Ask HN: Why do I struggle to follow corporate meetings? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do I struggle to follow corporate meetings?

296 pointskypro263 comments

Hi HN, I've just got out of a meeting and like almost every non-technical meeting I have next to no idea what the discussion was about.

I find a lot of non-technical meetings go something like this:

"Hi guys, as you might be aware [Robert Smith] of the [communications department] has recently released his [quarterly review] of our ongoing [transformation strategy]. We've received a lot of positive feedback so far, but I wanted to give you all an opportunity to share your thoughts in this meeting. Would anyone like to go first?"

Then about half of the team (normally the same people) will jump into the discussion and somehow seem to know what the hell is going on.

Meanwhile I'm there wondering who is this [Robert Smith] of the [communications department]? What is the [transformation strategy] and why does it need a [quarterly review]?

Occasionally someone will ask what the [transformation strategy] is, but typically it won't be answered in a way that helps me understand what's going on because even more names and departments will be dropped and the strategy itself will be described in such a vague way that it means nothing.

I guess a concrete example that comes to mind was from a place I worked previously where they would talk about their "omnichannel" strategy a lot. Whenever someone asked what "omnichannel" meant it was described in a way that seemed to mean nothing, "a multichannel sales strategy", etc. About 6 months into the job I finally figured out we were just using it to refer to some extra functionality that we were working on that would allow customers to collect and return online orders from our regional stores. But this was never how it was referred to in corporate meetings.

Am I the only one who experiences this? I can't work out if there's a part of my brain that's missing that prevents me from understanding what's being discussed in these meetings or if this is a common experience. I'm very practically minded which probably doesn't help, but I worry I'm not making enough of an effort to understand what's happening in the business outside my personal bubble.

Does anyone struggle with this, or do you have any recommendations for people like me who do struggle to understand what's happening in corporate meetings?

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It's kind of deliberate. there's bullshitters, and bullshit-takers, and you are in the latter group. Setting the agenda and defining the terms is a way to exert power, in many ways far more important than any substantive outcome to the meetings. That said, quite a few managers are just high on their own supply and chasing a fashionable idea or doing a poor job of trying to explain whatever they were told in their last meeting. You don't have to assume malice.

You can try using some BS of your own; for example, say modestly 'I love [the strategic thing] but I've struggled to communicate it effectively to my team. How can I make it easier for them to understand?' which flatters the person running a meeting enough that they might be tempted to show off. Don't have a team? Invent one, just evoke the existence of some confused and dissatisfied co-workers who you are eager to motivate.

Keep notes on different people/ideas and give them a BS score out of 10 (nothing complicated). After a while you'll get a sense for what actually impacts productivity or business outcomes vs what's just the corporate cheer squad.

This.

Most bigger corporate meetings could have been an email with some bulletpoints on top with most important things everyone must know, and later then details for people that are interested.

But if it wasn't a meeting, where else would the management get a change to flex, pat their backs, do some ritual sucking up and self promoting and generally justify their existence?

OP: Just focus on your real work and responsibilities, ignore the corporate meetings as much as you can get away with. Unless you want to join management, in which case you have to start clapping loudly and play the game.

The fact that you're talking about "management" as some separate evil entity and not you coworkers who just want to help you and live their lives happily ever after, in the same way as you do, tells me a lot.

Tells me the poster has work experience.

Please spell out for us the lot it tells you, instead of just ominously hinting.

Sorry about that. Non-technical coworkers are just people with probably the same goal as you. Talking about management in this specific way tells me that they see their management coworkers as enemies, and not as equals. I don't think that's healthy.

Thank you!

Some managers are just team members with organizational skills, they're great. Others are ladder-climbers who use bullying and economic force to advance. The more hierarchical an organization,the more likely you are to find the latter type.

> Talking about management in this specific way tells me that they see their management coworkers as enemies, and not as equals.

How am I being a jerk here, pointing out the obvious truths. I don't treat other people as enemies. I'm just speaking my mind about systemic problems.

I don't book company wide meetings that are (semi-)mandatory and waste thousands of person-hour of work time for the company, just because I enjoy it and am in position that can do it. I try to be mindful about the communication I initiate and treat other's people time with respect. I write TL;DR in my emails and optimize for groups performance, not just my own self-interest.

The thing you should deduce from what I wrote is that instead of being self-optimizing stupid/naive/cynical person, I actually (possibly irrationally) care about my craft and efficiency of the group I belong to, and can do my own critical thinking, instead of accepting status quo uncritically.

After 30 years in the industry I can confirm that this is indeed the case. They only generate BS.

I would only add that you should try to avoid these meetings if at all possible.

Just say you have a pressing deadline that requires your full attention. Then continue coding.

You see, I try to efficiently build stand-alone opportunities to enthusiastically architect frictionless adoption of our Turbo Incabulators, thus creating compellingly extended multidisciplinary potentialities across our interactively strategized low-risk high-yield web-readiness platforms.

C'mon, I'm not the only one here who uses "The Corporate B.S. Generator" for all their meetings, am I? Am I? https://www.atrixnet.com/bs-generator.html

You may also appreciate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXW0bx_Ooq4

> You can try using some BS of your own

Oh man, I would never start playing some sitcom-style communication game. That seems like it could go very wrong, and be stressful and annoying even if it goes right.

