useful meeting in years. All the important collaboration and decision making has happened organically in text chat, which is great because it's all searchable and dated, and I do refer to that a lot. In fact they recently moved my main collaborator from another building into the next desk and we agreed to keep the work stuff in chat as much as possible so it isn't lost. So we chitchat about our kids but still type out our debate about the best version launch date.
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.
I hope this finally ends meetings. Pretty much nothing ever needs to be a meeting. Everything can be decided async. Extroverts are the only ones demanding a meeting to hear themselves talk. I have yet to experience a single compelling remote meeting.
> He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The 10 others attending were note-taking apps powered by artificial intelligence that had joined to record, transcribe and summarize the meeting.
I hate this. For lots of reasons but mainly privacy. If the call is being recorded that's visible for all to see. If some dick is recording my every word with AI I'll never know. It's going to stifle discussions, especially more informal small group ones, and eventually the only solution will be dragging everyone back to the office because clearly people can't be trusted.
The worst thing about those "note taker" bots on video and voice calls isn't when your employer uses one internally -- where there might be awareness and at least nominal consent -- but when you get ambushed by one, at the start of a call, outside that company-internal context.
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.
I think Zoom throws up a consent screen. Obviously if it's some 3rd party thing that joins the call as a recorder, you don't get that.
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.
Brutal truth: we invited AI into meetings for efficiency, and now we’re discovering just how much of us it captures. What hit me is how quickly “AI assistant” can become “silent witness.” If organizations don’t set clear guardrails, convenience turns into compliance liability. We need transparency protocols—who sees what, why, and when.
https://archive.ph/ejC53
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.
Homework before hand is an anti pattern IMO. It assumes people aren’t busy in the rest of their day and the meeting scheduler is inflating the toll of the meeting with a hidden prep tax. This is how people end up with 12 hour days.
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.
All bezos did was explicitly make the homework a required part of calling a meeting. Correctly putting the majority of the prep work on the person calling the meeting to begin with.
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.
I know a guy that can run those meetings.
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.
Doesn't that significantly increase the need for more meeting rooms?
I might disagree on this. For a meeting that covers any moderately complex situation to be productive, the attendees need to understand the context. That sounds like what Bezos was after. Doing “homework” beforehand ensures that people aren’t sitting idly while one person is reading the report for the first time or otherwise trying to bring themselves up to speed on the context everyone else already knows. I don’t think that’s the best use of everyone’s time, unless you expect meetings to be the primary objective of those attendees. It sounds to me that leadership should be delegating decisions to people who understand the context rather than spending time at every meeting going over background. Of course, that only works well in high-trust environments.
How do you ensure everyone does their homework? If they are busy, they won’t. If they’re managers they’re probably in back to back meetings all day. Do they prepare for every one of them? This implies they should be working 11 hours a day just to keep up with homework for their baseline meeting load? In my 35 years I’ve never seen a busy manager or even IC show up having read the material ahead of time. Especially a very senior person who gets scheduled in 16 x 30 minute sessions in a day. It’s impractical and they’ll just show up and tell the junior people to explain the material and do a presentation while they ask questions. Pointing out the inefficiency for everyone else who prepared is a nonstarter as they’re busy and more senior.
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.
In my experience the biggest issue with homework beforehand is that a substantial portion of the attendees won't do the homework. Frequently it's the people who you most needed to have done the homework. Now you need to rehash it for them anyways and everyone who did the homework has their time wasted. That's one area where the Amazon Silent Read shines. The other way I found it very useful is that people leave comments on the areas that need discussion and now you can spend the rest of the meeting just on those points. Would be great to have left the notes before the meeting but that's where reality sabotages things.
I’ve admired meeting stewards who will adjourn the meeting if people aren’t prepared and reconvene it later. If that person has authority and is well respected, it only has to happen once or twice, but obviously it can’t be applied everywhere.
Often, the purpose of the meeting is to get a busy VP to listen to some proposal and then say “yes.” That VP was booked solid for three weeks, and is booked solid for the next three weeks. This is his only 15 minute free time slot.
Aint no way anyone’s going to adjourn this meeting just because someone isn’t prepared.
It's nice when that works and sets a good cultural signal. Unfortunately, the more important the meeting the harder this is.
>> 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.
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.
Man people who talk like you must work in absolutely miserable companies.
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.
The truth is that people who talk like that aren’t management material.
“I noped out of the management track” = “nobody was considering me for the management track”
'Tech lead' in a lot of companies is a hybrid track that gets funneled into a 'director' level roles, which is almost fully management. Just like scientists evolve into PIs, which also entails mostly management.
IMO management positions are mostly lobbied for/created by try-hard social climbers, at least initially. "We're taking a lot of X work, maybe I should lead a team to deal with that?" "Y has so many reports, maybe I can form a subgroup to help with that?" Creating new positions for people who want to be more important than they are right now is the main mechanism by which private orgs expand.
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.
I have a suspicion managers will become redundant sooner than tech workers, although certain big CEOs love to try to say otherwise... (wonder why...).
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...
I have the same suspicion that ultimately we will be working for the machines (which are owned by investors) rather than the other way around.
>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.
Which just feels like efficiency if you're the owner: less people reaching out to you with problems!
Exactly, the dysfunction comes from the top: the unelected investor class.
