I've run a 1-man software company for the last 21 years. I don't think I've had anything you would call a meeting in that time. Also haven't worn a tie, commuted more than 1 minute to my office or had to set my alarm clock for work. Living the dream. ;0)
One reason is that there are a lot of people that refuse to do anything unless there is a meeting.
I work with people that...
* When faced with some well-written, succinct email/text explaining both a problem and supposed solution, will "respond" with "let's discuss this" instead of an intelligent response, taking action as proposed, or even mentioning any particular concerns to be discussed / researched ahead of the meeting. They just need it to be spoon fed to them, and need to be "heard", before anything can happen.
* Will ignore requests to review PRs, or look into problems, for weeks on end. When I ask "what would be a good day next week to block off time to review this?", they'll suddenly spring into action, or say that a meeting is not necessary, but prove that in fact it is by refusing to do anything before the prospect of a meeting is raised.
Most people just have no practice or experience writing. Asking them to respond to or write a large response to an email is a total non-starter for them. That's the default culture in the corporate world unless you have a strong company culture otherwise.
You know how popular grammarly and 2023-24 era chatgpt were? The prospect of writing an email actually makes most people quite anxious. They are not in the comments of hacker news, as a rule - they're watching YouTube and TV and don't read blogs. Just the way most people prefer to live.
It blew my mind to enter college and peer review other people's papers. Up until that point I understood that there was a range of capability with writing, but I figured that in college courses the floor would be pushed up. I was dead wrong, and it was shocking to me that these folks had managed to get all the way through high school writing like 8th graders.
ETA: This is over 20 years ago, btw. I hear it's gotten materially worse. That terrifies me.
The TOEFL is a joke. Several years ago (before LLMs) I proofread group project papers for my wife's coursework at a large US state university. The sections written by foreign students were usually even worse than what I would expect from a native 8th grader. I assume they had found some way to cheat.
There is somebody that I am having to work with right now that will not respond to a single thing I ask unless it is on a live phone call.
I will ask a relatively simple question via email, and then he will call me back an hour later and leave a voicemail just saying "Sorry I missed you, call me back" instead of even answering my simple question. I'm almost never at my desk, always running around out on the production floor (manufacturing engineer). I'll get his voicemail, call him back and leave HIM a voicemail re-iterating my question, and then I will also send an email again re-iterating my question.
We will go back and forth like this until EVENTUALLY we catch each other at the right time, then it's a quick 2-minute call. It takes days and days, sometimes over a week, to get one single answer that takes 2 minutes to talk over.
He is an external consultant I am working with, so I can't even just walk over to his desk. Absolutely infuriating. As soon as this project is done I am never asking him another question again, I'll find someone else. (I inherited the project and don't have the resources to find another consultant right now)
It’s about to get a lot worse too. Gen Z has had noticeably worse reading comprehension scores over the last 5-10 years and they are starting to enter the workforce now. Many prefer video over text and firmly believe that written text is “the harder medium”.
Not advocating this, just more addressing the mindset on it, but in the game of office politics people don't mention concerns ahead of time because they don't want to give the opposing view point opportunity to research how to defeat their argument in a meeting, not that they "can't" give an intelligent response. They're ^choosing* not to in their own self interest.
"The enemy must not know where I intend to give battle; for if he does not know where I intend to give battle, he must be prepared in a great many places. And when he prepares in a great many places, those I have to fight in any one-given place will be but few."
Anyone who would advocate for this strategy against any SME is a moron anyway.
It's like watching someone who's expecting a knife fight walk in with a concealed handgun only to be immediately confronted with a tank.
The email is usually an attempt to not waste time in the meeting and get shit done. Leadership always favors those who can make it so. Anyone who stalls for time or hides information will always look bad. I don't get why people so desperately try anyway.
You generally also get paid with ~10% of everyone else, regardless if you get 3x more done or 3x less done.
So, if like most people, your working to live instead living to work - your employer is doing a terrible job incentivizing you to do more than the bare minimum.
We all know you are far better off doing almost nothing and then all your time trying to get promoted for it, than trying to get promoted by actually doing a good job and thinking you'll get promoted based on merit.
I believe that some of this is differences in communication style. I like written communication because I don't process verbal communication as well. But I've also had plenty of colleagues who are more comfortable with verbal communication, and may not process prose as well. Many of them seemed hesitant to believe they'd fully understood something until they'd had a chance to talk through it to confirm. And, yes, needed verbal prompting in the same way that I tend to need written prompting.
The most functional workplaces understand and respect these differences and make room for everyone's communication style.
Yeah that's true to an extent. I've also had many occasions where someone asks for an update on x and I respond with a two line email asking a yes/no question and the person just says "let's hop on a quick call" etc. That's so frustrating because they're turning 30 seconds into 30 minutes.
Not the person you're responding to but just needed to vent that. It's been happening a lot lately in my world
I am sympathetic to the "different communication style" line of reasoning, but I don't really buy it in the example I used / people I work with at present.
As far as I'm concerned, responding to some well-prepared prose with "lets discuss this", is just a non-response, and a refusal to engage. If one wanted to have a useful discussion, but preferred something verbal, actually picking up the phone, or responding with something like "I'm curuous about X/Y/Z. Let's discuss this at 2pm, I'll send you an invitation", or "please find some time in my calendar for us to look at this."
That would keep the matter progressing, and provide the opportunity to prepare for a useful discussion. "lets discuss this" is just saying "I need you to spoon-feed this to me, but I'm not going to make arrangements for that, so you'll need to figure out how to deal with that.".
My theory is that it’s an intuitive rate limiting scheme devised to cope with the corporate fire hose. There’s no limit on the amount of text coming into an office worker’s inbox in a unit of time. But if one focuses on verbal communication, there’s always going to be a single stream.
Personally, I don’t do this; instead I deal with the stress of the fire hose by grinding my teeth to stubs at night. And for the messages I don’t get to, instead of “let’s discuss”, the sender gets nothing at all.
My gut based on what you're describing is that there is some degree of "strategic neglect" happening here, where people the people doing this are effectively allowing the things being asked of them to self-prioritize: the proposals/emails/PRs/etc that get attention are the ones where the person who sent it follows up or schedules a meeting to discuss it, meaning they're likely higher priority than things where the person doesn't make that extra effort. This is a longstanding if exasperating strategy many people use, but I think it's getting more popular now that lobbing out a long proposal is easier than ever (because of AI).
I mentioned elsewhere that I was once coached to do this. In that situation it honestly wasn’t lazy at all. At the time I was fielding such a high load of incoming requests that even reading and responding to them was eating up a huge chunk of my time and preventing me from getting anything else (i.e., actually doing any of the requested work) done.
I realize that this looked to the people requesting my attention like deliberate stonewalling. That’s because it was. And it wasn’t cool. But, “This quarter I didn’t ship any software because I was too busy answering email,” would not have earned me a satisfactory performance review. And I certainly was not going to openly admit to anyone but my immediate manager that I was using persistence as a prioritization signal. I saw what happened to the poor schmuck who made that mistake.
Are LLMs are going to neutralize this as a tactic? Or reinforce it? They will happily bombard you with text, and you can set up an agent to fire back. More text than ever will be transmitted, with less and less of it ever coming to the attention of a human.
What I learned managing high performers is a disproportionate number of them had very hard childhoods and carry permanent scars that make this behavior destructive. These are the people that generally get ignored in every aspect of their life because their brain is operating much faster than the rest of society and get mistaken for being insane in every facet of their life. So when they experience this kind of behavior in an environment that's supposed to reward them for their ideas, it's stultifying. Those high performers are not going to continue putting effort and energy into novel ideas if they're being ignored.
The solution is pretty simple: just fire the manager.
Totally fair. I don’t know your actual situation and I also find these kinds of interactions to be infinitely frustrating.
But it took me a long time to realize there can be a sort of “double empathy” problem across communication styles that makes it difficult for people to accurately infer each other’s intent. They might even be operating from two slightly etiquette norms, such that the same behavior is considered polite by one person and dismissive or hostile by the other. Not saying that’s your particular situation, just talking generalities since that’s all I reasonably can speak to on a pseudonymous forum like this.
This is similar to me asking some basic questions to the LLM instead of reading the text it wants me to read and review. The difference is that it’s a robot and you’re not.