The most important thing here is buttering people up. I've never seen any more of an effective strategy than that. Just being kind and saying you like their ideas is an incredibly effective way to influence their next steps.

I'd also add that the purpose of a lot of these "consultation" meetings is not consultation at all - they exist to announce a decision that was already taken before the meeting, or to give exposure (and thus clout) to the people who convened the meeting. Seems like the latter is probably the case here.

> Don't have a team? Invent one, just evoke the existence of some confused and dissatisfied co-workers who you are eager to motivate.

ah, Tibor...

Great analysis. Also, the level at which the OP is understanding the situation means that he is never going to leave the world of the bullshit-takers. Thus his best strategy is to work on continuously improving his technical competence so that he can be a higher-compensated bullshit-taker.

"I really love your strategic approach, and I think we should seamlessly impact our intrepid cloud-ready technology with another meeting to go more in depth. I would like you, or John Smith from Marketing, to restore backward-compatible partnerships between our team leads. That way we can continually seize efficient human capital. That will really synergise with our stakeholders. What do you think?"

And you can respond to whatever they say with a thinking nod while stroking your chin. And street-kids would say "bet", you simply say "hmhm, very agile."

You'll be CEO in no-time.

> That will really synergise with our stakeholders

This is so 2010s. You need to update your vocab. Let me FTFY

> That will really decentralize our stakeholders

Goddamit I cringed so hard. I just had flashback from my previous job.

I have also found that people use [strategic thing] as a way of keeping something at a higher level without going in to the details. Because once they get in to the details the grand plans start to break down.

I have been a part of a number of these high level strategy type efforts at my company. I have often found that I seem to be the cynical one against an onslaught of relentlessly optimistic people.

"Everything is easy to the one who doesn't have to do it."

One of the best planning exercises I've heard is asking every attendee to think of a way the suggested plan could go awry.

The genius is that failure scenarios are, by definition, detail-oriented.

Consequently, it's an easy bridge into the discussing the details that actually matter (i.e. those that could threaten the entire plan).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-mortem

Pre-mortems. In general I haven’t found them that useful as the teams/leads I’ve worked with generally have the risks covered already

They're more useful, the more disfunctional and rose colored glasses the org has.

This is a painfully cynical worldview. If you find yourself in a company where management is this ineffective, get out. Or at least move to a different department where people are genuinely working together. Companies (or departments) wouldn't actually last very long if management teams were as bad as you described.

> Setting the agenda and defining the terms is a way to exert power, in many ways far more important than any substantive outcome to the meetings.

No, setting an agenda is a way to give people a chance to prepare for a meeting and to keep the meeting on track. A meeting with an agenda sent out ahead of time is far more efficient than a meeting where people just show up and think of things to chat about.

> You can try using some BS of your own

Please don't do this. Believe it or not, it's actually really easy from the management side of the table to tell when someone is just laying on the flattery and trying to say all the right things to butter people up.

Engineers who try to "play politics" usually overestimate their ability to manipulate other people and underestimate other people's ability to see right through it. You may think you're just playing the game, but I guarantee it's coming off as patronizing to the genuine employees around you. Those genuine employees are the people you need to build trust with, and these political manipulation games will only do the opposite.

> Don't have a team? Invent one, just evoke the existence of some confused and dissatisfied co-workers who you are eager to motivate.

Now this is pure keyboard warrior fantasy material. Doing anything resembling this will destroy your reputation at the company in short order. Chronic liars and manipulators may not be called out in public, but their negative reputation will spread quickly among people in the know.

> Please don't do this. Believe it or not, it's actually really easy from the management side of the table to tell when someone is just laying on the flattery and trying to say all the right things to butter people up.

Actually it’s been shown that ass kissing and flattery are quite effective unfortunately.

> Engineers who try to "play politics" usually overestimate their ability to manipulate other people and underestimate other people's ability to see right through it.

Actually, engineers are often quite adept at manipulating social systems to their advantage. If you think engineers are just heads-down nerds without personal agendas they promote ruthlessly, you’re the patsy.

> Chronic liars and manipulators may not be called out in public, but their negative reputation will spread quickly among people in the know.

Seriously? Politics over the last 10 years come to mind. Bad behavior is often rewarded. Doesn’t mean you should partake, but I don’t call it cynicism as much as realism.

> > Chronic liars and manipulators may not be called out in public, but their negative reputation will spread quickly among people in the know.

> Seriously?

Why do you doubt that at all? It's literally what the parent comment suggested doing: Keeping track of different people and getting a sense for who impacts business outcomes versus who is all talk. This is what people do in general. It's not some magical skill that only engineers can have. We all observe who gets things done and learn who can't follow through over time.

These ideas that only engineers can see how things work and that once we're promoted to management we just become dumb robots incapable of seeing reality is ridiculous.

> Politics over the last 10 years come to mind. Bad behavior is often rewarded. Doesn’t mean you should partake, but I don’t call it cynicism as much as realism.

Politics isn't the workplace. If you're using hot-button public politics spanning the country as an analog for teams working together in a workplace, you're going to end up with some deeply flawed mental models of how management works.

>Politics isn't the workplace. [...] you're going to end up with some deeply flawed mental models of how management works.