>“nobody was considering me for the management track”
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).
My point is that the comment’s author clearly doesn’t have the right attitude/skillset to succeed in management.
It would be like me saying I noped out of the starting lineup of the LA Lakers to with on the custodial staff.
I pray for souls who are considered to be management material.
Promoted to their incompetence. The Peter Principle or as I prefer: "growth mindset meets reality"
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.
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.
Excellent list! I want to add a point about keeping people aligned. One thing that becomes very apparent when you lead a group of more than one small team is how you need to communicate everything multiple times, phrase it in multiple ways and blast it through multiple channels. As a former boss of mine once said "if nobody is rolling their eyes you need to say it more often". Even though I intellectually know this I've still had cases that blew my mind where is repeat something I've been saying for weeks and one person is genuinely surprised and calls out how helpful it was to hear this (one might think this was a prank but the person was definitely the opposite personality type for that and sometimes struggled a little with English). This makes that portion of the meeting or email boring and a waste of time for many attendees but there is no getting past it.
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.
Yeah I hate those team calls too though. I don't give a shit what others in the team are doing. I'm not a team player at all. As such I always manoeuver myself into owning a particular topic which works well because I'm not slowed down by others. But these calls are something I just tune out on. I wouldn't even read the summary because I just don't care.
You’re going to be missing out on some really interesting problems, because the interesting ones are frequently cross-disciplinary, in my experience.
Still if you want to stick to what you know, that’s fine too.
Well I'm on a team now managing a cloud SaaS package. Meaning most problems just involve finding workarounds for their incompetence.
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.
you hating your job puts all of this in context.
- 1 . Use jira or any other porject managment tools instead.
- 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.
I stick to IC roles but personally I prefer meetings over your alternatives.
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.
A bad culture can emerge with tooling first or meeting first cultures.
Almost all of this can be accomplished without meetings
This could be an email/slack chain
Yeah, it could be. But why would I want 5+ small 5 minute interruptions when I could have a single 20 minute interruption? Assuming all interruptions have a minimum of a 5+ minute context-switching time, the 20 minute meeting is 25 minutes whereas the 55 ends up being 510=50 minutes.
Spoken like a true project manager that every engineer hates.
Spoken like the stereotypical antisocial engineer that always thinks they've got all the answers, no matter the question.
Reductionism is easy, and cheap.
Are you an actual engineer with a degree and subsequent accreditation through a professional body? or an "engineer" by role? Those mean very different things depending on country, quality of education and skills or...how many Microsoft Points you have.
So many people calling themselves “engineers” these days don’t even know the first thing about siege warfare.
This drives me up the wall so much. I had a boss that used to introduce me to customers as an engineer, and I'd correct him on the spot. And now that I'm looking for another job (not because I pissed off the boss), I keep having to search through "engineer" roles because people can't get their terms right.
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.
Weird hill to die on
>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.
".... the job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions."
https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926
> 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.
For me, they are the corporate parasite people.
They add no value, except for themselves.
They are in 95% of situations. Most managers and product people are just insecure about the fact that they know next to nothing technically about the products they manage, and instead of getting out of the way of the people who do, they feel the need to constantly insert themselves in the process, directly lowering project efficiency, to justify their roles existing at all. “Managing (internal) relationships” provides no value to the company’s clients whatsoever, it only exists to reinforce a company’s culture or prop up someone whose job is probably not that important in the grand scheme of things.
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.
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.
https://www.dailybot.com/ I think we're re-inventing early 2010s development trends with extra steps.
this is literally something my team already does —- you don’t need AI but this does fit with my running theory that AI makes it easier for people to see stupid processes they should change
The AI is watching your screen and check-ins, it doesn't need to ask you, it knows what you are working on.
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.
By that point one would be wise to find another job, because an IT gig wont be any different than a glorified McJob (if it's not eliminated entirely)
> By that point one would be wise to find another job
Much easier said then done. Especially if this really goes towards technological unemployment.
That's been around a while in various forms. It's still no replacement for synchronously asking follow up questions and being available for decision making.
But that's what a modern AI agent can do, which previous ones couldn't. If a company gives it full access to the project management system, your previous conversations with it, and its prior conversations with the other team members, I believe it can be quite good at follow up and recommendations. I do absolutely see managers giving it some limited decision making (e.g. "Yes, we should split this subtask off into next sprint") very soon.
Yea but that's not quite the same social pressure and implication of urgency; people are more motivated if they know they're talking to a human. That's my impulsive guess, anyway.
Is that not already reflected in the ticket status?
Not if there's a ticket you're sort of but not quite stuck on, and feel uncomfortable updating the ticket status, as it could then prompt your lead to say "well, have you tried X already?" and feel clever about their contribution, while the reality is more complex and then you have to get into an awkward chat with them about why X is a poor idea in this case.
My employer literally moved to this this week.
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.
As you said, async doesn’t go well with scale, and async comms is OK if statuses are all you’re gonna write there. But in meetings you get to have back-and-forth, and while you can also have that in async, you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. Which they might not do altogether.
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.
>async doesn’t go well with scale,
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.
The problem with all processes is that people aren’t interested in sticking with them.
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.
Now you need three managers. The reason for the 20 person standup is to save money and give lip service to the standup trend.