>There is no good excuse for ignoring requests repeatedly besides laziness or self importance.
Not necessarily, there are also plenty of cases where a person's KPIs don't match their responsibilities or the actual needs of the team. This is frequently a management problem where resources haven't been properly assigned and the employee will always prioritize what they are evaluated on to minimize friction. Far too often managers collect responsibilities for their team (or are told to take on something), yet have zero plans other than "it will work itself out" and they don't bother to formalize how the requests will be dealt with.
There are certainly a lot of people out there that refuse to do their jobs, but it is common enough that there is something else wrong that a discussion with the manager about where the process is failing is the first step.
It’s not necessarily laziness. They just don’t care about your request. “This thing you’re asking for is not important compared to the other things I need do.”
I used to run build call and this was the bane of my existence. People who just never engage (but pretend they are to get you to go away).
> The real solution is to simply fire these people.
I don't think that firing people is an intelligent solution to a problem that boils down to your personal inconvenience.
If you posted a PR and it's awaiting review, it is no longer your problem. You are literally blocked by others. Who knows what they are dealing with? Perhaps they have higher priority items than reviewing your work? I mean, would you stop making this complain after they review your 3rd or 30th PR? Everyone around you also has work to do.
If PR reviews are slow, escalate the issue with your manager.
This is why I said "repeatedly" i.e. a pattern has already emerged.
And in most companies I've worked at you are the one being held responsible for a PR/feature not being merged or finished on time - at least in my experience. You're often working on a different team from the people doing reviews, so in a large enough company they are just a faceless/nameless person from the perspective of your PM.
> And in most companies I've worked at you are the one being held responsible for a PR/feature not being merged or finished on time - at least in my experience. L
You are responsible for delivering tasks, but if you are blocked by the process then it's not you who is preventing the task from being delivered. Whether it's the scrum master or sdm or project manager, someone else is responsible for keeping the tasks moving. Once you mark a task as pending review, you are blocked. From that point onward all you have to do is raise awareness of reviewers to the task pending review, and raise visibility with stakeholders that your deliverable is being blocked by the review. As long as you don't slack in raising awareness, it's not your problem anymore.
If I told my manager it was his problem to get my code reviewed, he would tell me to do my job.
Offloading responsibility for getting code through review to a manager or scrum master sounds at least as dysfunctional as people avoiding doing the reviews.
It is managers responsibility to set priorities including those of other team members. Including priorities of code review. That is not offloading. It is also considerably less toxic then "I demand people to be fired because my code review was not done in 12 hours".
Your PR is not the importantest thing being worked on.
> If I told my manager it was his problem to get my code reviewed, he would tell me to do my job.
If that's how you interact with your team members, no wonder they refuse working with you.
What any competent developer does is a) update ticket to move it to review, b) call out the PR in whatever system you guys use, c) after a reasonable amount or time inform your scrum master/manager that your task is code-complete and is blocked by the review, d) update ticket with a notice that PR is still pending review. Go back to step b) and repeat until the PR is merged.
Done.
Updating the ticket and making a best effort to get the ticket moving is all that's expected from you. By design. That's how things are supposed to work. If your manager doesn't care, it's nothing they want to push anyway, as proven by the ticket history.
> Updating the ticket and making a best effort to get the ticket moving is all that's expected from you.
I have never worked somewhere that ran things as you describe. But then everywhere I’ve ever worked has expected a high level of personal responsibility, not “best effort” that consists of a one time Slack
message and tagging work as blocked.
I can see where this can be abused. (The PR review example is pretty rough!) I can also see where it's a strategy for triaging which tasks are a priority.
I've had projects presented to me over email that sounded great and seemed like they would have good traction, but then fizzled out once I asked if we could discuss it further in person. Blocking off face-to-face time is a signal that the work is important enough to get done.
I’ve even been explicitly coached to use this strategy as a sort of pre-triage. Because when you’re truly swamped with incoming requests even prioritizing starts to eat up a lot of time.
Me too. I used to be super dilligent about immediately responding to emails, requests, meeting invites and I never once benefited from doing so. I only trained my peers into learning that I was a "yes man" that always responded quickly, and they abused this.
Therefore, I now no longer rush at all responding to emails unless its actually urgent and concrete. If someone sends vague requests, I just don't ansewr. If they don't come back, I can infer it probably wasn't that important or they found some resolution on their own.
I also never respond to meeting invites just in case I can avoid the meeting. I think I've probably dodged 100 unnecessary meetings over the last couple of years by literally just never responding or showing up. I of course don't do this with 1-1 meetings, but meetings with: multiple people where I'm not needed, there is no listed agenda, and my involvement is not clear; F that.
I also frequently just say "no, I can't", which I didn't for most of my carreer, and just suddenly realized I could do largely without consequences or repercussions. It's fascinating.
> Blocking off face-to-face time is a signal that the work is important enough to get done.
This.
I'd also add that not bothering to book a meeting means that people treat you like a low-value work queue that they use to dump low-visibility and low-accountability work. They invoke you to handle silly tasks that no one but you accept.
By requiring a meeting, you're increasing the threshold of effort that your requester is willing to invest in getting it done. If they can't be bothered doing a meeting, you shouldn't bother doing the work for them.
With any request, schedule a follow up meeting to discuss the completed work, or to perform an autopsy if there was some impediment.
Make sure to actually say “autopsy”.
“Inquisition”, “colonoscopy” or “employment review” all work well too.
If you have two Bob’s definitely get them involved.
Then have a practice of letting such meetings be cancelled if the work is done and went well.
This can be done as a consistent and transparent inside joke. Humor often generates the social permission to communicate hard truths, by also providing psychological stress dispertion.
I cannot vouch for any of this, but please share your experiences.
100% agree. Most of the time, when I hear "this could have been an email," it's from someone with a track record of not reading (or writing and responding to) emails meaningfully.
Totally... I've been through this cycle more times than I'd care to count:
"What would be a good day next week to block off time to review this?"
"We don't need a meeting for this, I can get to it <whenever>"
"That's an excellent point, and I tend to agree. Nevertheless, this has been hanging out there for several weeks now. We can schedule the meeting now, and if it ends up getting done before then, it can be canceled.".
I think not reading or responding to e-mails is largely (from my experience) indicative of more fundamental communication problems in the company/group.
The first problem is e-mail fatigue. Many groups have ridiculous amounts of automated e-mails that amount to line noise. The information in them is rarely actionable and certainly never so critical it needs to be read by everyone immediately. "Everything is OK" alarms are fucking infuriating. It's very easy to miss the super highly critical e-mail from a manager that's just a lazily forwarded e-mail from the automated systems. The "Have you seen this?" with the entire contents of the line noise e-mail from the automated system.
Second is people, especially middle management, that for some reason assume e-mail is a real-time communication medium. They send an e-mail and expect the recipients to drop everything to respond to it. Simultaneously the people actually doing work are actually working and not checking their e-mail every nanosecond to see if they need to drop their actual work to explain their actual work to management. So then the middle management sends a cascade of instant messages and schedules meetings to get the people doing actual work to drop everything to explain their actual work. These meetings will inevitably contain complaints about not getting work done.
It's now even worse with AI in the middle. Instead of using LLMs to write easy to scan and digest bullet point e-mails they're used to expand bullet points into useless novellas.
My solutions to these problems are thus:
1. RSS - Automated systems should just emit RSS feeds with their normal status with separate feeds for exceptional conditions. Only in those actual "machine on fire" conditions are e-mails sent by such systems. Parties interested in constant updates just watch their feed reader and everyone has a single source of truth for event logs from the automated systems.
2. Automated systems should just file tickets automatically so everyone involved has a single source of truth and can all collaborate in one place. Even better if the ticket/bug tracker supports RSS because it becomes dead simple for anyone to follow feeds they're interested in and even set up system notifications for new issues.
3. Company/group wide e-mail policies that constantly remind everyone it's not a real-time medium and that filling everyone's inbox with noise is not effective communication. This can be enforced with automated delivery delays guaranteeing e-mail won't be immediately delivered as a safeguard against people using it instead of actual real-time channels.
4. Verbose e-mails are also rarely effective communication and shared LLM prompts that make e-mails shorter and clearer would also help.
