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.
To your point, I think this tone has to be set by the senior person or else it won't take. It has to be ingrained culturally.
Correct me if I'm off, but it seems like you're saying these things are true:
1) There are certain high-level decisions that must be made and only certain people can make them because of the risk.
2) Those people are busy and in meetings almost all of the day.
3) Because they are busy they can't do the homework.
All of that points to the decision-maker as being the bottleneck. Certainly I'm missing the nuance, but that doesn't sound like an organization that delegates effectively. Real delegation, where people are delegated the authority to make important decisions, could reduce the need for all of the above. What exactly are they being delegated if not the authority to make high-level decisions? It's sounds like delegation in name only, or a more superficial version of delegation. Sometimes I think leaders think of “delegation” as “allowing someone else to do the stuff I don’t really want to do.” That’s not the type of delegation I’m alluding to.
The issue is this view doesn’t scale beyond a small organization. There are a variety of reasons many of which I already pointed out but including you can’t hire uniformly P99 leaders.
The thing Bezos did with Amazon was create a scale free organizational culture which is resilient and highly adaptable. You can’t do that by adopting processes and organizing artifacts that depend on perfect execution by everyone everywhere all the time against some ideal. You have to build processes that are resilient to inadequacy and even incompetence yet still be successful at all levels reliably. When you’re managing an organization of over a million employees with a pretty flat org structure this becomes even more important. Saying “delegate effectively” is not a resilient thing - setting up a structure that ensures delegation happens but executive leadership is aware of and involved in enterprise critical decisions is hard to do.
One way Andy Jassy does this is he requires the documents to be read in his meetings to always use a specific style including Oxford commas. If he reads the document and there aren’t Oxford commas he ends the meeting and you have to reschedule - which can take months. So, you really are certain you have made the most succinct document according to a protocol that’s very low cognitive load for him. He delegates most decisions to his team and they to theirs but at the scale of aws or Amazon, there are some decisions he is a part of. And that number is a lot because Amazon is enormous, not because he doesn’t trust his team or delegates.
But some things he doesn’t. At aws he never delegated pricing decisions. He scrutinized any pricing change in detail. If you did a good job and everyone on his team already was bought in he invariably had something incredibly insightful no one else thought of. He would send it down and his subordinates would often be empowered to approve it. But he always reviewed pricing at least once. This was less about micromanagement and more about choosing to apply his time against what he felt his org should really care about. Margin, cost, scale, and customer experience of these things.
No offense, but nature of these replies sounds more like someone parroting tech speak than someone applying principles that have a context beyond just tech or AWS.
>scale free organizational culture
The fact that the meetings are bottlenecked by decision makers ability to synthesize information imply it is not, in fact, “scale free”. Scale free would imply there are not such bottlenecks.
I agree it’s about developing resilient processes. What you allude to is not that, because it implies single points of failure within decision-making, bottlenecks etc. It doesn’t come across as a clear understanding of true process-oriented culture.
>he reads the document and there aren’t Oxford commas he ends the meeting and you have to reschedule
I can’t know, of course, but I suspect this has more to do with ensuring due-diligence than document formatting. It’s the same thing Van Halen did in the 1980s by requiring brown M&Ms removed from the bowl in their dressing room. It was a quick heuristic to ensure the venue read their rider/contract completely and adhered to it because a lack of due diligence in set design, pyrotechnics etc. would have been a major safety issue. I’m willing to bet checking for a lack of Oxford commas is shorthand for “what other details did they miss?”
>And that number is a lot because Amazon is enormous
Again, this implies the opposite of “scale free” culture. A true scale free org wouldn’t have any nodes with a large number of connections. A large number of decisions does not mean any single individual has to involved in those decisions directly. Why is he not willing/able to select someone capable of making those decisions? (Honest question to understand the dynamic).
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.
I once worked at a job where an entry level person started crashing any meeting they were allowed in an not thrown out of. I mean people would literally say why is person X in this meeting? And they would just stay there.
So how did this end? Well despite literally ignoring and not in any way doing their actual job because of this, they were promoted to management.
So yeah, meetings are about reinforcing mgmt power above all else.
> The actual meeting topic, while it can be relevant, is secondary. You establish and reinforce the pecking order, sense allegiance and subversion, or, feel out potential for reinforcing bonds or mitigating fallouts.
In other words, a total waste of time for me. I don't care about pecking orders, I ignore them anyway.
> This is why people focussed on 'doing the actual work' hate meetings, while carreer focussed people love them.
Management isn't the only option to make a career in.
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.
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.
No thanks, I have my own hobbies and friends. Activities that primarily benefit work, including team building exercises, should be during paid company time.
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.
Okay, well, if you read my comment saying that sometimes meeting with people outside the team is useful, then you start writing about how I'm wasting the time of people _inside_ my team, then I must have miscommunicated something.