Same manager with right-sized stand-ups wouldn't cost anymore money, unless that manager is making many multiples over what any of their team makes. It seems more like a kneejerk reaction to not "waste" the manager's time at the expense of the actually-more-important-but-hierarchically-less-important employees.
Easy. Have another team member run the stand up.
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.
Essentially the old "This meeting could be an email. Yeah, but would you actually read the damn email?" thing.
>But in meetings you get to have back-and-forth, and while you can also have that in async, you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. Which they might not do altogether
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.
> you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read.
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
When you get to that point, those two people should take the discussion outside of the sync call. The purpose of a sync is to figure out whether your current work is on track and, if not, who and what is needed to fix that.
Over the years I've moved away from thinking of the daily standup as being a way to update everyone on what we're doing. The value in it is having a daily time when everyone on the team sees each other's faces and has a brief conversation. Sometimes it'll be a quick hello, other times we'll talk for half an hour about nothing in particular, but that's valuable on a remote team where it's all to easy to forget that everyone else is a real person.
That's what happy hours and optional team activities are for. After hours gaming groups, book clubs, hobby groups, etc do this much better.
That seems socially punishing for people with other obligations (parents) and anyone who’s just not interested in the activities.
No thanks, I have my own hobbies and friends. Activities that primarily benefit work, including team building exercises, should be during paid company time.
You don't have those things when working remotely. You need to foster social relations at work too; after-work socializing is not a substitute for a collaborative work atmosphere.
You don’t “need” to foster social relations at work. They will naturally arise as people work together. This idea that we need to turn the workplace into a big “family” is nonsensical corporate propaganda pushed by HR departments primarily staffed by women. I promise, most men don’t give a single fuck about “fostering social relationships” at work. The guys I have respected and became the most friendly with at work have been the ones I’m in the trenches with, designing, building, etc. I don’t need to know what Susan in HR’s kid did over the weekend, it’s legitimately useless information to my entire life.
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.
Why would they want to be in trenches with you, collaborate on a project, start a company, or otherwise stick their neck out for you, if they don't know you? They'll pick someone they enjoy rapport with.
People are real whether or not you see their faces or chat daily. Framing daily standups as "humanising" can end up dehumanising those who find enforced face time and small talk uncomfortable or exhausting - especially neurodivergent team members. Inclusivity means recognising that not everyone bonds the same way.
Surprised by the downvotes, honestly. Inclusivity isn't about asking everyone to conform to neurotypical norms - it's about creating space for different ways of working and communicating. If even mentioning that feels unwelcome, that says something worth reflecting on.
I think the issue it that you're speaking to an ideal that doesn't tend to stand up in reality. The reality is if people stop seeing your face in meetings people are less likely to think about you. This may feel good to the stereotypical introvert who just wants to get things done and be left alone. But it can be a career killer. This is very apparent in hybrid companies where folks in the office with incidental face time have an easier time advancing than remote employees regardless of value added. We can state that it's not fair and things should be different and more inclusive but that doesn't do anything to actually make environments more inclusive.
Calling it a "career killer" to avoid constant face time ignores the reality that many people are masking disabilities just to survive daily interactions. Burnout from that kind of masking _is_ a career killer - just a quieter, slower one. We wouldn't tell someone in a wheelchair to "get more visible by taking the stairs." Yet we build ramps, pat ourselves on the back, and ignore invisible disabilities entirely. The fact that this kind of exclusion is still seen as normal - even strategic - should be a source of shame, not resignation.
In my company the career killer is being an immigrant lately.
Imagine working in a team where you have never seen the face of your coworkers...
Don't even be sure they're real; there are increasingly people who outsource their work to bots these days.
You're looking at this through a neurotypical lens. I've worked in teams where I never saw most people’s faces, and yet we had genuine camaraderie and trust -built through shared work, not video feeds. For many neurodivergent people, faces and expressions aren't sources of connection - they're noise. Video calls can turn into a performance: "Does my face match what I'm saying?" "Did I laugh at the wrong moment?" "Is it my turn to speak yet?" That constant second-guessing burns cognitive energy that could go into actual contribution.
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.
async scales better than sync in this context as on larger teams you might need a queue.
> But you can share your daily status asynchronously as well.
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.
>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
So add yet more process and bureaucracy instead of following tried and true management techniques of having a synchronous meeting lasting 15 minutes every morning?
This whole thread is about how standups are not “tried and true”.
Ignoring the basics of a simple process doesn’t make the process “bad.”
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.
> It's usually possible for the person running a small project to ask everyone for status
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?
Are you intentionally describing having a Slack chat for a project and asking for status updates there?
You still don't need a meeting for that if everyone actually does it.
Why do you think a larger meeting is a remedy for this? Quite the opposite, if you can't get a personal status from a large group, doing the meeting is completely pointless because it demonstrate lack of preparation.
It's not. That's not what I meant or said. I said not all projects allow for getting status ahead of time.
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.
>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.
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.
Seriously. This sounds like, "I can't manage my direct report, so I need to waste the time of everybody else on the team just so the little punk realizes he can't hide forever."
A team meeting should not be the go-to solution for "Bob is bad at communicating"!
It appears you didn't read my comment, here's the relevant part:
> But some people just don't do that, especially people from other teams
Hope this helps.
Oh I read it.
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 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.