I mean, I sort of agree... But on the other hand, it's literally called 'office politics' and is generally pretty analogous with 'public politics' (e.g. balancing diverse viewpoints to achieve a common goal). It's not really as binary as you are implying.

You are not promoted to manager. It is a different career choice, but the fact that you see it that way explains a lot about your position.

> You are not promoted to manager

This seems like a statement you could use to describe one’s own path, but not the path of others.

People absolutely are promoted to management positions. This cannot be disputed.

Whether the individual transitions into the role effectively and becomes a good manager is a separate thing.

I’ve worked with managers who started as devs, and took naturally to the role.

I’ve worked with horrible managers who started from the same place.

> but the fact that you see it that way explains a lot about your position.

What does it explain? You are implying it’s meaningful, but it’s impossible to engage with your position until you articulate it.

Ouchie, that's pretty nasty and uncharitable interpretation and feels like a needless attack to the poster :-/

There are people who decide early in their career to go technical and never change their mind.

There are people who decide early in their career to go management and never change their mind.

But there are a LOT of people in the middle, and that's been the overwhelming majority of people I (anecdotally) know in management roles - they were good at what they do so they were promoted to management - junior dev, senior dev, tech lead / architect... whopsie, now you're manager and you don't know how you really got there; or you found you are good at talking to customer, understanding their pain points, and are also good at helping and supporting your team, so you accept a promotion you never thought you would a decade ago. And any other number of permutations. But I do know any number of people who did not "make a different career choice". They simply were doing a good job and ended up a manager. Inertia is a more powerful career drive than many people acknowledge.

It seems to me people get tempted into management rather than promoted. It's a shitty job that they agree to do because the money is better and they like having power over others.

It feels we will have to agree to disagree. Very few people I know got into management for "power over others" - as most people and articles and lessons and training for managers will tell you - it's a common perception that managers have power.then you become manager and realize it's all constraints and targets and you have crap all power and you owe everybody everything - up down and sideways. I'm not saying that power-hungry sociopaths don't exist, absolutely they do, but I think by sheer numbers they are overwhelmed by regular folks just trying to do their job.

(Oh and, for many companies, project managers are paid less than senior developers, so it's not necessarily better money either)

It's a different career choice that leads to a higher salary ceiling and a higher status and power position in a way that is much easier to achieve than an equivalent individual contributor.

That's a lot of words to say "it's a promotion".

It's not a promotion! It's taking a sucky job that no one else wants because the money is better.

Plenty of companies do not have technical career ladders of any note or value.

It is often rewarded but generally people will remember it much longer than good things and it will show at marginals.

You are quite right that it is a cynical outlook, but (it seems to me) OP is describing an environment where buzzwords take precedence over making sure everyone understands the goals and path toward them, and has made extensive good faith efforts to figure out just what corporate is trying to say.

My suggestion is not that OP should play politics (which s/he would likely neither enjoy nor prosper at) but rather do some very basic tests to get a feel of what is actually going on and avoid possibly ending up as a convenient scapegoat if a manager's grand plans don't pan out.

I fully agree that anyone stuck in an actually dysfunctional corporate environment should look for an exit where they can focus on actually working as a team.

> it's actually really easy from the management side of the table to tell when someone is just laying on the flattery and trying to say all the right things to butter people up.

How do you know you didn't just catch the people who are bad at it?

I think most managers are afraid to think how the people who like them are using them. That fear is intensified by past decisions around liking: when you've promoted someone who was good at manipulating you, terrible at the work, and now everyone associates their success with your success.

One reason why good judgement becomes essential the higher up you go. If you just "believe in management", managers below, above and across from you will saddle you with likeable and incompetent people.

> No, setting an agenda is a way to give people a chance to prepare for a meeting and to keep the meeting on track. A meeting with an agenda sent out ahead of time is far more efficient than a meeting where people just show up and think of things to chat about.

I go so far as to reject meetings that don't have an agenda specified. Either that, or (if I'm feeling generous) reply to the meeting invite with a "Maybe" and ask specifically for an agenda.

^ This.

If a meeting doesn't have an agenda, then it has no terminating condition, and is therefore an infinite loop until it times out.

Don't go to those meetings.

And more constructively, don't create those meetings.

An agenda takes ~3 minutes to add; there's no excuse for not having one.

E.g. Agenda for this comment: (1) express agreement, (2) clarify what's toxic about agenda-less meetings using computer science analogy, (3) appeal to reader to improve their own behavior, (4) preemptively rebut complaints about suggested behavior. Done.

I wish this was enforced in meeting systems across corporations unless all participants elect not to have one (appreciate certain sensitive or perhaps social meetings might not need this)

> Chronic liars and manipulators may not be called out in public, but their negative reputation will spread quickly among people in the know.

I desperately wish this to be true, but the years spent watching them get promoted and rewarded tells me otherwise.

I have observed that even when all parties know someone is full of BS, it can still be quite difficult to fight against it. It takes much more energy to debunk than lie. Lies, once spoken take on a weird truth of their own.

This is such an important, lucid point. One of the most important skills I have had to develop is to see through "reality control", which constitutes a much larger part of communication than we're comfortable talking about in most settings.

> Companies (or departments) wouldn't actually last very long if management teams were as bad as you described.

I take it you've never worked for a FAANGM.

> Companies (or departments) wouldn't actually last very long if management teams were as bad as you described.