You're reading things into what I'm saying that aren't there.
My job is to defend my direct reports from having their time wasted and clear blockers for them. Sometimes, yeah, this means meeting with people to ferret them out.
I'm not weaponizing anyone's presence at a meeting except mine.
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.
> The problem is these meetings are so low information density even an AI summary is not worth my time.
I've been in my share of useless meetings.
However, I've been fortunate enough to be able to cut down the useless meetings at most of my jobs (with one exception, which was awful).
The problem now is that the AI note takers are turning even the good meetings into useless exercises. It's obvious that the AI note taker participants have no intention of participating during the meeting. Then 3 hours later you start getting follow-up questions that they should have asked in the meeting.
Everyone knows "This meeting could have been an e-mail" but fewer people recognize when "This 50-response e-mail conversation spanning 3 days could have been solved in the 30 minute meeting"
The root problem is people trying to transform their own work into async at the expense of forcing everyone else to accommodate them.
We can’t have people going back and forth over chat to work out an issue. I need to start a meeting so I can monologue the portion people already understand again and then I can complete the work because my portion is complete.
I already completed my work so I don’t need to change with these back and forth messages finding oversights or conflicts. I can just sit back and coast.
Also when it’s in chat everybody’s messages are the same size and you can’t just skip over them. By holding a meeting, I can disable everybody else’s mic and the chat or just talk over anybody else and win the discussion. By talking louder, my opinions are better and correct.
I don’t like when some random person causes me more work by speaking up in chat so that’s why we need to have meetings. Plus there’s a whole paper trail and it’s just messy and inconvenient.
It's not even that, they do the meeting to appear personally leading something. Modern companies confuse leading meetings with true leadership, because hardly anyone knows how to do the later. It is a fast, effective way to give an appearance of leadership and say they're doing something, while doing close to nothing.
Let's not pretend someone who sends an AI note taker, which also implies they have time to read notes taken by an AI of a meeting they couldn't find time to turn up for is someone lacking in time.
The prerequisite of reading notes written by an AI means you have time.
They should just be honest and say "I don't need to be in this" or "I don't want to be in this" rather than pretending they do.
This doesn't follow. Plenty of hour long meetings could easily be summarized in a paragraph. Having the time to read a paragraph does not equate to having time to sit through an hour long meeting.
> They like giving directions vocally because that authority is harder to question than if they wrote up a memo
Authority is also much harder to deliver in an asynchronous format. If someone can just _not read_ the memo, it functionally has no power. The risk isn't that your memo might be questioned, it's that your memo might never be read.
I have to disagree since I can also just not listen/pay any attention to what is vocally delivered in the meeting, which I find to be an abhorrent waste of my time in the first place. If the directive is in writing such as an email I (or the person who issued it) can't point to that and say "you did not read this" which shifts the onus entirely on the person receiving the directive.
About a year ago, I nearly quit my job over this, going so far as to put my two weeks notice in as a way to hold a gun to their head, repeating my frequent request that all directives handed down from on high _must_ be in writing if they are expected to be followed. My company had (still does, to some degree, but we are still working on it) a cancerous culture of he said/she said that was being abused to avoid any accountability from upper management, which was both impeding the actual work being done as well as demoralizing to th workers. We even ended up losing some talent over it before I used my own value and authority to put my foot down, making me wish I'd done it sooner.
Verbal directives only stroke the ego of the person delivering them and their meaning either evaporates or gets twisted as soon as everyone walks out of that conference room or logs off that video call. If the person issuing them is not willing to have their directives questioned when they are in writing, then they should not hold the position they do. It's not about questioning someone's authority, it's about ensuring the directive makes sense with the work being done and adds value or guidance to the existing processes. Screw the fragile ego nonsense.
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 ...
Just today I had a "communication 101" training session that was telling me, among other things, to be concise and targeted. I don't know what's either concise or targeted about an 1h session that doesn't differentiate by job description or amount of work experience.
Meetings can be low information, but they don't have to be. The point of meetings is to create a space where people with different knowledge sets working on the same project can ask questions and get answers in a zero latency feedback loop. This is quite useful at certain times.
The last sentence is it - most people can't communicate much less write well, hell, I don't write well, but I hope my ideas are at least clearly communicated.
When you can't write well, you "resort" to using a lot of body language and facial nuances in face-to-face communication, which works acceptably. Unfortunately, this doesn't translate well on zoom.
This "writing well" as a form of good communication is needed, but while in school, those same people who cannot write well also likely were complaining about learning how to write essays and such. Over time, this sort of lack of learning has resulted in poor written communication into adulthood i reckon.
And with the advent of LLM and all these chatGPT-esque bots writing for them, esp. in school, the level of literacy skill is only going to continue to drop!
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.
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.
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.