Nothing made me appreciate the information-density of engineering meetings like attending parent/teacher or sports club committee meetings.
It's like... people, is your time not worth more than this thirty minute bun-fight over summer clubs?
Still hate meetings though.
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.
Ye there are multiple such fallacies. E.g. making brittle systems and later save the day makes you seem competent and important.
Also the opposite effect, where the most productive and important engineers seem to cause most problems and seem incompetent.
As parent already hinted at, writing down stuff makes you vulnerable to criticism. Just stay vague, and you have a lot of wiggle room left...
An exec writing down minutes can also come back to bite them in the ass if there's a lawsuit or criminal investigation. Email can have retention policies. That's harder to enforce with paper, especially when it's someone's personal notes.
Ya, it quite simply boils down to Plausible deniability.
Totally agree with this. Took me a while to realise my manager who never writes anything down was doing it on purpose.
This is it.
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.
> 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.
It reminds me of the recurring scene in Real Genius with the lectures and the tape recorders.
> because that authority is harder to question
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.
> 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.
Fair point in your case, but my experience across companies and industries is that people just don't read. It's true in any customer facing experience where tutorials etc are routinely unread and ignored, it's true for execs who are always short on time and want the exec summary in order no to read a whole memo (however misguided this may be in certain instances), it's true for seasoned professionals who prioritize and decide to ignore certain requests until they are clear enough / repeated enough, the list goes on.
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.
> people just don't read
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?
Accountable for what? "They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work"?
This matches my experience, with email in particular every organisation I've worked for it's been normalised that it's OK to not read every email, particularly if it's long or detailed. Clearly if the CEO emails you alone about something important that doesn't hold but for the vast majority of emails it was seen as acceptable to not read them and to even openly admit that. I remember being phoned by a department head once asking what an email was about - they weren't going to read it until I explained why they should.
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.
> 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 ...
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.
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.
> I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills
I'd say poor reading skills are even more of a problem
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.
In meetings I attend in my line of work, more often than not it's about something AI wouldn't be able to summarize anyway.
"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’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills.
I thought most meetings take place because people are to report how many meetings they organized/attended as this is considered a productivity metric.
> I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills.
That’s funny, because I actually prefer writing to make up for my poor meeting skills.
sigh You have engineers that read memos? Must be nice.
That's on them, though.
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.
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!
Don't forget the number of people who think they write well but don't. These type of people tend to litter their communications with ghastly MBA-speak, passive voice and super-tired business cliches instead of just writing in plain language.
Which is frankly appalling in this day and age. We write all the time, sure, the vast majority of it aren't essays or any kind of dense text, but expressing ideas in writing is something we do constantly.
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.
I wish I had that privilege. I've had a manager make a paragraph-long question about if I had any training courses that I'd want to take, and when I answered with a "No", I got chewed out for not being communicative or something.
> I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills
by people with low verbal IQ
"These meetings?" Which ones, exactly?
"The meeting is the message"
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Personally I don't mind spending several hours solving a problem over "async communication" if that means I'm free to work on other stuff while the other party is formulating a response. Then I also get the benefit of having something in their writing to refer back to.
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).
Taking time to develop cogent responses is the opposite of poor communication skills
I'm of the opinion that those who want "it" now are short-sighted and impulsive.
I'm inclined to believe you're closer to management than actual execution: when you say "resolved" I hear "owned".
Nobody is complaining about 3 minute meetings... Try 30+
> Issues that can be resolved in a three minute meeting
Why is every meeting 1h+ then?
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This risks breaking the guidelines about being snarky, being curmudgeonly, fulminating, sneering and generic tangents.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Trust me, the 80% meeting workday became prevalent loooooong before the 2020s.
Can double confirm.
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.
Isn't this just called "being a Product Owner"? I've never seen those people do anything but sit in meetings.
I don't know about anyone else, but contrary to my general disdain for meetings* I have found product owners/process managers to be useful in the regard of having one central person to funnel things through on a particular project. The bottleneck also creates a nice buffer of accountability in both directions and they typically offer either new or refined SOPs after solving the same problems over and over again. Plus, they can sit in on the meeting while I go do something useful.
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
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I trust you thats the case for your environment. Where I work, useless meetings started to explode March 2020, and never went away.
Were you born in 1997? If so, it’s possible you just weren’t senior enough to see the 80% meeting workday prior to COVID.
There was a big step change in my experience, enabled by the adoption of Teams for remote work and the resulting ease of scheduling meetings. Previously meetings had always required the organiser to book a room.
Weird guess. No, you're off by 18 years. However, I am not working in a software shop.
> Weird guess.
The guess probably stems from the number in your user name: 97.
Ahh, right! That is actually a reference to Terminator... 29, August 1997...
Peak HN
This didn't start with COVID. Remember that scene in "Office Space" where the big boss had that banner up that said "Is this good for the company?" and everyone was nodding like they'd just been given the secret to life? Yeah, I've seen those kind of things in real life.
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.
Having had been on both sides of this coin, I agree a lot of managers mis-manage meetings.
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.
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.
This might not be quite what the previous poster meant, but in my experience it's often not that the developer missed a meeting and now doesn't know some critical piece of information. Rather, it's often that the developer has some knowledge about the code that changes how something should be implemented. Because they weren't at the meeting, nobody else knew about this, and it's only later, when the developer sits down to write the code, that everyone finds out.