That is only true for companies in a highly competitive market. There are all kinds of markets, some are very competitive (e.g., the market for a commodity like gasoline or flour), some are total monopolies or oligopolies (e.g., the market for smartphone operating systems, or for electricity or water in your city) and many are some hybrid somewhere in between.

The less competition a company has to face, the more they are able to grow dysfunctional while still staying profitable, thus avoiding any serious pressure to curb the dysfunction.

See https://open.lib.umn.edu/exploringbusiness/chapter/1-5-monop... or any intro microeconomics text for more.

Also, even in cases that are more competitive, managers are human and make mistakes, and the feedback cycle might be so long that a lot of dysfunction can happen before it's time to pay the piper and a whole division has to be sold off or laid off. This is most likely to happen at companies huge and diversified enough.

I think you have been fortunate enough to never work at a place like the one OP described. I have, although only once. If you find yourself in such a place, yeah, take it as a sign to get out.

Have you ever been management at a Fortune 500 company?

I have and, while the parent may be a bit on the cynical side, you're take is boarding on dangerously naive for anyone who wants to understand the non-engineering part of an org.

My experience is that the real path to success is to do cynical things naively. That is, if you cynically see things how they are, and act accordingly, you won't get very far. Management in large orgs (and many small ones as well) requires "true believers" so to speak.

Meetings are a lot about asserting power, but the most successful people in large orgs genuinely believe that those people asserting power are better than them, and hope to one day be as powerful.

Flattery works insanely well, but it works better coming from a true sycophant, one who genuinely aligns their personal success with your opinion of them. I've been the object of flattery many time, and to be honest, it does feel good and work even when you know it's some what BS.

> Now this is pure keyboard warrior fantasy material.

I literally laughed out loud when I read this, since I was more or less told to engage in this type of behavior to succeed by senior leadership when I worked in a large org. Inject yourself into projects that didn't need you, find ways to make yourself relevant, do whatever it takes to grow your team (because your authority is directly proportional to the number of people under you).

Personally I think that entire culture is reclusive, so left that role very quickly and stick to IC work and smaller leadership roles on teams that do more resemble the world you're describing. But make no mistake, parent is accurately depicting the realty at the majority management roles in large corporations.

Please stop this. This is the worst kind of technical cynicism.

Tech people are not the people with 'real jobs' while everyone else 'bullshits'.

Terms are above your head because they generally relate to operations outside the scope of your knowledge.

(Edit: 'omnichannel' could mean a lot of things, it's definitely a bit 'buzzwordy' but it almost assuredly refers to some cross functional project of some kind that the OP is not aware of. This immediate implication of 'things I don't understand are bullshit' is antisocial and a bit glib - maybe understandable for some young people (?) but still, it's a problem to default to this posture.)

The biggest 'bullshiters' tend to be on the tech side, who go on and on about technology that is not needed, this is because they can very easily talk past others on domain knowledge.

I sit on both sides of the fence, and as soon as I get on the business side, I immediately see it - tech people 'controlling' the schedule and much of everything else because of their domain knowledge, often without the self awareness to recognize what's going on, operating with the implicit assumption that their need to push back 2 months for some refactor is inherently more important that other needs.

And yes - a lot of effort is filler and inefficient - that is probably the real culprit here.

Do not heed any of this ridiculous Machiavellian advice (aka 'keeping notes on people'? WTF?). Assume the best, do your jobs, obviously some people will BS, oh well, move on.

this is true. its also the case that the various 'business' people have very different goals, very different terminology, and a much squishier sense of success.

alot of the 'business' conversation is carried out largely in subtext. you can learn quite a bit about the internal machinery of the company where you work by just learning to read that.

there _is_ quite a bit of useless sleeze on the business side. but to believe all of it is, and that somehow you have a better view of inter organization struggle and market response than all of those who do it full time is naive and counterproductive.

> Assume the best, do your jobs, obviously some people will BS, oh well, move on.

The reason this is common sense on business side and much less on tech side is that tech side is much cleaner in terms of relationships. Otherwise said, bullshiting is less common and people are not used to it.

As you said, the moment you cross to in between or to management, bullshiting and lying becomes normal. Moreover, sales and management gets rewarded for lying and their words are rarely checked for accuracy. I have seen them lying with straight face about our progress or capabilities of our software one too many times. I have also seen them lying to damage other employees. The worst stab in back, lying about other people or situation I have seen were not coming from tech. Sure, I have seen tech people lying, but it is visible for higher up more quickly - and they are not in situations in which they can do as much damage in the first place.

Second thing, tech people controlling schedule is a good thing. Writing from place where tech people often dont control that and the delays and pissed off customers caused by that refactoring not being done are very very real thing too. Everywhere where tech people did not controlled schedule was hot mess - and even relationships got much much worst. Because business then blamed tech for consequences of unmaintainable software (meaning absurd amount of bugs, deadlines not really met etc) and tech people resented business for causing it all.

Tech people (or anyone) controlling the schedule is good in the sense that absolute monarchy is good... if the leader happens to be good.

Tech teams are just as capable of dicking around or diving down bullshit rabbit holes that don't deliver value as anyone else.

To parent's point, I find a productive skill is humility: the person on the other side of the desk/screen is assumed to be trying to say something useful, albeit in language or concepts I don't understand.