Removing most of the noise from e-mail makes it more effective and can make it an actual communication medium. If e-mail becomes effective communication far less of everyone's limited lives needs to be spent zoning out in meetings where their only purpose is to "give a status update".
Back in the days of paper memos the literal cost and effort required to send them required the sender to really think about what they were trying to communicate and how to say it best. Because e-mail is essentially free it is widely abused since so little thought needs to go into its composition and delivery.
I have this even on slack. I prefer text because it gives me time to thi k before responding but I think some people just don't have very good reading comprehension. Or writing skills.
So they force everything to "let's set up a chat about this".
A highly profitable company can be poorly run and still survive exactly because there is so much more margin for error than for a company which is barely profitable (or worse).
Granted, that kind of situation is unlikely to continue indefinitely, but it certainly can happen.
Profitable companies are often very, very poorly run. The best run companies, in an absolute sense, are ones that are extremely close to breakeven on margin and thus have to shave every penny - my prototype for this would be Costco, for example.
Companies in industries where you can print money (for a while...) usually haven't actually been put under any duress, so any fool can manage them and look like a genius. It's in hard times that you discover whether you're a good manager or not, when the decisions made in good times come home to roost.
If you reduce a companies purpose to solely being "making money" then by that definition sure.
But in my opinion the worship of money and reduction of everything to being solely a dollar maximizer is one of the biggest problems that humanity has at the moment - it is a reduction in purpose by the blind and greedy.
My definition of a well run company is one that is still profitable, but has happy employees who are maximizing their potential and growth. Who is a good tax paying entity so that it contributes back to the society that is supporting it. Is making a healthy return for its shareholders despite all of this, and is not doing anything evil like producing toxic chemicals, harming vulnerable people or polluting the environment.
Is it idealistic? Yes of course it is. Our collective description of greatness should be to aim at perfection so that even falling short of it is still excellent.
Saying it must be well run because its profitable makes me sick, because that line of thinking feeds unrestrained greed, and is exactly the reason our state of capitalism is so unbalanced and full of greed right now.
Email chains can fail to converge. Yeah, the meeting could have been an email, but what if it was going to be 20 email back-and-forths? And not everybody is responding quickly?
You ask three people what we should do about a problem. They float ideas. You think the discussion is converging on a solution, and then one of them (who hasn't been heard from for the last three days) suddenly protests where the group is going, saying that they don't agree at all, that they have several concerns, that nobody talked to this other group that needs to be consulted, and so on. Then for that other group, nobody responds for a week because they're busy on something else.
A meeting can force people to say what they have to say, now, or be ignored. That forcing function has value.
And it's not (just) that "people refuse to do anything". It's that multiple people, doing things asynchronously, on different time rhythms, sometimes means that the group consensus advances v e r y s l o w l y, if at all.
> * When faced with some well-written, succinct email/text explaining both a problem and supposed solution, will "respond" with "let's discuss this" instead of an intelligent response, taking action as proposed, or even mentioning any particular concerns to be discussed / researched ahead of the meeting. They just need it to be spoon fed to them, and need to be "heard", before anything can happen.
You hit the nail on this, a lot coming from middle managers too who still think that a busy calendar of these meetings it means they are very productive. I remember a manager I worked with, he was so keen on having meetings, a discussion between me and a colleague and he overheard it? Meeting to discuss “the conflict”!! It was soul crushing experience thankfully i left quickly, only to know later he started having meetings for meetings, so in those meetings they discuss what they will discuss on the other meetings!
Also, there are some other sinister reasons, an email is an artifact that can be traced and searched, a meeting usually is just verbal communication and even meeting minutes get challenged later.
I've faced this same PR problem. Something is very wrong with a software development process when one developer can halt forward progress on the repo by simply ignoring PRs. One solution I've thought about is to automatically accept any PR that sits idle for 48 hours without comments or modification. After that, the reviewers lose the right to complain. If some nasty bug is later discovered, that's what git bisect is for.
Meetings are the broccoli of work – widely disliked, but probably good for us anyway.
If you don't like broccoli, it just means you're preparing it wrong. Don't steam it, boil it, or microwave it. Here's how I prep frozen broccoli.
Preheat your oven to 400ºF/200ºC.
As soon as the oven has preheated, put the frozen broccoli into a mixing bowl and drizzle 2tbsp / 30ml of olive oil over it, and toss with your fingers.
Spread the broccoli over a baking sheet, sprinkle a small amount of salt over it, and bake for 20 minutes.
I firmly believe 20 minutes is the optimal amount of time to meet, introduce a problem and evidence, and make a decision that allows all parties to move forward aligned.
I suspect office work defaulted to 30 minute calls because of TV/Radio broadcasts in the early 20th century, but I haven't researched this theory further.
It's a joke, but taking it at face value, many informational emails are not written in a way that suggests a reply is wanted or necessary, in as much as many meetings are just something you sit through as a listener and not as an active participant.
If an email presents some new plan or policy as a "done deal" then what is the point of spending time replying to it?
A big reason is a lack of agency. I work with large organisations where people cannot or do not know if they can make an executive decision. What to do? Call a meeting with everyone who might have a view on it so that you can then make a decision.
The problem, of course, is when an important person is not available so a decision is not made and then when something comes up mid-week, we need to wait another week to have another meeting.
Give people guiderails, let them try (and fail sometimes) and watch them flourish. On the other hand, tell them that they need permissions from X, Y and Z and watch them do the minimum amount possible.
The problem is failure seems more costly than the 30-120 minute call that may align all necessary parties. I think a lot of effective work cultures have moved towards the "move fast and expect mistakes" mentality you describe, but most people/organizations are still carrying mentalities from the "old ways"
My dad used to joke that a meeting is where minutes are kept and hours are lost.
Buried in the pdf in different sections
> Managers attend meetings far more frequently and spend substantially more time in them than non-managerial employees.
> Separately, interactions with senior colleagues are associated with stronger wage growth
A meeting is called to coordinate or communicate. Wadge's law of meetings tell you which one is which.
But not all coordination is top down, sometimes you need your manager to go negotiate a point with another division.
And neither is all communication, most often you can impress on others the potential of a new approach or the problems with the existing one.
The only trouble for the neurodivergent among us is that "appearing to pay attention" is also communication, same goes for eye-contact or not stuttering.
Corolllary is that skip meetings at your own risk, decisions will be made and you won't be in the room where it happens. And don't be the person who is not welcome in meetings, that too eventually makes your pay suffer.
I am one of today's Ten Thousand (https://xkcd.com/1053/) to just now learn of this law.
"Wadge’s Law (of Meetings).
Before every formal meeting there’s a smaller, more exclusive, less formal meeting where all the important decisions are made.
This is based on decades of experience in academia and friends’ experience in industry and government. Sometimes there’s an even smaller, more exclusive, less formal pre pre meeting where all the decisions of the pre meeting are made. Maybe even a pre pre pre meeting … until you reach some guy deciding everything in the shower."
Because we're social creatures. We're desperate to foster and measure social consensus. That's why we have so many meetings. We want to see the agreement / concession / enthusiasm / disagreement on people's faces, and then use the social forum to cow them into assenting.
Because this is a base intuition and inclination, we employ this clumsily even in cases where it's not really the right tool for the job.
This is the core of it. So much of business, engineering and product design is about navigating a network graph of people to discover requirements, coordinate expertise and make things happen in the real world.
I know many engineers would prefer to just focus on engineering, but creating something meaningful for people means working with and through people. Even the most hands-off, self-service SaaS products depend on this.
Take an extreme case like Minecraft, where a single person behind a computer created a billion-dollar company. I'd argue that even here a significant part of that success came from Notch's very active involvement in the community.
Indeed, the enjoyment in software engineering may come from problem-solving (for many of us at least) - but that means that at the end of it, you've created something that solves that client's problem; you've built something for them that they're now going to use. The requirements stage, and subsequent refining based on what the client needs to do, absolutely is the most important stage.
> a significant part of that success came from Notch's very active involvement in the community
I've never heard it argued otherwise, although it probably doesn't get emphasized enough. It was very interesting at the time to watch how closely he interacted with the community, asking opinions and listening, while also making them feel involved by being open about the details of what he was doing. It was a massively refreshing counter to the way the big game studios were coming across so arrogantly at the time, being certain they knew better than their users about what the users wanted. Notch's attitude created that community feel around the game, and made you feel unusually close to the development and even the decision-making processes. That in turn led to word-of-mouth advertising that resulted in Minecraft becoming one of the biggest selling games of all time.
