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Comment by satisfice | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting thing to try and learn from. It is an abusive thing to enforce on everyone all the fucking time.

A meeting is a social event. Silent reading is not.

Why does every young clever person think that his preferred method is the only thing that makes sense? Oh I know. Because young clever people have not had time to live, grow, and appreciate the full spectrum of human productivity.

My meetings are for talking. Come prepared.

Also, documents for everything? Great way to slow everything down and discourage certain people from making suggestions at all.

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> My meetings are for talking. Come prepared.

That is what they do. They just happen to do the preparation together at the same time right before the meeting, instead of asking people read the documents on their own time. This way a meeting is self-contained.

Over a lengthy career I've discovered that rule number 1 in the engineering world is "Nobody ever reads anything." This holds true even if they were supposed to beforehand and swore on a stack of bibles that they would.

Interesting that you baselessly accuse the author of saying that his preferred way is the only thing that makes sense, followed immediately by "My meetings are for talking. Come prepared." Your attitude seems to be just as rigid as you imagine the author's to be. And I definitely wouldn't want to encounter that gratuitously sarcastic attitude of yours in a meeting or anywhere else, it'd definitely strike me as abusive.

Okay, so, I figure a post that goes "those darn kids in amazon senior leadership!" is probably not made entirely sincerely

How many "come prepared" meetings have you had where everyone in attendance had prepared? This format gives the space to read and discuss. Everyone has the same opportunity (often, the people with the least time to prepare in advance would be the people you most want feedback from).

The other interesting dynamic is that in many cases the eventual audience for the doc under review is an executive, and the discussion has the goal of refining it for that audience.

> Also, documents for everything?

I worked for a smaller company with this extremist philosophy, to the point that they forbade voice or text chat outside of scheduled meetings; all discussion had to be written in public Teams threads. The CEO also had a habit of dropping into random threads and micromanaging. I think it was bad for everyone, but for me it was completely paralyzing.

Chat apps are not documentation. What you are describing is just a moronic way of doing things and absolutely not documents for everything.

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