But we've worked together for several years, so he trusts my judgment.
Meeting culture is something that varies hugely between companies and industries and sectors. IMO that means that advice like this has limited utility unless you're aware of the differences. There are a few topics like this.
If the person you'd be telling it to is your boss, you probably don't have much sway to change the culture beyond regular feedback loops.
People in leadership usually get there because they value time and efficiency, and if you don't spin that as "your agenda is trash" but "I cannot contribute to this meeting and would like to pursue my other tasks", I doubt they will be mad at you.
It can also be worth it to bring this up with your team and establish a meeting culture, as suggested in TFA. That way, you can discuss this openly and everyone has a shared understanding of what is okay.
Equally if not way more often they are there, because they like to control things or organize things or like having power or see it as career setup. Or they like working with people.
Time and efficiency is not something you get on these positions.
Not 100%, but seems to work.
Or just counter-schedule a meeting in the same slot.
- "I have many meetings already and worry about not meeting deadline".
- "I do not have strong opinions either way, so am fine getting just outcome".
- "I do not have knowledge to be useful".
- "It seems like I wont be useful".
Basically, you can guess these from the topic alone. Most of the time, the response is something like "of course no problem" sometimes followed by short explanation why I was called in. Occasionally they say they indeed want me there.
I don't think this advice is generic - there can be different perspectives here.
In a managerial role in a large corpo, doing what could be crudely characterized as office politics, I often have this sort of FOMO - missing out on new initiatives, budgets and projects which would be good for the team; or being unable to prevent others dumping hot potatoes onto us; or just not knowing what is brewing behind the scenes within the company. To a degree, I have to do this so that the technical guys don't have to.
My job, really, is to be invited to as many meeting as I can. I can then ditch the ones I don't think would be useful. Of course, often I sit on meetings that are a complete waste of time - but that is an occupational risk. I don't find these frustrating - they allow me to relax a bit, do my email, learn more about people in the meeting, or just practice my note taking.
Money, exposure, promotion, money.
People who attend more meetings and do less work get higher pay rises and promoted faster. They are also far less likely to be included in rounds of layoffs given their importance to the organisation.
I’ve been lightly enforcing a rule of my own too: “no agenda, no attenda”
I think this makes sense in the abstract but not always in practice. I have been in many long back-and-forth Slack conversations explaining some piece of knowledge that would be better as a 20 minute meeting.
And so I think a better "mental model" of meetings might be functionally the same as human communication in general: for smaller and faster-acting groups, live communication (meetings) is often more efficient than writing. Especially when the team is small and needs to act quickly, because then the time cost of 5-20% of your manpower spending an hour to write out something that takes 10 minutes to explain via a video meeting walkthrough is not optimal.
But the more people your group has, the more you'll need to shift to a text-based communication method.
(This is also why I think remote work makes sense in many contexts, but does somewhat become less efficient in smaller, fast-moving companies. Unless you replace the in-person ad hoc meeting with a rapid on-demand meeting culture, you'll have some inefficiencies and move slower.)
I have seen some attempts to use AI transcription bots as an attempt to square the circle here and commit ephemeral meeting information into durable text information, and in general they aren't too bad actually.
I agree though, for a small team to build a shared understanding and move quickly, just having a chat together is definitely more efficient. I don't think the ideas lined out here apply to that organisation size, however.
like
* "incident-2025-07-28-CI-not-deploying-disk-full" * "feature-stripe-integration" * "exploration-datadog-or-sentry"
and channel comes and go and people are quite "agressive" about routing discussion to the right channel or converting 10+ message thread into dedicated channel.
No fluff, no descriptions other than simple labels, no ten paragraph intro blurb, no index, nothing that I would normally skip over when reading someone else's document.
I call these "cheat sheets" and send them out to colleagues on their first day on a project. I've heard feedback along the lines of "I got 10x more value from that one page than three weeks of 'handover' from other people."
If you must hand over key parts of your company's infrastructure to external companies, at least ensure you have control of your data if they go sideways. Don't put backups in someone else's hands.
Keep drives encrypted in a safe deposit box if you have to.
People simply don’t read emails, and ignore documents.
I don’t miss emails. Wiki devolves into a mess after a couple of years. Sharepoint has poor accessibility as there’s this constant churning between the app space and the web space.