Why do I feel every meeting has a rambling motormouth that will speak for at least 80% of the meeting, making the most obvious, remedial "points" (with illustrative anecdotes of course and repeating them over and over) and then keep the meeting running late?
This sounds like a former CEO I used to work with. Huddled an entire team into a meeting g bc he wanted an update, proceeded to talk through 80% of the meeting time.
End result: someone was appointed to send an email with the update.
People with no social lives outside of work tend to do that. They have no one to talk to other then on meetings, so they talk a lot on meetings. They are not aware of what they are doing, but it is a consistent pattern.
They help people with email jobs to feel important and show everyone else that they're doing something, while simultaneously reducing time available to the people with real work to do, which can then be used by the former group to apply pressure on them.
In my view meetings are the most powerful channel for social signaling which unfortunately is at least half the revealed job in software engineering. That was (and still is) the hardest thing for me to accept as the child of blue collar parents.
This. Seems like the more you sync with your manager, the more he/she likes you and your career seems to flourish. Nothing much to do with the quality of your thinking or work it seems. If I do my job but don't have a great relationship with my manager, to hell with my career. But if I sync with my manager everyday for even the smallest minutiae, I am seen as team player. Go figure.
Meetings make the cost of collaboration and uncertainty visible. As disruptive as they are I find them to be the most effective way to explain to less technical stakeholders why something is particularly complex or exactly why we need high degrees of certainty in seemingly unimportant portions of the product spec.
They also drive me crazy since we tend to have many of them with relatively little actionable output, but as others have said what tends to happen in the wake of these is the technical people backchannel our own conversations about what needs doing and the sequencing of what we should build to meet the evolving product vision.
What frustrates me is when I complain about there being many meetings on my calendar I'm told to just decline them, but then I'm effectively ceding authority since the time to voice opposition to a particular plan or task is in whatever meeting I'm declining.
Perhaps all of the above is more prevalent in product-led orgs rather than engineering-led orgs, I'm curious if people on the other side of the spectrum have different anecdotes.
A byproduct of working remote is the amount of human connection in general has gone way down. The only time I "see" the people I work with anymore is when we're on a meeting.
Meetings that could have been an email, in some ways, are replacing hallway and water cooler conversations. Are they a good replacement for that? Not really.
I have recently learned that meetings help with one thing we're really bad at, which is deadline and estimations.
Not meetings about deadline, or meetings about estimation, but the shared experience of having timed events associated with stakeholders and involved parties.
It's like an invisible cue system the brain adapts to and starts reacting/responding to in the form of scheduling and resource allocation. (Which can be a double edged sword for some people: e.g. when they wait until the meeting to ask a question)
One thing that I've been wondering is if I could somehow transmit everything in my head somehow automatically into text so that an LLM can reasonably respond to almost everything about what I'm doing and how updated live to other people. Perhaps it could escalate the things that matter to me and meetings would be transformed so that others could pull things out of me faster than having to talk to me. I might even be completely obviated by sufficient encoding of self.
Perhaps the visible actions and text I write are all holographic-principle-like sufficient encoding of my invisible prior thought given sufficient information. Curious to see!
TL;DR People are pushed to specialize as companies grow and meetings are cartesian products of interests.
As responsibilities become increasingly important (more financial import), their work is divided into specialized slices for optimization, redundancy, and bus factor. The number of combinations of people that might be necessary to answer questions or provide guidance in decisioning expands exponentially (small slope, correlating to recruitment). If something in a meeting is considered missed, unsaid, or backtracked, the event is memorialized and pushes for more meeting with a larger audience. The people in large meetings self-select into smaller meetings around their specific vertical interests, in order to align with the interpreted decisions of the larger meetings.
Meeting bloat is the result of a conflux of human behavior, lossy communication, optimized behavior and competing interests. If it was a simple single reason, humans would have solved it long ago.
As our economy becomes more and more riddled with nonsense jobs that provide no economic value, it becomes increasingly important for the people in those jobs to create the impression of value (this is their only product), and that's what meetings are largely for. Excessive pointless meetings are not broccoli, even if meeting-attenders see higher wage growth than their peers. Excessive meetings are a symptom of an economy that's becoming more and more disconnected from the real world and from creation of real economic value.
pre wfh times the meetings were restricted by the capacity of the meeting rooms in the office. It also required more effort to coordinate, schedule, preparation, etc.
WFH and COVID accelerated meeting usage. I had a manager who claimed people also flocked to meetings during COVID and WFH because they were 'lonely.' But that same manager would kick people out of meetings if they weren't actively participating, too, so who knows.
The fundamental problem is that brain-to-brain transfer of information is really hard. And face-to-face communication is often a better vehicle for it than written communication.
Figure 3 is interesting. After manager vs non-manager, the strongest predictor of meeting load is whether the work is in-office or remote, with remote & hybrid workers having both more and (much) longer meetings on average. That lines up with my experience, and is one of the big reasons I dislike hybrid work in particular.
I doubt their data would have supported this, but I do wish they had distinguished hybrid from fully distributed. Anecdotally, the one time I worked at a 100% distributed organization the meetings were efficient and the meeting load was low. Not quite as low as the fully in-office companies, but I think some of that was that we deliberately padded meetings with some social time as a stand-in for the water cooler.
The paper seems like a high school science project, but in my experience one common reason for having a meeting is this: Person A wants Person B (Person C's boss) to tell Person C to do something. That's it. So Person A slacks or emails Person B saying I need to get Person C to do this thing. Person B says oh we better have a meeting. The three get onto the meeting and Person B says "yeah so Person A was talking about this thing, I'm not really sure what it is...". And the meeting ends with Person C saying "ok I will do that".
All of this can be avoided in my experience by creating a culture of task assignment. Often I've seen the bug/issue tracking system used to facilitate this but you can use other applications. In this scenario Person A would open a bug detailing what they want done, and either assign it, or put it in the triage queue so Person B get assigned next. Person B reviews, makes any notes, then assigns to Person C. That's it. No meeting.
Because companies are too big, there is a lot of dead weight, overlapping responsibilities, and differing opinions. It's a hiring, management, and culture issue. Smaller companies have it better, and AI helps with that.
Boomers want to hear themselves talk they think meetings equal work. They are lazy and instead of learning on their own they require others to spoon feed the information to them.
you have so many meetings because you send billions of messages that have NO value, but create a wild number of different expectations accross the spread of those involved in any one project, and so meetings are one way to try and get people on the same page.
but off course there are now millions of people entrenched in organisations who are messaging and meeting specialists,and for whom procedural tacticts are instinctive and will only defer and conduct actual work when under direct supervision from a superior.
I could talk about how deal with some of that, but, no.
I've run a 1-man software company for the last 21 years. I don't think I've had anything you would call a meeting in that time. Also haven't worn a tie, commuted more than 1 minute to my office or had to set my alarm clock for work. Living the dream. ;0)
One reason is that there are a lot of people that refuse to do anything unless there is a meeting.
I work with people that...
* When faced with some well-written, succinct email/text explaining both a problem and supposed solution, will "respond" with "let's discuss this" instead of an intelligent response, taking action as proposed, or even mentioning any particular concerns to be discussed / researched ahead of the meeting. They just need it to be spoon fed to them, and need to be "heard", before anything can happen.
* Will ignore requests to review PRs, or look into problems, for weeks on end. When I ask "what would be a good day next week to block off time to review this?", they'll suddenly spring into action, or say that a meeting is not necessary, but prove that in fact it is by refusing to do anything before the prospect of a meeting is raised.
Most people just have no practice or experience writing. Asking them to respond to or write a large response to an email is a total non-starter for them. That's the default culture in the corporate world unless you have a strong company culture otherwise.
You know how popular grammarly and 2023-24 era chatgpt were? The prospect of writing an email actually makes most people quite anxious. They are not in the comments of hacker news, as a rule - they're watching YouTube and TV and don't read blogs. Just the way most people prefer to live.
It blew my mind to enter college and peer review other people's papers. Up until that point I understood that there was a range of capability with writing, but I figured that in college courses the floor would be pushed up. I was dead wrong, and it was shocking to me that these folks had managed to get all the way through high school writing like 8th graders.