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.)
The point in the parent comment still stands. There should be a paper trail so that the developer would have to confront the need to add such a detail. If the decision was made in the meeting alone, then it was lost in time as not all developers can be expected to be in every meeting.
How? Meeting notes can never contain all the detail of the meeting and, if they do, there would be so much content that you'd likely miss them when you read the documentation. That's to say nothing of the time investment of the person to catch up on every document produced.
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.
If decisions are being made about the code or implementation, then the person working on that code should be in that meeting, surely. Otherwise there's no point making that decision.
I realize introverts don't work that way, I know, I am one. But I've had some of the most brilliant ideas come through purely on a discussion nay sometimes an emotionally charged argument.
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 an introvert, too. I have no troubles participating in, or leading, or even fighting in group activities. Does it exhaust me? Yes, it does. I literally feel physical pain if I have to stay in company for more than maybe an hour. But value is created through interaction, not some process, paper stacks, or a lone wolf hiding in the closet, so I learned a long time ago how to communicate effectively, give and take feedback, organize tight meetings, and facilitate decision making.
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.
Most people in meetings don’t type very fast, and find it easier to talk than to write.
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.
In my org we have rotating minutes takers - it effectively takes them out of the meeting, but they do pipe up if an issue affects them directly. Of course people's meeting taking skills vary widely but I still find the human-made minutes far superior and accurate to whatever Copilot cooks up.
I wasn't so much saying that there should be plenty of documentation generated during a meeting as saying that there should be plenty of documentation prior to the meeting. That the meeting is based on.
I've also read a thing (dunno if it was opinion or fact) that posited that people's reading ability is directly correlated to a preference for video, I suspect it's the same with meetings. I read / write all day (including on here lmao), meetings are draining in comparison. But the people in those meetings don't read / write nearly as much as I do.
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.
I administer reading comprehension tests and typing speed tests to all candidates I consider hiring.
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.
Hi
> 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?
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.
>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.
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.
No matter how they're used, AI companies will create the artificial need for every company and essentially every worker to use these tools, even if they're not needed.
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.
Just tell ‘em that!
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…
Did they get to read the RFC before the meeting? If they had access but didn’t use it, then this is out of line. But if they only got the RFC during the meeting when they were asked to comment, then flipping out is overboard but the feeling is understandable.
Fair Q. It was a multi-week process where the doc was published/open for written comment and then we had a series of meetings for live discussion as well. The engineer in question just completely mis-read where we were in the process and thought this was being announced as a mandate in the one particular meeting.
Yes, this is pretty universal I think. Some people think software engineering in a team is writing code as much as possible, and doing anything else is bad.
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).
Why didn't you put "lets get the engineers ideas meeting before the yearly plan ships" as the meeting topic in the invite then? Otherwise you're expecting a whole load of people to turn up for a meeting with no idea what it's for.
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.
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.
> 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.
Then just implement it I guess
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"
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.
Not OP but yes and those meeting notes are turned into tasks with callbacks to the meeting they came from. Yet we still get the “where do these priorities come from” questions.
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
> 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.
but i didnt get invited to the meeting in the first place! and i dont think my management chain was either!
Looks like your team isn't communicating the goals of your meetings well.
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.
Feature development is rarely so cut and dry that you can hand a developer a task and let them run with it.
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.
Excellent, this all can be written, thought over and discussed in written form. I do not see how this all requires a meeting.
> 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.
Seems like when you say "engineers", you mean "people with my exact personality"
You might be right.
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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.
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> 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.
> I suppose they were simply working on their assigned tasks, listening to others in the background. How effective is that - I don't know.
If I’m doing that, I’m taking notes on the meeting. As long as the agenda items are at all relevant.
These are the same executives/managers who lost their minds at the idea of butts not being in the physical seats at the office, so yeah.
> 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.
You did not use the right amount of flair?!
That reminds me of when I worked at Kroger.
That’s next level.
I would be updating my resume and talking to old colleagues. What a load of BS you have to deal with, man.
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.
A lot of mine at the time were workshops. I find workshops work best when there is an agenda and small teams, then you present to the wider group when ideas are more developed. A lot of the time, when additional people attended they would be seeing too early of a concept or idea and too many people would debate little details. I believe the best productivity is in small teams.
It's not just historical precedent, it's about creating common knowledge that everybody has received the relevant information
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!
The reason people don't read email is that companies have poisoned their communication channels. If an important email is right beside a practically junk message, it will be lost.
90% of the work emails I received were indistinguishable from spam. And they were sent by my employer.
“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.
An interesting aspect of this: Where I work, an email subject line including "important" or "urgent" is a 99% indication for junk...
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.
So an email? You could not read the email, but I can just as easily not pay attention.
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.
However, it's a lot more socially acceptable to say "I missed the email" than "I sat there for 30min while you were talking but didn't actually listen"...
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.
> With async text communication channels you'll post when an issue shows up.
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.
> With async text communication channels you'll post when an issue shows up
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.
That's caused by daily meetings, not a reason to have them.
I didn’t mention they’ll wait til the next daily update. They’ll wait until someone messages them on slack or pings them on jira/linear or the sprint planning
I might be lucky. Or I might be avoiding large organizations on purpose. Most of the time at least.
