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PeterStuer a day ago

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.

CuriouslyC a day ago | parent | next [-]

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.

fnordpiglet a day ago | parent | next [-]

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.

phil21 a day ago | parent | next [-]

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.

sitkack 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I know a guy that can run those meetings.

He meets with all the stake holders, determines their desired outcomes, makes sure they are all prepped.

Starts the meeting, sets the goals and the ground rules.

As soon as the meeting exit criteria are met (either another meeting, more homework or a decision has been made) the meeting is over. Done.

Most meetings with this guy lasted 12-17 minutes.

His job was toilsome, but he saved everyone else. I am getting teary eyed just thinking about it.

a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]
[deleted]
jowea 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Doesn't that significantly increase the need for more meeting rooms?

bumby a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

burningChrome a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>> 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.

ajmurmann a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

bumby a day ago | parent [-]

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.

ryandrake 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

17 hours ago | parent [-]
[deleted]
ajmurmann a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It's nice when that works and sets a good cultural signal. Unfortunately, the more important the meeting the harder this is.

ToucanLoucan a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

dangus a day ago | parent [-]

The truth is that people who talk like that aren’t management material.

“I noped out of the management track” = “nobody was considering me for the management track”

CuriouslyC a day ago | parent | next [-]

'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.

ElevenLathe a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

smaudet a day ago | parent | next [-]

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...

ElevenLathe 21 hours ago | parent [-]

I have the same suspicion that ultimately we will be working for the machines (which are owned by investors) rather than the other way around.

Talanes a day ago | parent | prev [-]

>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!

ElevenLathe a day ago | parent [-]

Exactly, the dysfunction comes from the top: the unelected investor class.

bumby a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>“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).

dangus 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

My point is that the comment’s author clearly doesn’t have the right attitude/skillset to succeed in management.

It would be like me saying I noped out of the starting lineup of the LA Lakers to with on the custodial staff.

tauwauwau a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I pray for souls who are considered to be management material.

bravetraveler 11 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

mft_ a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

ajmurmann a day ago | parent | next [-]

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.

wkat4242 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

Angostura a day ago | parent [-]

You’re going to be missing out on some really interesting problems, because the interesting ones are frequently cross-disciplinary, in my experience.

Still if you want to stick to what you know, that’s fine too.

wkat4242 a day ago | parent [-]

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.

apsurd a day ago | parent [-]

you hating your job puts all of this in context.

brador a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This could be an email/slack chain

lghh a day ago | parent [-]

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.

insane_dreamer a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Almost all of this can be accomplished without meetings

stoneyhrm1 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Spoken like a true project manager that every engineer hates.

HelloMcFly a day ago | parent | next [-]

Spoken like the stereotypical antisocial engineer that always thinks they've got all the answers, no matter the question.

Reductionism is easy, and cheap.

freshpots a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

spauldo 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

gunsle 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Weird hill to die on

philwelch 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So many people calling themselves “engineers” these days don’t even know the first thing about siege warfare.

v3ss0n a day ago | parent | prev [-]

- 1 . Use jira or any other porject managment tools instead.

- 2 . Use Zulip - and integrate them with project management tools.

- 3 . Zulip is good for this also

- 4 . Unless you need to share screen and explain things , you don't need meetings for that.

- 5 - Chat please

- 6 - Brainstroming is only place where meetings are needed.

rafaelmn a day ago | parent [-]

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.

yellow_postit a day ago | parent [-]

A bad culture can emerge with tooling first or meeting first cultures.

bumby a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>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.

toolslive a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

".... 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

wkat4242 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

Shorel a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For me, they are the corporate parasite people.

They add no value, except for themselves.

gunsle 6 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

zamadatix a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

snickerdoodle12 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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