ETA: This is over 20 years ago, btw. I hear it's gotten materially worse. That terrifies me.
The TOEFL is a joke. Several years ago (before LLMs) I proofread group project papers for my wife's coursework at a large US state university. The sections written by foreign students were usually even worse than what I would expect from a native 8th grader. I assume they had found some way to cheat.
There is somebody that I am having to work with right now that will not respond to a single thing I ask unless it is on a live phone call.
I will ask a relatively simple question via email, and then he will call me back an hour later and leave a voicemail just saying "Sorry I missed you, call me back" instead of even answering my simple question. I'm almost never at my desk, always running around out on the production floor (manufacturing engineer). I'll get his voicemail, call him back and leave HIM a voicemail re-iterating my question, and then I will also send an email again re-iterating my question.
We will go back and forth like this until EVENTUALLY we catch each other at the right time, then it's a quick 2-minute call. It takes days and days, sometimes over a week, to get one single answer that takes 2 minutes to talk over.
He is an external consultant I am working with, so I can't even just walk over to his desk. Absolutely infuriating. As soon as this project is done I am never asking him another question again, I'll find someone else. (I inherited the project and don't have the resources to find another consultant right now)
"I need the answer in an email, thanks."
It’s about to get a lot worse too. Gen Z has had noticeably worse reading comprehension scores over the last 5-10 years and they are starting to enter the workforce now. Many prefer video over text and firmly believe that written text is “the harder medium”.
Not advocating this, just more addressing the mindset on it, but in the game of office politics people don't mention concerns ahead of time because they don't want to give the opposing view point opportunity to research how to defeat their argument in a meeting, not that they "can't" give an intelligent response. They're ^choosing* not to in their own self interest.
"The enemy must not know where I intend to give battle; for if he does not know where I intend to give battle, he must be prepared in a great many places. And when he prepares in a great many places, those I have to fight in any one-given place will be but few."
Anyone who would advocate for this strategy against any SME is a moron anyway.
It's like watching someone who's expecting a knife fight walk in with a concealed handgun only to be immediately confronted with a tank.
The email is usually an attempt to not waste time in the meeting and get shit done. Leadership always favors those who can make it so. Anyone who stalls for time or hides information will always look bad. I don't get why people so desperately try anyway.
You generally also get paid with ~10% of everyone else, regardless if you get 3x more done or 3x less done.
So, if like most people, your working to live instead living to work - your employer is doing a terrible job incentivizing you to do more than the bare minimum.
We all know you are far better off doing almost nothing and then all your time trying to get promoted for it, than trying to get promoted by actually doing a good job and thinking you'll get promoted based on merit.
I believe that some of this is differences in communication style. I like written communication because I don't process verbal communication as well. But I've also had plenty of colleagues who are more comfortable with verbal communication, and may not process prose as well. Many of them seemed hesitant to believe they'd fully understood something until they'd had a chance to talk through it to confirm. And, yes, needed verbal prompting in the same way that I tend to need written prompting.
The most functional workplaces understand and respect these differences and make room for everyone's communication style.
Yeah that's true to an extent. I've also had many occasions where someone asks for an update on x and I respond with a two line email asking a yes/no question and the person just says "let's hop on a quick call" etc. That's so frustrating because they're turning 30 seconds into 30 minutes.
Not the person you're responding to but just needed to vent that. It's been happening a lot lately in my world
Some people just don't have enough to do and setting up "quick chats" makes them feel busy.
I feel you.
I am sympathetic to the "different communication style" line of reasoning, but I don't really buy it in the example I used / people I work with at present.
As far as I'm concerned, responding to some well-prepared prose with "lets discuss this", is just a non-response, and a refusal to engage. If one wanted to have a useful discussion, but preferred something verbal, actually picking up the phone, or responding with something like "I'm curuous about X/Y/Z. Let's discuss this at 2pm, I'll send you an invitation", or "please find some time in my calendar for us to look at this."
That would keep the matter progressing, and provide the opportunity to prepare for a useful discussion. "lets discuss this" is just saying "I need you to spoon-feed this to me, but I'm not going to make arrangements for that, so you'll need to figure out how to deal with that.".
My theory is that it’s an intuitive rate limiting scheme devised to cope with the corporate fire hose. There’s no limit on the amount of text coming into an office worker’s inbox in a unit of time. But if one focuses on verbal communication, there’s always going to be a single stream.
Personally, I don’t do this; instead I deal with the stress of the fire hose by grinding my teeth to stubs at night. And for the messages I don’t get to, instead of “let’s discuss”, the sender gets nothing at all.
My gut based on what you're describing is that there is some degree of "strategic neglect" happening here, where people the people doing this are effectively allowing the things being asked of them to self-prioritize: the proposals/emails/PRs/etc that get attention are the ones where the person who sent it follows up or schedules a meeting to discuss it, meaning they're likely higher priority than things where the person doesn't make that extra effort. This is a longstanding if exasperating strategy many people use, but I think it's getting more popular now that lobbing out a long proposal is easier than ever (because of AI).
I've worked with a lot of people who will not engage with a request until the request has been made multiple times.
Its a very lazy way of filtering.
"It couldn't have been that important" is their logic.
I mentioned elsewhere that I was once coached to do this. In that situation it honestly wasn’t lazy at all. At the time I was fielding such a high load of incoming requests that even reading and responding to them was eating up a huge chunk of my time and preventing me from getting anything else (i.e., actually doing any of the requested work) done.
I realize that this looked to the people requesting my attention like deliberate stonewalling. That’s because it was. And it wasn’t cool. But, “This quarter I didn’t ship any software because I was too busy answering email,” would not have earned me a satisfactory performance review. And I certainly was not going to openly admit to anyone but my immediate manager that I was using persistence as a prioritization signal. I saw what happened to the poor schmuck who made that mistake.
Are LLMs are going to neutralize this as a tactic? Or reinforce it? They will happily bombard you with text, and you can set up an agent to fire back. More text than ever will be transmitted, with less and less of it ever coming to the attention of a human.
What I learned managing high performers is a disproportionate number of them had very hard childhoods and carry permanent scars that make this behavior destructive. These are the people that generally get ignored in every aspect of their life because their brain is operating much faster than the rest of society and get mistaken for being insane in every facet of their life. So when they experience this kind of behavior in an environment that's supposed to reward them for their ideas, it's stultifying. Those high performers are not going to continue putting effort and energy into novel ideas if they're being ignored.
The solution is pretty simple: just fire the manager.
Totally fair. I don’t know your actual situation and I also find these kinds of interactions to be infinitely frustrating.
But it took me a long time to realize there can be a sort of “double empathy” problem across communication styles that makes it difficult for people to accurately infer each other’s intent. They might even be operating from two slightly etiquette norms, such that the same behavior is considered polite by one person and dismissive or hostile by the other. Not saying that’s your particular situation, just talking generalities since that’s all I reasonably can speak to on a pseudonymous forum like this.
This is similar to me asking some basic questions to the LLM instead of reading the text it wants me to read and review. The difference is that it’s a robot and you’re not.
Not gonna lie, I've had the PR issue before.
The solution? Blast the PR into your shared slack noting that it isn't being reviewed on time because maybe XYZ person is busy.
Watch how fast they are suddenly free to review when their name is attached to something in public.
The real solution is to simply fire these people. There is no good excuse for ignoring requests repeatedly besides laziness or self importance.
>There is no good excuse for ignoring requests repeatedly besides laziness or self importance.
Not necessarily, there are also plenty of cases where a person's KPIs don't match their responsibilities or the actual needs of the team. This is frequently a management problem where resources haven't been properly assigned and the employee will always prioritize what they are evaluated on to minimize friction. Far too often managers collect responsibilities for their team (or are told to take on something), yet have zero plans other than "it will work itself out" and they don't bother to formalize how the requests will be dealt with.
There are certainly a lot of people out there that refuse to do their jobs, but it is common enough that there is something else wrong that a discussion with the manager about where the process is failing is the first step.
Dogbert: "I can only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good, either."
It’s not necessarily laziness. They just don’t care about your request. “This thing you’re asking for is not important compared to the other things I need do.”
I used to run build call and this was the bane of my existence. People who just never engage (but pretend they are to get you to go away).
> The real solution is to simply fire these people.