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.
> no agenda, no attenda
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)
I like my meeting where we don’t have a fixed agenda but anyone can bring something up. If there’s nothing, we just end the meeting.
How do you prevent meetings from meandering and going over time? How do you ensure the correct people are in the meeting when there's no agenda?
What do you do if you skip such a meeting and a decision you don't like but that you can't weigh in on anymore is taken there?
If it's essential that I attend for such a meeting, the organizer usually reach out.
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).
Maybe “make a decision about X” should be on the agenda? I bet he’d show up in that case, if he cared about X.
In this context, I don't see an incentive for meeting organizer to create an agenda. They don't care at all about op's opinion about X.
Yes, but that's too late now. If everybody else did show up and discussed X, it's only going to look bad for you.
That’s where you have stakeholders within a company and you require sign-off for decisions that affect them.
Lol I've seen this happen, people feeling they're too important to attend meetings and then complaining when something happens in them.
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.
It's "the boy who called important meeting" - if the first 9 meetings in a series provided zero value, you shouldn't be surprised that someone refuses to attend #10.
It's not about being a prima Donna. It's about business value. Too many meetings over the years should either be better planned, not taken place at all or could have been an email/chat message.
Business value first
You’re both in agreement that most meetings are unnecessary and that it would be better if meetings had a set agenda.
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.
Meetings with an agenda are generally better, but that doesn't mean meetings without one can't have any business value. If you skip it, you make sure you at least don't contribute to anything decided in it.
How do you deal with daily standups? or 3x a week standups?
>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.
> "no agenda, no attenda"
I love this phrasing of the principle.
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.
Actually we didn’t know how good we had it.
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.
> opportunity to pee
Social pressure is still a thing for some unfortunately. Or maybe memories from school creep in. Just go for a pee.
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.
“Time for a bio break.” I’ve heard that often.
Sometimes, when I need to pee, I say "I need to pee". I find this complex, advanced strategy works pretty well.
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.
What a boringly cynical take, too!
>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.
The amount of thought that can be put into writing as a function of total time thinking/communicating is probably nearly the same or less than talking. That is, if you spend a second figuring out what you're going to say, you can put more thought into your words.
> 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
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.
People attribute tone to text that the writer may not have intended. For example, someone might write something that is very brusque, but still meant it lightly, and people may interpret this as overly rude or aggressive - while had they spoken it, their tone would've conveyed their intent.
You're making assumptions.
This whole thread is full of assumptions.
OK, as long as you know you're just making stuff up, that's fine with me.
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.
Finally, the meetings that should have been emails are being turned into emails for the organizers of such meetings. The only meetings that will survive are those where genuine discussion is warranted. If it’s simply an “all hands” address to your reports, it can be transcribed, summarized, and read in a fraction of the time.
I recently became an active user of some AI note-taking tools, and I've noticed that they are really great. As long as I set up the account, they send a robot to the meeting and write down almost everything, especially when there are people from different backgrounds and ACCENTS! God, they saved my life a thousand times, I would say. And reading summaries or even transcripts are so much more efficient than attending the meeting in person.
Reminds me of this scene from Real Genius: https://youtu.be/wB1X4o-MV6o
I didn't read the article, but when I read the headline, I immediately thought of that scene with all of the recorders!
Yeah I thought of that scene too. But for some reason I thought it was from "Back to School"
Same, we're so close to the meeting organizer to be AI slop next.
Reminds me of the scene in Real Genius.. where more and more students were leaving tape recorders on their desks to record a lecture and then eventually their professor left one playing a recorded lecture to a room full of tape recorders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EueMqc8i4GI
> [EU regulations] gives people a degree of control over their personal data, including the right to ask for it to be deleted.
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!
I disagree. The common sense position is by default we're not recording each other. We shouldn't have to start every discussion with a disclaimer when most people aren't recording each other most of the time. Taking some notes in a meeting is fine and very different from transcribing it in totality using a tool that has high accuracy.
This is some very black-and-white thinking.
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.
You don't even need AI. Just a bot that waits until the end of the meeting and then says, "Nothing from me. Thanks everyone."
Why wait until the end? Jus have it wait for the first three second lull after everyone joins.
These comments are creating exactly the feeling that troubled me about in-person engineering meetings and I still can't quite express it. It's like we all know we don't want to discuss this topic and can't help but do so. I get the same feeling whenever I see a bot introduce itself and then someone immediately replies "read stop". It's pretty close to a mixture of regret and disappointment.
I'm going to buck the trend I see in this thread and say that the AI notetaker we've used has been helpful. After the meeting it sends a list of action items and meeting highlights that links to the timestamp in the meeting where we were talking about it in case we need to refer back. I've found it nice to have.
Would you mind sharing what AI note taking app do you use?
Fathom if I recall correctly.
How long before the AIs are leasing the meetings?
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.
I'd prefer to reduce meetings as much as the next guy but when I am in one, I take notes. Detailed notes. It helps make sense of what's being said and gives me a deeper understanding. I park the notes when done and can refresh my memory if I need a follow up.
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.
This is a complete non-issue if you use meetings to make gather feedback and make decisions. Send notes on the decision in an email after the meeting.
If you use meetings for something useful, then AI notes won’t be of any value anyway.