And specifically, humility whether it's tech or non-tech controlling the schedule: each know something the other doesn't.

> Tech teams are just as capable of dicking around or diving down bullshit rabbit holes that don't deliver value as anyone else.

You can dock around even when business controls schedule. It is just different dicking around - you make it seem as if you have done work, but skip on parts like "checking whether you broke something" or "testing it" and waste rest of time in discord.

Nevertheless, if actual issue is laziness then it is not that hard to eventually figure it out and address that. Even when tech co tools schedule, business tend to have way more control including political one. And genuinely, both dicking around and rabit holes are minor issues compared to what can happen when people bullshit in software development.

The question of schedule control is not about who bulshits tho. It is about systematic motivations and consequences either arrangement has. And business controlling it is in my experience as disastrous as having programmer to do sales.

"As you said, the moment you cross to in between or to management, bullshiting and lying becomes normal."

I definitely didn't say that!

I said 'the moment you cross to the business side you see the technical side bullshitting'.

Step out of the bike-shedding technobabble wars for a minute and you'll see technical organizations are more like cats than dogs ... refused to be herded or do tricks, they do 'what they want' and 'think it's right'.

I will admit there is a degree of overt candor in the technical side that is worse on the business side, but there's enough lack of self awareness among techies as to the level of the value of what they are producing, technical debt, trying cool new things, pie in the sky thinking etc.. 80% of technical work should be more or less like 'construction' not 'research' - admittedly that 20% is also quite rare and critical.

The kinds of BS-ing and inefficiency on 'both sides' are different and that's what the OP might be struggling with.

And 'Sales' - that's another dimension entirely - don't worry or even assume anything about 'honesty' there, they bring in the $$$, that's the fuel that drives everything else. Don't assume they are liars necessarily other, it's just a different form of communication.

Refactors of course come down to a tradeoff. I've always see it come down to, "do you want it on the deadline you set, or do you want it maintainable after?"

"By the deadline" is always chosen, and then management gets to complain about the incompetent developers who are just trying to deal with the hackathon-quality code they've been forced to write.

This seems good but I've never seen a manager who allows their subordinates to complete a two-phrase sentence. How have you trained yourself to speak fast enough to get this question out?

That's an honest question, and a good question. A positive sign.

It depends on the company. Some companies really are this bad. If you haven't been in one, you're lucky. If you are in one, it can be hard to recognize for a while (see OP) but the key is to recognize it so you can get out of there.

I completely agree. So many tech people defending their domain with some technobabble that most people are afraid to challenge because they think it'll make them look stupid.

Based on post, those sentences had actual meaning and OP just did not understood. Take multichannel thing - it was real existing functionality. OP just had no idea what it refers to.

You are doing people disservice here. If op followed your advice, op would look like idiot to teammembers.

Alternatively, this could be a comment written by management about developers, who when asked about why they are missing their delivery date, rattle off a list of microservices which need to be refactored, which they refer to by their Lord of the Rings code names.

Sometimes when people don't understand something else, it isn't bullshit, it's simply something they don't understand.

Precisely.

Consider this recommended reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

> 'I love [the strategic thing] but I've struggled to communicate it effectively to my team. How can I make it easier for them to understand?'

That is very transparent, by the way. If your goal was to hide that you don't understand it, you didn't achieve it.

You will probably get a better answer if you are honest, anyway. If you never worked with [the strategic thing], you should not be expected to know it.

This advice is wrong on so many levels. All the engineers do the True Work, everyone else is just bullshitting. Yeah sure. Could it be that you don't understand their jobs in the same way "they" don't understand your job? Who knows.

David Graeber wrote a whole book about this called Bullshit Jobs

> You can try using some BS of your own;

Don't you worry about Planet Express, let me worry about blank.

It's abstraction, but for things you don't care about. I was an engineer early in my career and I felt exactly as you. All that stuff was in one ear and out the other and I couldn't for the life of me make sense of it.

I moved to product and finally got it. A PM can't explain the same concepts/ideas/initiatives/etc every meeting because the whole meeting will be spent doing that. They give it a name.

Take the strategy example. In the early stages of forming this strategy, part of the PMs job is to communicate it lots of groups of people. They have the same meeting 1-10 times depending on the size of the company. Then everyone who needs to know about this strategy has an understanding of what it is. Then the PM gives it a name. The next meeting, rather than having to explain it from scratch, they call it by its name.

You're either not paying attention when it is first explained (I don't blame you, a lot doesn't matter to an engineer), or you weren't invited to the meeting it was explained.

You are absolutely right. Also on the part that it makes sense that you don't know since a lot of the information you receive isn't necessarily relevant to you as an engineer.

If something is unclear, the normal path forward is to ask a clarifying question. I wonder why OP hasn't mentioned or tried this at all. In my experience people are happy to answer these kind of questions because they don't want to lose their audience.

I also wonder why engineers are OK with the concept of technical abstractions, but are somehow in despair when business people use business abstractions. Most people here understand how abstractions are useful.

Why would anyone hold business people to higher standards than yourself? Do you really think that if you would explain a technical abstraction everything is immediately clear to anyone outside your domain? Surely not. Then why expect better from coworkers from other domains who are just people too?