I don't think that firing people is an intelligent solution to a problem that boils down to your personal inconvenience.
If you posted a PR and it's awaiting review, it is no longer your problem. You are literally blocked by others. Who knows what they are dealing with? Perhaps they have higher priority items than reviewing your work? I mean, would you stop making this complain after they review your 3rd or 30th PR? Everyone around you also has work to do.
If PR reviews are slow, escalate the issue with your manager.
This is why I said "repeatedly" i.e. a pattern has already emerged.
And in most companies I've worked at you are the one being held responsible for a PR/feature not being merged or finished on time - at least in my experience. You're often working on a different team from the people doing reviews, so in a large enough company they are just a faceless/nameless person from the perspective of your PM.
> And in most companies I've worked at you are the one being held responsible for a PR/feature not being merged or finished on time - at least in my experience. L
You are responsible for delivering tasks, but if you are blocked by the process then it's not you who is preventing the task from being delivered. Whether it's the scrum master or sdm or project manager, someone else is responsible for keeping the tasks moving. Once you mark a task as pending review, you are blocked. From that point onward all you have to do is raise awareness of reviewers to the task pending review, and raise visibility with stakeholders that your deliverable is being blocked by the review. As long as you don't slack in raising awareness, it's not your problem anymore.
Crazy solution to fire people. Found a toxic person in waiting.
> it is no longer your problem
This is absolutely not true. If I can’t check in a fix or a feature because someone else isn’t doing the review, it’s definitely still my problem.
> This is absolutely not true. If I can’t check in a fix or a feature because someone else isn’t doing the review, it’s definitely still my problem
It isn't. It's your scrum master's/Manager's problem, because the ticket is blocked in review.
In the meantime you moved on to another task. Because the review is not your problem.
If I told my manager it was his problem to get my code reviewed, he would tell me to do my job.
Offloading responsibility for getting code through review to a manager or scrum master sounds at least as dysfunctional as people avoiding doing the reviews.
It is managers responsibility to set priorities including those of other team members. Including priorities of code review. That is not offloading. It is also considerably less toxic then "I demand people to be fired because my code review was not done in 12 hours".
Your PR is not the importantest thing being worked on.
> If I told my manager it was his problem to get my code reviewed, he would tell me to do my job.
If that's how you interact with your team members, no wonder they refuse working with you.
What any competent developer does is a) update ticket to move it to review, b) call out the PR in whatever system you guys use, c) after a reasonable amount or time inform your scrum master/manager that your task is code-complete and is blocked by the review, d) update ticket with a notice that PR is still pending review. Go back to step b) and repeat until the PR is merged.
Done.
Updating the ticket and making a best effort to get the ticket moving is all that's expected from you. By design. That's how things are supposed to work. If your manager doesn't care, it's nothing they want to push anyway, as proven by the ticket history.
> no wonder they refuse working with you.
Weird and abrasive assumption you make.
> Updating the ticket and making a best effort to get the ticket moving is all that's expected from you.
I have never worked somewhere that ran things as you describe. But then everywhere I’ve ever worked has expected a high level of personal responsibility, not “best effort” that consists of a one time Slack message and tagging work as blocked.
I can see where this can be abused. (The PR review example is pretty rough!) I can also see where it's a strategy for triaging which tasks are a priority.
I've had projects presented to me over email that sounded great and seemed like they would have good traction, but then fizzled out once I asked if we could discuss it further in person. Blocking off face-to-face time is a signal that the work is important enough to get done.
I’ve even been explicitly coached to use this strategy as a sort of pre-triage. Because when you’re truly swamped with incoming requests even prioritizing starts to eat up a lot of time.
Me too. I used to be super dilligent about immediately responding to emails, requests, meeting invites and I never once benefited from doing so. I only trained my peers into learning that I was a "yes man" that always responded quickly, and they abused this.
Therefore, I now no longer rush at all responding to emails unless its actually urgent and concrete. If someone sends vague requests, I just don't ansewr. If they don't come back, I can infer it probably wasn't that important or they found some resolution on their own.
I also never respond to meeting invites just in case I can avoid the meeting. I think I've probably dodged 100 unnecessary meetings over the last couple of years by literally just never responding or showing up. I of course don't do this with 1-1 meetings, but meetings with: multiple people where I'm not needed, there is no listed agenda, and my involvement is not clear; F that.
I also frequently just say "no, I can't", which I didn't for most of my carreer, and just suddenly realized I could do largely without consequences or repercussions. It's fascinating.
> Blocking off face-to-face time is a signal that the work is important enough to get done.
This.
I'd also add that not bothering to book a meeting means that people treat you like a low-value work queue that they use to dump low-visibility and low-accountability work. They invoke you to handle silly tasks that no one but you accept.
By requiring a meeting, you're increasing the threshold of effort that your requester is willing to invest in getting it done. If they can't be bothered doing a meeting, you shouldn't bother doing the work for them.
With any request, schedule a follow up meeting to discuss the completed work, or to perform an autopsy if there was some impediment.
Make sure to actually say “autopsy”.
“Inquisition”, “colonoscopy” or “employment review” all work well too.
If you have two Bob’s definitely get them involved.
Then have a practice of letting such meetings be cancelled if the work is done and went well.
This can be done as a consistent and transparent inside joke. Humor often generates the social permission to communicate hard truths, by also providing psychological stress dispertion.
I cannot vouch for any of this, but please share your experiences.
At my company it is "post-mortem"
100% agree. Most of the time, when I hear "this could have been an email," it's from someone with a track record of not reading (or writing and responding to) emails meaningfully.
Totally... I've been through this cycle more times than I'd care to count:
"What would be a good day next week to block off time to review this?"
"We don't need a meeting for this, I can get to it <whenever>"
"That's an excellent point, and I tend to agree. Nevertheless, this has been hanging out there for several weeks now. We can schedule the meeting now, and if it ends up getting done before then, it can be canceled.".
I think not reading or responding to e-mails is largely (from my experience) indicative of more fundamental communication problems in the company/group.
The first problem is e-mail fatigue. Many groups have ridiculous amounts of automated e-mails that amount to line noise. The information in them is rarely actionable and certainly never so critical it needs to be read by everyone immediately. "Everything is OK" alarms are fucking infuriating. It's very easy to miss the super highly critical e-mail from a manager that's just a lazily forwarded e-mail from the automated systems. The "Have you seen this?" with the entire contents of the line noise e-mail from the automated system.
Second is people, especially middle management, that for some reason assume e-mail is a real-time communication medium. They send an e-mail and expect the recipients to drop everything to respond to it. Simultaneously the people actually doing work are actually working and not checking their e-mail every nanosecond to see if they need to drop their actual work to explain their actual work to management. So then the middle management sends a cascade of instant messages and schedules meetings to get the people doing actual work to drop everything to explain their actual work. These meetings will inevitably contain complaints about not getting work done.
It's now even worse with AI in the middle. Instead of using LLMs to write easy to scan and digest bullet point e-mails they're used to expand bullet points into useless novellas.
My solutions to these problems are thus:
1. RSS - Automated systems should just emit RSS feeds with their normal status with separate feeds for exceptional conditions. Only in those actual "machine on fire" conditions are e-mails sent by such systems. Parties interested in constant updates just watch their feed reader and everyone has a single source of truth for event logs from the automated systems.
2. Automated systems should just file tickets automatically so everyone involved has a single source of truth and can all collaborate in one place. Even better if the ticket/bug tracker supports RSS because it becomes dead simple for anyone to follow feeds they're interested in and even set up system notifications for new issues.
3. Company/group wide e-mail policies that constantly remind everyone it's not a real-time medium and that filling everyone's inbox with noise is not effective communication. This can be enforced with automated delivery delays guaranteeing e-mail won't be immediately delivered as a safeguard against people using it instead of actual real-time channels.
4. Verbose e-mails are also rarely effective communication and shared LLM prompts that make e-mails shorter and clearer would also help.
Removing most of the noise from e-mail makes it more effective and can make it an actual communication medium. If e-mail becomes effective communication far less of everyone's limited lives needs to be spent zoning out in meetings where their only purpose is to "give a status update".
Back in the days of paper memos the literal cost and effort required to send them required the sender to really think about what they were trying to communicate and how to say it best. Because e-mail is essentially free it is widely abused since so little thought needs to go into its composition and delivery.