These apps are cancer. Otter.ai for example, by default, will scrape the call's contacts, and email every single one, saying they can access the notes if they sign-up. A 300 person meeting, their spam bot sends out 300 emails. Totally captive audience, and the person who installed the notetaker is often none the wiser that it happened.
Even if just one person installs it, it resets the iteration and can begin again.
Just like malware.
I mean.. it's literally sending an audio stream of the meeting and it's contents to an external server? It's not even malware. This is a virus.
When the Zoom CEO gave that outlandish interview to TheVerge about the future of Zoom being agents attending meetings for you…
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.
My take on this... a small meeting among close people can have big payoffs. Much of the payoff is fast transfer due to total communication (body language, casual, back and forth) and then that loses it's power as the meeting gets less intimate. The unexpected face to face conversations and the overall environment are what makes in-office work well. Big meetings lose much of that power. Zoom meetings lose much more of that power. AI note taking sessions... might as well not even bother. Just send docs that of course nobody will read. This is just cargo-culting.
There should be a common text system to send messages to your coworkers. It would be great if it worked universally across the Internet.
Someone needs to invent some form of electronic mail.
Nothing says "this meeting should have been an email" like programmatically reducing it to plain text.
Each time I'm in a meeting with an AI note taker I am very tempted to prank the AI / person sending the AI. Maybe I should create a AI meeting mayhem bot that plays out some ridiculous scenario for the note taking AI to transcribe.
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
Like with Image AI and noise images that can be engineered to be recognized as an actual object.
I'm interested if there is also audio that is noisy/ not really noticable humans that will disrupt the AI.
I was thinking of using AI generated voice to play out some dialog, but adversarial audio could also be interesting - ie some in-audible sound for humans but that gets transcribed by the AI note taker
So our company has reasonably liberal usage of Zoom's AI Assistant. To provide summaries etc. How good the summaries are is a matter of debate..... Sometimes they are fairly good, often they get small details wrong/confused. Overall I view them as a "this will remind us of high level conversation points if needed".
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.
In my opinion, sending an AI note taker to a meeting basically means that for the attendee, a recap email written by the meeting organizer would be enough - except that in my experience at least, most meeting organizers aren't writing these.
Best would be the meeting organizers to leverage their AI attendee to write a draft meeting recap and sending it out after review.
Alternatively it means the person will get 6 months down the line before they realise they missed something important. It's not easy for an attendee to accurately assess the expected value of a meeting beforehand in most cases.
Why have a meeting then in the first place and not write an email?
One case would be a topic which is only mildly relevant to you.
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.
I block AI note takers from my meetings. Show up or read the notes taken afterwards (by a human, me). I’m not going to waste my time explaining the mistake your AI note taker made (misheard or misunderstood). I’m not going to deal with a “Why are we doing X when we previously said Y” which could either be the AI misunderstanding or a legit change of decision we made in the meeting (which you would know and would have been able to weigh in on if you had attended).
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.
We have multiple people across our projects using these and they all fucking suck. They mix things up all the time. Wrong todos, wrong people assigned to todos.
At my last company my manager never knew how to end a meeting. After we finished the topic of discussion he would start to ramble and ask people about their day, tell bad jokes, it was horrible. You could tell the guy was just desperate for social interaction and his subordinates were the only social interaction he had.
Wow looks like I'm only one who is happy not talking to bots at my job. I go to meetings to ask questions (maybe answer too). I guarantee if I don't care about the topic I won't read your AI notes email even harder than I won't attend or listen in the meeting. But in case of the meeting you could tell I didn't!
I completely understand sending a note taker to a bloated meeting where no participation is really expected of you anyways, but the anecdotes about AIs being sent to small meetings (even a 2 person interview the reporter scheduled for this very article!) in your stead is crazy.
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.
If anyone is interested in running their own meeting bot (doubtful aha), check out our open source repositories: https://github.com/Meeting-Baas
Also we provide on-prem installation so meeting data doesn't leave your company :))
I was recently in a 1:1 meeting where the person I met with had 3 separate AI note takers join. What in tarnation?!?
which one gave the best results? can you share?
Not sure, they used them and I didn’t ask for any. I still take my notes manually.
Newbies! I don't even bother with note-taking. If something important was said during the meeting, someone will let me know.
(Only for meetings I'm not an active participant, of course. Filler meetings... which is most of them).
I want to mildly off-topic point out that the article is arguing about the "loss of meaning" caused by automated note takers, only to be followed by an AI summary of the comments section.
Do as I say, not as I do.
So how long until the first meeting were all the attendees are AI and the presenter is also AI?
This will probably become commonplace for routine interactions between corporations that don’t involve sales.
I work at a large multinational bank. We have zoom, but we have permantly disabled the ability to record, transcribe, or use AI for any meeting. It's been like this since the beginning and there are no signs of changing. Sure, the writer of this article is going to experience AI in his bubble, but we aren't. Things get forgotten every 5 seconds around here. For some of us that's not changing. Although it is a little reassuring that I never have to worry about an AI agent joining one of my calls, lol.
Then they should host the meetings on irc! (not completely kidding.)
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!
