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.
I've routinely seen people attending a meeting from the office on Zoom camera, all gathered in a single big conference room, all looking and typing on their laptops for the entirety of the meeting, saying something maybe once or twice. I suppose they were simply working on their assigned tasks, listening to others in the background. How effective is that - I don't know.
These days I don't care. I'm 100% "at work" when I'm in the office, so whatever. I just pull up my phone and plan my next vacation trip or whatever. When I'm remotely I take my laptop to the kitchen and start preparing stuff for dinner. Life is too short for this mess.
If I’m doing that, I’m taking notes on the meeting. As long as the agenda items are at all relevant.
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.
We had an internal RFC comment/discussion meeting on a proposed engineering standard. In that exact meeting, a dev flipped out and expressed exasperation that they weren’t asked to comment on the proposal. In the exact meeting that was one in a series of opportunities to comment on the proposal…
If 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.
Seems direct and uncontroversial, and IMHO most people react well at this.
To get there, you need a confluence of context and expertise from several domains:
- what problem needs to be solved (user story)
- what options are available (interaction design, technical capabilities)
- what the cost of implementing each option is, and the opportunity cost of each level of implementation / each option (technical capability, resource management, sales, user research)
- managing group consensus on the path forward (communication to technical and non-technical audiences)
- break down of any large chunks of work into smaller tasks that can be done and planning the work to be done in series or parallel (resource management, technical capabilities)
Finally, after all of that, you have a task (or several) that can be handed off.
There's really no way to get here without at least some thought into the implementation details, as the business can't make the decision on which options without knowing rough timelines.
Seems like when you say "engineers", you mean "people with my exact personality"
If them missing some meetings means they're in the dark as to how those features were decided on then I can't see that as a defence of attending every meeting so much as a statement of BS meetings being so predominant in the company that all decisions are made through a BS process.
In this case, there's nothing to document from the meeting because the information wasn't shared in the first place. The information could only have been shared if the developer had been in the meeting.
(FWIW, I've rarely seen this from a developer not being in a meeting entirely, but I've seen it a few times where a developer has treated the meeting as a "read-only" event, i.e. expected that other people provide all the requirements and not used their own expertise or experience of the code to push back on decisions.)
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.
Important decisions are almost never 2+2=4, if they were, they wouldn't be important and yes you wouldn't need a meeting (like I admitted, there's definitely a lot of unimportant meetings).
But important decisions are almost always an exercise in coaxing, cajoling and persuasion, which is just extremely low fidelity on paper.
Most engineers will look at their team leads and say "I don't believe in this strategy on paper", and all their team leads can say is "I was at the meeting. You had to be there"
I'm actually a bit tired of introverts hiding behind their disposition. You can do something about it, and it's more than complaining.
EDIT: Sorry, that was more rantish than I wanted. But I'll leave it here anyway.
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.
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 don't know how we're deciding on some of these critical product features"
You write up meeting notes, tasks, etc right?
If you've got engineers who are unaware of functionality because of a verbal meeting being missed you've got deeper problems to address.
You’re not asking for meeting notes you’re asking for a transcription which has the same problem as an email - people don’t read rhem
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.
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.
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 am constantly amazed by allie K miller positioning herself as leader and visionary in every hot trend.
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?"
Even if just one person installs it, it resets the iteration and can begin again.
Just like malware.
Why do you even have a call with 16 people in it?
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.
If you use meetings for something useful, then AI notes won’t be of any value anyway.
compare and contrast the two headlines
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.
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!
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.
Then the meeting is pointless. But not all projects allow for that.
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.
Perhaps, for efficiency, they could ask everyone simultaneously in parallel, or at least roughly around the same time?
To maximize creativity and opportunity, perhaps we could then figure out some way to share each person's status update with every other person on the team?
You still don't need a meeting for that if everyone actually does it.
This might not scale well to larger teams, but we simply write a short message in a dedicated channel each day. It contains a short status and a few bullet points to plan the next day.
Slack makes this conventient because you can write a top level message and then use the reply feature to add more details.
Anyway, I’ve come to really dislike async comms. If something is being communicated to you over async, it’s something not important enough that you can ignore it, in many cases indefinitely. Meetings are still the best way to keep everyone in sync and it’s a structural strategy to keep everyone accountable for making progress at their jobs.
Also the opposite effect, where the most productive and important engineers seem to cause most problems and seem incompetent.
It's not even that, they do the meeting to appear personally leading something. Modern companies confuse leading meetings with true leadership, because hardly anyone knows how to do the later. It is a fast, effective way to give an appearance of leadership and say they're doing something, while doing close to nothing.
The guess probably stems from the number in your user name: 97.
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.
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.
* 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.
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 ...
Authority is also much harder to deliver in an asynchronous format. If someone can just _not read_ the memo, it functionally has no power. The risk isn't that your memo might be questioned, it's that your memo might never be read.
About a year ago, I nearly quit my job over this, going so far as to put my two weeks notice in as a way to hold a gun to their head, repeating my frequent request that all directives handed down from on high _must_ be in writing if they are expected to be followed. My company had (still does, to some degree, but we are still working on it) a cancerous culture of he said/she said that was being abused to avoid any accountability from upper management, which was both impeding the actual work being done as well as demoralizing to th workers. We even ended up losing some talent over it before I used my own value and authority to put my foot down, making me wish I'd done it sooner.
Verbal directives only stroke the ego of the person delivering them and their meaning either evaporates or gets twisted as soon as everyone walks out of that conference room or logs off that video call. If the person issuing them is not willing to have their directives questioned when they are in writing, then they should not hold the position they do. It's not about questioning someone's authority, it's about ensuring the directive makes sense with the work being done and adds value or guidance to the existing processes. Screw the fragile ego nonsense.
by people with low verbal IQ
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 figure, they're consenting adults, they're responsible for managing their time.
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.
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.
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’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.
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 think with new crop of tools the product of my dreams, a vision-audio notekeeping app, will be possible.
Also we provide on-prem installation so meeting data doesn't leave your company :))
skeeter2020•13h ago
asabla•13h ago
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)
Scarblac•13h ago
andy99•13h ago
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.
asabla•13h ago
Business value first
jjj123•12h ago
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.
Scarblac•10h ago
tgsovlerkhgsel•6h ago
asabla•13h ago
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).
bee_rider•12h ago
theamk•12h ago
Scarblac•10h ago
chongli•5h ago
Aeolun•5h ago
toephu2•4h ago
xnx•13h ago
I love this phrasing of the principle.
mystifyingpoi•13h ago
Social pressure is still a thing for some unfortunately. Or maybe memories from school creep in. Just go for a pee.
phs318u•6h ago
kstrauser•4h ago
kaashif•4h ago
LiquidSky•13h ago
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.
david-gpu•6h ago
SpicyLemonZest•12h ago
maccard•20m ago
This is absolutely not new and was as bad if not worse before remote work.
munksbeer•19m ago
I'm genuinely confused by this. Those sort of meetings have existed in the entire 20-something years I've been working corporate jobs.