How you asked them why?
It could be more productive than being angry. Or not, but worth a try.
I have this even on slack. I prefer text because it gives me time to thi k before responding but I think some people just don't have very good reading comprehension. Or writing skills.
So they force everything to "let's set up a chat about this".
They sound like poorly run companies, management should be aware and dealing with both of these problems.
They're annoying companies to work at, yes. They're also highly profitable, so it's difficult to make the case that they're poorly run.
A highly profitable company can be poorly run and still survive exactly because there is so much more margin for error than for a company which is barely profitable (or worse).
Granted, that kind of situation is unlikely to continue indefinitely, but it certainly can happen.
Profitable companies are often very, very poorly run. The best run companies, in an absolute sense, are ones that are extremely close to breakeven on margin and thus have to shave every penny - my prototype for this would be Costco, for example.
Companies in industries where you can print money (for a while...) usually haven't actually been put under any duress, so any fool can manage them and look like a genius. It's in hard times that you discover whether you're a good manager or not, when the decisions made in good times come home to roost.
If you reduce a companies purpose to solely being "making money" then by that definition sure.
But in my opinion the worship of money and reduction of everything to being solely a dollar maximizer is one of the biggest problems that humanity has at the moment - it is a reduction in purpose by the blind and greedy.
My definition of a well run company is one that is still profitable, but has happy employees who are maximizing their potential and growth. Who is a good tax paying entity so that it contributes back to the society that is supporting it. Is making a healthy return for its shareholders despite all of this, and is not doing anything evil like producing toxic chemicals, harming vulnerable people or polluting the environment.
Is it idealistic? Yes of course it is. Our collective description of greatness should be to aim at perfection so that even falling short of it is still excellent.
Saying it must be well run because its profitable makes me sick, because that line of thinking feeds unrestrained greed, and is exactly the reason our state of capitalism is so unbalanced and full of greed right now.
Email chains can fail to converge. Yeah, the meeting could have been an email, but what if it was going to be 20 email back-and-forths? And not everybody is responding quickly?
You ask three people what we should do about a problem. They float ideas. You think the discussion is converging on a solution, and then one of them (who hasn't been heard from for the last three days) suddenly protests where the group is going, saying that they don't agree at all, that they have several concerns, that nobody talked to this other group that needs to be consulted, and so on. Then for that other group, nobody responds for a week because they're busy on something else.
A meeting can force people to say what they have to say, now, or be ignored. That forcing function has value.
And it's not (just) that "people refuse to do anything". It's that multiple people, doing things asynchronously, on different time rhythms, sometimes means that the group consensus advances v e r y s l o w l y, if at all.
> * When faced with some well-written, succinct email/text explaining both a problem and supposed solution, will "respond" with "let's discuss this" instead of an intelligent response, taking action as proposed, or even mentioning any particular concerns to be discussed / researched ahead of the meeting. They just need it to be spoon fed to them, and need to be "heard", before anything can happen.
You hit the nail on this, a lot coming from middle managers too who still think that a busy calendar of these meetings it means they are very productive. I remember a manager I worked with, he was so keen on having meetings, a discussion between me and a colleague and he overheard it? Meeting to discuss “the conflict”!! It was soul crushing experience thankfully i left quickly, only to know later he started having meetings for meetings, so in those meetings they discuss what they will discuss on the other meetings!
Also, there are some other sinister reasons, an email is an artifact that can be traced and searched, a meeting usually is just verbal communication and even meeting minutes get challenged later.
I've faced this same PR problem. Something is very wrong with a software development process when one developer can halt forward progress on the repo by simply ignoring PRs. One solution I've thought about is to automatically accept any PR that sits idle for 48 hours without comments or modification. After that, the reviewers lose the right to complain. If some nasty bug is later discovered, that's what git bisect is for.
Meetings are the broccoli of work – widely disliked, but probably good for us anyway.
If you don't like broccoli, it just means you're preparing it wrong. Don't steam it, boil it, or microwave it. Here's how I prep frozen broccoli.
Preheat your oven to 400ºF/200ºC.
As soon as the oven has preheated, put the frozen broccoli into a mixing bowl and drizzle 2tbsp / 30ml of olive oil over it, and toss with your fingers.
Spread the broccoli over a baking sheet, sprinkle a small amount of salt over it, and bake for 20 minutes.
Thanks. Will try that. The other way to enjoy it is eating it raw in a salad .. but yes "don't steam it, boil it, or microwave it"
A tweet I saw a few days ago: "This meeting could have been an email. In fact, it was. But no one replied. That's why it's a meeting now."
What bothers me most about meetings is their duration. There's no need to schedule hour-long meetings.
I firmly believe 20 minutes is the optimal amount of time to meet, introduce a problem and evidence, and make a decision that allows all parties to move forward aligned.
I suspect office work defaulted to 30 minute calls because of TV/Radio broadcasts in the early 20th century, but I haven't researched this theory further.
I think humans just prefer halves and quarters over thirds. So, you either get a full hour, a half hour, or a 15 minute meeting.
It's a joke, but taking it at face value, many informational emails are not written in a way that suggests a reply is wanted or necessary, in as much as many meetings are just something you sit through as a listener and not as an active participant.
If an email presents some new plan or policy as a "done deal" then what is the point of spending time replying to it?
A big reason is a lack of agency. I work with large organisations where people cannot or do not know if they can make an executive decision. What to do? Call a meeting with everyone who might have a view on it so that you can then make a decision.
The problem, of course, is when an important person is not available so a decision is not made and then when something comes up mid-week, we need to wait another week to have another meeting.
Give people guiderails, let them try (and fail sometimes) and watch them flourish. On the other hand, tell them that they need permissions from X, Y and Z and watch them do the minimum amount possible.
The problem is failure seems more costly than the 30-120 minute call that may align all necessary parties. I think a lot of effective work cultures have moved towards the "move fast and expect mistakes" mentality you describe, but most people/organizations are still carrying mentalities from the "old ways"
> tell them that they need permissions from X, Y and Z and watch them do the minimum amount possible.
ah, this, so much this
My dad used to joke that a meeting is where minutes are kept and hours are lost.
Buried in the pdf in different sections
> Managers attend meetings far more frequently and spend substantially more time in them than non-managerial employees.
> Separately, interactions with senior colleagues are associated with stronger wage growth
A meeting is called to coordinate or communicate. Wadge's law of meetings tell you which one is which.
But not all coordination is top down, sometimes you need your manager to go negotiate a point with another division.
And neither is all communication, most often you can impress on others the potential of a new approach or the problems with the existing one.
The only trouble for the neurodivergent among us is that "appearing to pay attention" is also communication, same goes for eye-contact or not stuttering.
Corolllary is that skip meetings at your own risk, decisions will be made and you won't be in the room where it happens. And don't be the person who is not welcome in meetings, that too eventually makes your pay suffer.
I am one of today's Ten Thousand (https://xkcd.com/1053/) to just now learn of this law.
"Wadge’s Law (of Meetings).
Before every formal meeting there’s a smaller, more exclusive, less formal meeting where all the important decisions are made.
This is based on decades of experience in academia and friends’ experience in industry and government. Sometimes there’s an even smaller, more exclusive, less formal pre pre meeting where all the decisions of the pre meeting are made. Maybe even a pre pre pre meeting … until you reach some guy deciding everything in the shower."
https://billwadge.com/2015/10/28/wadges-laws/
(pretty fun read, thanks)
Because we're social creatures. We're desperate to foster and measure social consensus. That's why we have so many meetings. We want to see the agreement / concession / enthusiasm / disagreement on people's faces, and then use the social forum to cow them into assenting.
Because this is a base intuition and inclination, we employ this clumsily even in cases where it's not really the right tool for the job.
This is the core of it. So much of business, engineering and product design is about navigating a network graph of people to discover requirements, coordinate expertise and make things happen in the real world.
I know many engineers would prefer to just focus on engineering, but creating something meaningful for people means working with and through people. Even the most hands-off, self-service SaaS products depend on this.
Take an extreme case like Minecraft, where a single person behind a computer created a billion-dollar company. I'd argue that even here a significant part of that success came from Notch's very active involvement in the community.