I do ask questions. If it's a smaller meeting within my team I'll always ask questions if I'm not following. It's when it's department-sized meetings that I struggle. In these I find it harder to follow what's being discussed and I also need to balance my need to ask questions with the need of the meeting to proceed smoothly.

I think you're right though. There have been a few occasions in my career when I have seen corporate narratives form around projects I've led technically. In those instances I know with certainty that what's being said is mostly corporate BS that dances around the specific what, whys and how's of the problems we're solving. But to your point, that's probably for practical reasons. A lot of the time the details I'm concerned with from day to day just aren't that important as you move up the org structure.

I guess what I'm confused about is how other people seem to follow along in these meetings. I don't understand how some people seem to know everyone and about every project. Even if I have some awareness of someone or some project, I rarely know enough to follow much of what's being said, and certainly not enough to contribute anything useful.

I know I'm doing something wrong, I just don't know what it is. I do try to pay attention, but that doesn't seem to help me much. I'm worried it's more to do with the fact that I struggle with vagueness and corporate discussions are full of vagueness.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm following along more than I realise and it doesn't really matter that I don't know all the details about some project. Perhaps it's not that I can't contribute to a discussion if I don't know any details, but that the only contributions I care enough to make would involve details. For example, you don't need to know what [project xyz] is to ask who's leading it or if there's documentation on confluence.

> For example, you don't need to know what [project xyz] is to ask who's leading it or if there's documentation on confluence.

Bingo, there is a pattern to most business problems (not that the generic corporate template for problem solving is right solution) and if the know the pattern, you can engage with it. You only need a few high level details to have enough context, so some people can go really wide and have a superficial view of wide breadths of corporate initiatives.

> In these I find it harder to follow what's being discussed and I also need to balance my need to ask questions with the need of the meeting to proceed smoothly.

I think this is a key issue/insight. The larger full-department meetings will inevitably have parts to them that various people won't understand. It might be a 10-minute section about sales strategy that the engineers don't understand, or a 15-minute section about a technical issue that marketing doesn't understand. When you get that many people together across different disciplines with different areas of expertise, it's inevitable that this will happen.

The important thing is knowing what you (as an individual) need to understand, and if there's something in that bucket that you don't understand in the moment, hopefully the atmosphere is inclusive enough that you don't feel embarrassed or penalized asking a question, and the question can be answered quickly enough that it doesn't bog down the meeting. And on the flip side, if there are things you don't need to understand, you just accept that and wait until meeting conversation moves to something that's relevant to you.

You could argue that this type of meeting is horribly inefficient, and you'd be right. But sometimes inefficient meetings are just necessary, because doing it in a way that seems more efficient turns out to not actually be that efficient (or it is, but it's not thorough enough, and you end up with people missing critical information that they need to know). But this is also why this type of meeting (hopefully!) doesn't happen often, like maybe only once per quarter.

If you're in this type of meeting once a week, then something is wrong. Either your company is terrible at internal communication, or the person inviting you has misunderstood your role. A quick side conversation with the meeting organizer after the meeting is over should hopefully clear things up, and maybe excuse you from further attendance.

> I guess what I'm confused about is how other people seem to follow along in these meetings.

Why are you so sure they do? I mean, yes, certainly there will be some people in these meetings whose job function aligns pretty well with everything discussed. But there will also be others, like yourself, who sit there and listen (or pretend to listen), but don't really understand a lot of what's being said. They just don't admit to anyone else that this is the case, so you might think that they follow along but just don't have much to say.

> I know I'm doing something wrong, I just don't know what it is.

I don't think you're doing anything wrong. Consider your day-to-day job. Do you think you have the necessary information to do your job effectively most of the time? If so, then it's fine that you don't get much out of these meetings. If not, it's still not certain that your inability to understand these meetings is the reason. It's possible your direct manager doesn't give you enough context (either one-on-one, or in smaller team meetings), or maybe there are other meetings that you should be invited to but aren't.

Please don't immediately assume you're at fault here. Meetings -- especially those with a lot of attendees -- are just these big amorphous things that are often not very useful to many people attending. That's just how corporations work, for better or worse.

In those giant meetings if I couldn't get out of them I just pretended.

< I also wonder why engineers are OK with the concept of technical abstractions, but are somehow in despair when business people use business abstractions. Most people here understand how abstractions are useful.

Because business 'abstractions' are often buzzwords or intentional jargon, that hide the simplicity of what actually lies underneath. Whereas software abstractions are genuine abstractions of the complex mechanism that underlie software.

It's funny how many comments like yours are insisting that, of course everyone knows what's going on, they just have more context and relevant expertise -- obviously it makes sense to them and they're being totally productive, you're just not keeping up...

... and yet 8 months ago there was a discussion[1] that revealed that many such meetings were actually built on foundations of sand, and infected with false domain beliefs and double-illusions of transparency[2]. Where someone had to come in and say, "wait, stop, explain all this like I'm an idiot" before anyone could actually get on the same page.

One example[3]:

>>I get pulled into a meeting about something that I have no context on because it touches my area of expertise, and the discussions have apparently been stalling out.

>>I brace myself to be the idiot. I'm going to waste everyone's time asking questions that everyone knows the answer to, and I just got looped in, so everyone's going to feel like they need to walk through all the super-obvious stuff to satisfy the one guy who didn't do his homework.

>>So I start asking questions, and slowly begin to realize that nobody in the room has any idea what they are talking about.

