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.

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.

>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.

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 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.

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.

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.

> 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 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'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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Totally agree with this. Took me a while to realise my manager who never writes anything down was doing it on purpose.

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...

It reminds me of the recurring scene in Real Genius with the lectures and the tape recorders.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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).

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Looks like your team isn't communicating the goals of your meetings well.

but i didnt get invited to the meeting in the first place! and i dont think my management chain was either!

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.

> "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.

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.

[dead]

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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 :)

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.

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?

How do you deal with daily standups? or 3x a week standups?

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

Not sure, they used them and I didn’t ask for any. I still take my notes manually.

Fathom if I recall correctly.