I really think if you want to get people to take a document seriously you have to present it and walk people through it. If you get feedback and integrate it then it has collective ownership and it’s more interesting than a soliloquy.
But according to the popular glib, and I would say incorrect interpretation of agile principles, documentation is considered wasteful.
Some don’t listen, some won’t read. It’s not only a function of the specific person but also depends on the day who reads and who listens.
So, yeah, in theory, in an ideal world with perfect co-workers you wouldn’t need so many meetings.
In the real, messy world we live in, meetings are one tool to make sure important messages come across.
1. Context: Why are we here? What's the problem we're solving?
2. Actions: What decisions did we make? What are the next steps?
3. Follow-up: Who's doing what and by when?
Put this in a shared doc, a wiki, anywhere people can find it. If you can't see it, you can track it and you can't measure the outcome.
Just like developers measure the outcome of their planning and project meetings every sprint, managers and execs should do the same.
In theory, two things will happen once outcomes are tracked: Some managers will realise their meetings produce nothing useful, so they'll send fewer invites. And the company will shift focus from output to outcomes, which means fewer meetings and more real work getting done.
In practice, it depends on who you hire. People with less knowledge, experience, or agency tend to rely on meetings more than others.
Most standups are therefore tea parties. A previous boss of mine even used to bring biscuits, which was nice. It serves the role of reminding everyone that each other exists and are collaborating as a team, which occasionally needs reinforcement.
It's an RAF forums in-joke that being invited to a "meeting without biscuits" means you are going to be reprimanded.
Edit: good comment in this thread on the role of middle management meetings being intrinsically social/political: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44708660
I've said this before,
The "engineer's" pov on meetings is that they are an incredibly poor and overused instrument of getting things done and that it is beyond comprehension why "the company" continues to tolerate such expensive nonsense.
The manager's (current and aspiring) pov on meetings, especially physical presence meetings, is that they are the most effective way to reinforce the hierarchy/pecking order, sense allegiances and potential defectors, scout opportunities for ascension, or destabilize a rival in public.
You might call this 'cynical', but is it really when you lay out the facts?
As for the author's specific points:
Brainstorming in a meeting is by far the least effective way. It just comes down to the most brazen flaunting their unnuanced opinions in rapid fire while more considerate and intricate reasoning is speed ran and drowned out by loud advocacy.
"Group decisions", yes, to a point. Mostly needing 'formal' buy-in to CYA on a decision already made. "If you already knew this would be the (bad) outcome, why did you not speak up at the all hands meeting? Obviously you and everyone else supported this at the time".
"to expand and clarify knowledge": That is most often a lecture/presentation with Q&A attached, not a meeting
To fix that, the moderator needs to do what I would call "round-robin brainstorming". Each other participant has to have made exactly one point (in seating order or spontaneously) before the first one can make another one. Everyone has to weigh in, and at least for the first 2 or 3 rounds, the moderator needs to enforce this. Usually by then, everyone has warmed up to the idea that their ideas are not that stupid after all, and participation is more equalized.
Edit: about your other points: yes, I agree.
That's a signal for me. A signal, that the author of this shit of an article didn't bother reading his own article before publishing it.
This article brings nothing new useful to the table. That's a rehash of someone else's rehash of something they've read somewhere.
No response, resends email 2 or 3 times
Sends Invitation "Meeting to Agree whether X or Y."
XX replies to original email with an answer
Meeting is cancelled
Is there a minutes taking tool that does automatically list the attendants and their join/leave times, allow me to create items like TODO, DECISION, POLL, DISCUSS_MORE, GET_INFO, BLOCKER that will then be tabulated and cross-referenced automatically across more than one meeting? And added to the TODO-lists of participants referenced?
Preferrably somewhat independently of the conference tool in use, because that varies a lot around here.
Ours are pretty informal, we (unfortunately) use MS Teams which has an agenda & notes section; people are asked to fill in the agenda if they have any points (which is frustrating because getting there isn't easy or obvious), people can write down notes and action points during the meeting (it's a shared and collaborative effort).
You can assign tasks to people's todo lists though, but of course the problem is fragmentation; everyone has their own todo lists, there's Jira for work items, etc.
But you could be right, this might not be the unifying tool for everything but more like number 29 that has never replace the previous 28...
ragebol•4h ago