Another[4]:

>>This is me all the time haha sometimes I really am just "stupid" and the only one in the room without a clue, but many many times my stupidity has revealed no one really has any idea what they or the others are talking about.

So yes, I don't doubt that sometimes what you're describing is what's going on. But also, the OP may be deeply aware of something others don't realize.

[1] Main link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28942189

[2] https://learning.subwiki.org/wiki/Double_illusion_of_transpa...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945382

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28952838

Several times on email lists or in Slack channels, I’ve stuck my neck out and said stuff along the lines of “Whenever anyone asks a question about this stuff, people throw out these code words and obscure references to internal projects, and for people new to the process like me, it might as well all be Japanese. You can tell me to find it on the “foo server”, but if I don’t know what the “foo server” even is, that doesn’t help! Where can I find the beginner’s guide to doing this stuff for someone who has zero experience with it?” I’ve had numerous people ping me privately afterwards to thank me for asking the “dumb” questions because they all had the same questions and were afraid to ask and look stupid.

Agree that it's an abstraction that OP doesn't know the definition of, but there's also a tendency for people to

* over-abstract (where you could replace the abstraction name with a slightly more verbose but clearer definition)

* over-generalize (it's a meeting about handling returns in multiple physical locations but they keep talking about "channels" instead of physical locations)

* propagate abstractions without actually understanding the underlying concrete implementation (they know omni-channel means having multiple ways to return, but not exactly which ones)

But yeah as the consumer of abstractions you have to dig into the definition and understand the context in which it's applied in order to understand what's going on

I think a lot of confusion comes from meetings with no agenda/context. The organizer should be required to include a reasonable context for what is going to be discussed and decided in the meeting. I’ve only worked in one company where this was widely adhered to and it was amazing (meetings often declined without agenda on invitation). Before and since, I often just have no idea what I’m walking into and tend to think of my best questions after it’s ended. If I had some time to view the agenda, pre-read the materials (slide deck, etc), and collect some base level thoughts before having 2 slides per minute of content shoved in front of me; then I’d be better prepared to participate IN the meeting.

As my career has matured, I’ve just become better at making sure I’m up to speed and understand (at least conceptually) the topics at hand. I also build relationships with everyone such that I can have sidebar conversations and seek clarity on things when needed outside the meeting. Also, have become pretty good at just filtering/ignoring the stuff that’s not important (to me).

I wish meetings were held in textual form (like a Slack channel). Reading the history and being able to search through it would make it a lot easier to understand context.

Similar to one other commentor, I wonder whether a text-based format (perhaps email/wiki) could be a more effective use of everyone's time?

(that plus the ability to question and correct aspects of the project asynchronously could compare favourably to spoken meetings, where details could be forgotten or misinterpreted over time, and where bandwidth for audience feedback is usually limited)

I'll provide slightly less cynical thought, may or may not help:)

I was purely technical for first 20 years of my career. I never understood meetings like this. I never cared for meetings like this. I assumed there's no value or meaning for meetings like this. They didn't impact me and people can BS each other as much as they want.

I was right? From a personal perspective. I did my technical work, and the org changes and sales strategy and client relationships and wording on contracts did not seem to daily impact my work. You can spend an entire, happy, sane career in that way.

Few years ago I ended up what can best be described as middle management. It is now my JOB to understand what the heck is going on at a certain level, and it is in some way easier. My goal becomes less "Build Server to these specifications" and more about "Help client achieve this outcome". Just like there's a set of language that has developed around "how to build a server" and "how to create a webpage", there's a language around "how to achieve a business outcome". And they'll sound equally gobblety-gook to each other.

A business development manager may believe all techies are interchangeable and building servers is the easy part, hard part is sales and keeping client happy. A pure techie may believe that all managers are bullshitters and hard part is infra/code. I'm sufficiently recent to both sides that I can see both aspects if I squint, kind of like that optical delusion that's like two faces or one vase depending on how you look.

If you genuinely WANT to understand these meetings... you can't go in them cold. You won't understand language and background by starting from the middle. Talk to your management and ask them: what are your goals? What are your priorities? How do we make this team, business unit, company succeed, at strategic level? This will hopefully give you a framework to then start fitting little nuggets you hear into.

Good answer. I'll add that as a middle manager, it's your job to take a large umbrella strategy and break it down into actionable terms for your team. I think this is the root of the OPs problem. These meetings are for disseminating a goal/strategy that is set near the top of the organization. It has to be broad and generic in order for different groups to enact. It's up to the management of each team (whether its sales or engineering) to translate the company goals into specific goals for the team that are understandable.

This suggests OP shouldn't be in this meeting, and instead should join a separate team-focused "translation" meeting.

or maybe just scrape meetings and sent an easy to understand email which summarizes everything in 3-4 minutes.

Could save a lot of wasted time and energy

As a middle manager with that background, I would think the lesson is that you should make a better effort to brief the engineers on what context they need for meetings rather than let them linger in the state of feeling like it's all pointless.

Agreed; I don't know the requestor's background, org structure, role, and why are they in those specific meetings in the first place. There are any number of activities that their manager can do and improve, but question as I interpreted it was "What can I do / what is wrong with me / how can I improve".