Indeed, the enjoyment in software engineering may come from problem-solving (for many of us at least) - but that means that at the end of it, you've created something that solves that client's problem; you've built something for them that they're now going to use. The requirements stage, and subsequent refining based on what the client needs to do, absolutely is the most important stage.
> a significant part of that success came from Notch's very active involvement in the community
I've never heard it argued otherwise, although it probably doesn't get emphasized enough. It was very interesting at the time to watch how closely he interacted with the community, asking opinions and listening, while also making them feel involved by being open about the details of what he was doing. It was a massively refreshing counter to the way the big game studios were coming across so arrogantly at the time, being certain they knew better than their users about what the users wanted. Notch's attitude created that community feel around the game, and made you feel unusually close to the development and even the decision-making processes. That in turn led to word-of-mouth advertising that resulted in Minecraft becoming one of the biggest selling games of all time.
Why do I feel every meeting has a rambling motormouth that will speak for at least 80% of the meeting, making the most obvious, remedial "points" (with illustrative anecdotes of course and repeating them over and over) and then keep the meeting running late?
Hey, it’s our new VP.
This sounds like a former CEO I used to work with. Huddled an entire team into a meeting g bc he wanted an update, proceeded to talk through 80% of the meeting time.
End result: someone was appointed to send an email with the update.
People with no social lives outside of work tend to do that. They have no one to talk to other then on meetings, so they talk a lot on meetings. They are not aware of what they are doing, but it is a consistent pattern.
It's simple.
It's the laziest and easiest way to get alignment.
Plus, Not everyone hates it.
It's nice to finally ask Mr A why they said Mr B should be working on login v2 instead of fixing bug b.
Management feels empowered and feels like they know what's going on if everyone meets.
> Why do we have so many meetings?
They help people with email jobs to feel important and show everyone else that they're doing something, while simultaneously reducing time available to the people with real work to do, which can then be used by the former group to apply pressure on them.
In my view meetings are the most powerful channel for social signaling which unfortunately is at least half the revealed job in software engineering. That was (and still is) the hardest thing for me to accept as the child of blue collar parents.
This. Seems like the more you sync with your manager, the more he/she likes you and your career seems to flourish. Nothing much to do with the quality of your thinking or work it seems. If I do my job but don't have a great relationship with my manager, to hell with my career. But if I sync with my manager everyday for even the smallest minutiae, I am seen as team player. Go figure.
Meetings make the cost of collaboration and uncertainty visible. As disruptive as they are I find them to be the most effective way to explain to less technical stakeholders why something is particularly complex or exactly why we need high degrees of certainty in seemingly unimportant portions of the product spec.
They also drive me crazy since we tend to have many of them with relatively little actionable output, but as others have said what tends to happen in the wake of these is the technical people backchannel our own conversations about what needs doing and the sequencing of what we should build to meet the evolving product vision.
What frustrates me is when I complain about there being many meetings on my calendar I'm told to just decline them, but then I'm effectively ceding authority since the time to voice opposition to a particular plan or task is in whatever meeting I'm declining.
Perhaps all of the above is more prevalent in product-led orgs rather than engineering-led orgs, I'm curious if people on the other side of the spectrum have different anecdotes.
A byproduct of working remote is the amount of human connection in general has gone way down. The only time I "see" the people I work with anymore is when we're on a meeting.
Meetings that could have been an email, in some ways, are replacing hallway and water cooler conversations. Are they a good replacement for that? Not really.
I have recently learned that meetings help with one thing we're really bad at, which is deadline and estimations.
Not meetings about deadline, or meetings about estimation, but the shared experience of having timed events associated with stakeholders and involved parties.
It's like an invisible cue system the brain adapts to and starts reacting/responding to in the form of scheduling and resource allocation. (Which can be a double edged sword for some people: e.g. when they wait until the meeting to ask a question)
Every time a meeting is canceled, an angel gets its wings
One thing that I've been wondering is if I could somehow transmit everything in my head somehow automatically into text so that an LLM can reasonably respond to almost everything about what I'm doing and how updated live to other people. Perhaps it could escalate the things that matter to me and meetings would be transformed so that others could pull things out of me faster than having to talk to me. I might even be completely obviated by sufficient encoding of self.
Perhaps the visible actions and text I write are all holographic-principle-like sufficient encoding of my invisible prior thought given sufficient information. Curious to see!
TL;DR People are pushed to specialize as companies grow and meetings are cartesian products of interests.
As responsibilities become increasingly important (more financial import), their work is divided into specialized slices for optimization, redundancy, and bus factor. The number of combinations of people that might be necessary to answer questions or provide guidance in decisioning expands exponentially (small slope, correlating to recruitment). If something in a meeting is considered missed, unsaid, or backtracked, the event is memorialized and pushes for more meeting with a larger audience. The people in large meetings self-select into smaller meetings around their specific vertical interests, in order to align with the interpreted decisions of the larger meetings.
Meeting bloat is the result of a conflux of human behavior, lossy communication, optimized behavior and competing interests. If it was a simple single reason, humans would have solved it long ago.
As our economy becomes more and more riddled with nonsense jobs that provide no economic value, it becomes increasingly important for the people in those jobs to create the impression of value (this is their only product), and that's what meetings are largely for. Excessive pointless meetings are not broccoli, even if meeting-attenders see higher wage growth than their peers. Excessive meetings are a symptom of an economy that's becoming more and more disconnected from the real world and from creation of real economic value.
https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediu...
So lets extrapolate to the very near future.
Getting work done will require combination of biological and silicon agents working together.
Will our silicon counterparts also want as many meetings as biological equivalent to get the same work done?
pre wfh times the meetings were restricted by the capacity of the meeting rooms in the office. It also required more effort to coordinate, schedule, preparation, etc.
Now just a click and summon people.
WFH and COVID accelerated meeting usage. I had a manager who claimed people also flocked to meetings during COVID and WFH because they were 'lonely.' But that same manager would kick people out of meetings if they weren't actively participating, too, so who knows.
That's a very good question. Let's set up a workgroup that meets once a week.
The fundamental problem is that brain-to-brain transfer of information is really hard. And face-to-face communication is often a better vehicle for it than written communication.
Figure 3 is interesting. After manager vs non-manager, the strongest predictor of meeting load is whether the work is in-office or remote, with remote & hybrid workers having both more and (much) longer meetings on average. That lines up with my experience, and is one of the big reasons I dislike hybrid work in particular.
I doubt their data would have supported this, but I do wish they had distinguished hybrid from fully distributed. Anecdotally, the one time I worked at a 100% distributed organization the meetings were efficient and the meeting load was low. Not quite as low as the fully in-office companies, but I think some of that was that we deliberately padded meetings with some social time as a stand-in for the water cooler.
The paper seems like a high school science project, but in my experience one common reason for having a meeting is this: Person A wants Person B (Person C's boss) to tell Person C to do something. That's it. So Person A slacks or emails Person B saying I need to get Person C to do this thing. Person B says oh we better have a meeting. The three get onto the meeting and Person B says "yeah so Person A was talking about this thing, I'm not really sure what it is...". And the meeting ends with Person C saying "ok I will do that".
All of this can be avoided in my experience by creating a culture of task assignment. Often I've seen the bug/issue tracking system used to facilitate this but you can use other applications. In this scenario Person A would open a bug detailing what they want done, and either assign it, or put it in the triage queue so Person B get assigned next. Person B reviews, makes any notes, then assigns to Person C. That's it. No meeting.
Because companies are too big, there is a lot of dead weight, overlapping responsibilities, and differing opinions. It's a hiring, management, and culture issue. Smaller companies have it better, and AI helps with that.
Boomers want to hear themselves talk they think meetings equal work. They are lazy and instead of learning on their own they require others to spoon feed the information to them.
Boomers are 62-80 years old. Where do you work with an average age like that?
Some reasons, occurring too often:
- Talking is confused with doing
- Design / Decision by committee alone is the path of progress, including attempts to improve itself.
Most people are unimpressive and mediocre.
you have so many meetings because you send billions of messages that have NO value, but create a wild number of different expectations accross the spread of those involved in any one project, and so meetings are one way to try and get people on the same page. but off course there are now millions of people entrenched in organisations who are messaging and meeting specialists,and for whom procedural tacticts are instinctive and will only defer and conduct actual work when under direct supervision from a superior.
I could talk about how deal with some of that, but, no.