On the other hand, I have great difficulty following who speaks what during an online meeting. I think that most people speech arent clearly transmitted, well as a justification looking the live caption, it also contains a lot of mistake
I use live captions for this a lot and find that it's pretty accurate. It's helpful if someone says something that I don't catch and I can just scroll up the captions to make sure I understand.
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?"
More remote-work rage bait.
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.
> “We’re moving into a world where nothing will be forgotten,” Allie K. Miller
I am constantly amazed by allie K miller positioning herself as leader and visionary in every hot trend.
That statement is anything but visionary.
she is a CEO and Fortune 500 AI advisor! says her self-asserted promotional material
What counts as “attending” when AI is present? If a bot represents you in silence, is that equivalent to skipping the meeting—or attending? This raises deeper questions about participation equity and presence.
How can anyone be sure this story is at all true? Is it taken from an anecdotal story told to a WaPo reporter by a large investor in AI seeking to hype up the ability of AI to take good notes in a meeting, to create a marketing buzz around AI and draw in more investors? The naive credence given to this story in the comment section is probably not justified.
I use AI to take meeting notes too, and it really makes things easier. I can focus more on listening. But sometimes it changes the vibe a bit, like we’re all just talking to a bunch of bots. Now I only use it when I’m leading the meeting, and I always ask if others are okay with it. The tool is helpful, but real human connection still matters.
Arranging more meetings is not how you move a project forwards. This is a disease.
It’s occurred to me that scrum masters are not long for this world at all. It would only take one engineer to suck up their entire organization’s meetings and then train an AI scrum master on them. Surprised we haven’t seen a Y-combinator company do it yet.
That's just like asking to replace priests by AI...
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This is like the adversarial interoperability version of "this meeting could have been an email".
The worst is when someone uses these, blindly trusts the output, and then sends out an email after the meeting with a list of hallucinations that everyone supposedly "agreed to".
I've always struggled with note keeping while actively absorbing information. Unfortunately, it is either/or for my brain.
I think with new crop of tools the product of my dreams, a vision-audio notekeeping app, will be possible.
We have a lot of sensitive meetings these days, so we aren't recording them. We have had to put guard rails in place to keep people from sending their AI note-takers to the meetings because they don't listen to our CEO when he says not to do that. Few people in our org worry about the security implications of ingesting sensitive information with these tools.
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...
>> We have had to put guard rails in place to keep people from sending their AI note-takers to the meetings because they don't listen to our CEO when he says not to do that.
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?
What TF is "AI notetaker" you need to send in? All our Teams meetings get recorded and all invitees get the link to the recording and a short AI-generated summary.
A bit ironic that the flood of productivity, communication and project management tools in the past 2 decades were supposed to fix the “meeting problem”, and yet it won’t go away.
Considering that most meeting software have built-in call record and transcription features, it is less wasteful and less distracting to automatically send the artefacts to all participants.
Last year, after many years working remote, I joined a company with heavy in-office culture. I grumbled about all the commute, but now I am really really happy.
Given just how completely empty of real substance and importance 90% of 90% of all group meetings are, this is one use of AI I can fully applaud.
I haven't had an useful meeting in years. All the important collaboration and decision making has happened organically in text chat, which is great because it's all searchable and dated, and I do refer to that a lot. In fact they recently moved my main collaborator from another building into the next desk and we agreed to keep the work stuff in chat as much as possible so it isn't lost. So we chitchat about our kids but still type out our debate about the best version launch date.
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.
And since AI is now being used to subvert the power and control of management, it's going to be banned.
I am average joe. But maybe if we can teach only AI to take notes from defined person only? saves times right?
I never skip any meetings. Why should I miss a chance to twiddle my thumbs that I get paid for?
I get paid for results, with no allowance for my immediate manager's faults.
Similar like that saying with politics - if you don't proactively replace yourself with AI, then you will be replaced by AI.
I hope this finally ends meetings. Pretty much nothing ever needs to be a meeting. Everything can be decided async. Extroverts are the only ones demanding a meeting to hear themselves talk. I have yet to experience a single compelling remote meeting.
> He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The 10 others attending were note-taking apps powered by artificial intelligence that had joined to record, transcribe and summarize the meeting.
Why do you even have a call with 16 people in it?
The big question is why they need 10 apps to take notes of the same meeting? Wouldn't be better to have just one and send the summary at the end?
popular news reported in the US "Zoom Meeting Participants are Sending AI bots Instead"
compare and contrast the two headlines
Nothing from my end, thanks.
Some people have multiple ones.
I hate this. For lots of reasons but mainly privacy. If the call is being recorded that's visible for all to see. If some dick is recording my every word with AI I'll never know. It's going to stifle discussions, especially more informal small group ones, and eventually the only solution will be dragging everyone back to the office because clearly people can't be trusted.
The worst thing about those "note taker" bots on video and voice calls isn't when your employer uses one internally -- where there might be awareness and at least nominal consent -- but when you get ambushed by one, at the start of a call, outside that company-internal context.
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.
I think Zoom throws up a consent screen. Obviously if it's some 3rd party thing that joins the call as a recorder, you don't get that.
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.
Brutal truth: we invited AI into meetings for efficiency, and now we’re discovering just how much of us it captures. What hit me is how quickly “AI assistant” can become “silent witness.” If organizations don’t set clear guardrails, convenience turns into compliance liability. We need transparency protocols—who sees what, why, and when.
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