I've not been a dev for very long, but I don't care for the "build to these specifications" approach. I like to know what outcome I'm helping achieve and why it matters because I think that knowledge helps achieve the outcome. This is part of why I enjoy software consulting.

I agree, but I have seen people of all kinds and preferences.

I've actually been stopped couple of times when I was explaining background - literal line: "Thanks Nikola, but I don't need the context - just tell me what the build and I'm happy:)". This was a team member who was a sysadmin, then tech architect, then decided knowing background and being responsible for outcomes was not contributing to his quality of life, and went back to sysadmin, and lived very happily ever after in carefully managed ignorance. I've seen a number of people who have decided their happiness is in scope management. I don't work like that, for now, but I fully understand that perspective.

If you genuinely WANT to understand these meetings... you can't go in them cold.

This. If you don't understand any of these corporate meetings, ask your direct manager to explain. If you want to keep that question private, ask during your regular 1-on-1. Or, if you know your teammates have the same problem, ask during a regular team meeting. (I'm assuming you have both meetings on some regular cadence, if not, run away!)

Hopefully your boss can explain it in plain language. If not, run away!

This is a great answer.

It’s easy to assume someone else’s job is simple when you don’t understand it.

I bet we all know a few “Business” people that assume sysadmin is just turning on machines, and programming is really simple and easy.

But the reverse happens all the time too, where “technical” people assume the business jobs are easy. That sales, management and marketing are easy.

None of the jobs are easy. Lack of understanding the difficulty is not evidence of simplicity.

It's probably some blend of you not being in that domain + intentional vagueness.

I used to write about omnichannel marketing, so I love that you gave that example. As the "explainer", I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the hell I was explaining. If you visited the website of one of the major omnichannel vendors, you'd mainly see a lot of inspirational fluff that was almost completely devoid of meaning. At the same time -- there was actual software being built and actual changes being made to the businesses that bought into omnichannel. So it's not nothing, but humans are built to deceive each other and a good deal of this corporate speak is part of an intricate dance of deception, built around advancing careers and justifying budgets and headcounts. Any good lie contains a measure of truth.

You can, if you put your mind to it, learn enough of the "language" to sit there and blabber to the execs about it and if you are, let's say, 60% comprehensible everyone will nod their heads and either politely ignore the other 40%, or, like you, believe that the 40% of chaff is actually something. But if you don't feel like you fit in with the babblers, it'll be harder for you than it is for them.

I like your point about the "language" - as you said, there's a measure of truth, but there really is quite a lot of translation involved that may or may not include a good dollop of BS.

(source, designer in marketing. The BS is useful to trojan horse actually useful concepts to certain tiers of management.)

Make friends with folks on the business side, and ask questions, as many as you can, including 'I didn't understand what this meeting was about, could you please explain? ' and 'who is this guy and what is his role?'

This has practical implications for you beyond corporate meetings : it will allow you to prioritize what's important in a much better way, will allow you to prevent bad things happening later on because you'll know when to say no early in the process , and will allow you to make better technical decisions because you'll know the business implications or what you're working on.

It takes time (I've been there), and the key is essentially to learn your environment, and what the people outside your bubble do. You won't find the answer in books, so you'll have to ask.

As a technical person, you have a natural moat around your castle. Technical work is difficult, complex and requires years of training and experience.

Business and management work is... not nearly as complex. But the people doing that work have the same highly complex brains as you do. They can handle the same deep complexity as you. So with all this extra mental space, they add layers and layers of complexity to seemingly simple business processes. This complexity builds the moat protecting their turf from others. It creates the irreplaceability that you get for free.

Most of this complexity has no clear business purpose (bureaucracy). Some of this complexity is fiction or invented languages (bullshit). It is all designed to exclude outsiders and prevent anyone not on the inside from being able to tell what is going on or easily get anything done.

Businesses are quite complex. A lot of bureaucracy starts as an attempt to organize and simplify the problem space.

There are simply too many decisions for one person to make and informal processes fall apart at scale.

This is also where things take on a life of their own. Without strong guidance, you end up with the rules becoming more important than reality.

> Most of this complexity has no clear business purpose (bureaucracy)

Bureaucracy has a very clear purpose. In business, politics, or otherwise.

Bureaucracy makes change difficult and slow.

Bureaucracy should be applied when you have a working solution to your problems and you don't want anyone (new devs, new managers, external forces) to change it.

Bureaucracy is often prematurely applied, in an attempt to "bring order." This cannot work. Bureaucracy applied to chaos cements the chaos into place.

Yes! Bureaucracy is helpfull. Sometime, bureaucracy prevents more bureaucracy. The issue is that it is hard to understand how or why it was set up, and to differentiate bad bureaucracy from good bureaucracy. Both look the same and feel the same. Both can be simplified. Only, when you simplify bad bureaucracy, you can get whatever. If you simplify good bureaucracy, you will definitely end up worse, at least for a time.

This is absolute poetry. It's like the Zhuangzi meets Dilbert.

The bureaucracy that can be changed is not the true bureaucracy.

Sure, not all bureaucracy is misused, it can have a good function in governance. But it absolutely can be used to extend and protect power as well. It is a tool, plain and simple.

Bureaucracy is organization. If you build something complex, you need a lot of humans to do it. But the humans need organizing principles, common goals, divisions of labor and leadership.

To not understand that, and like some of the comments above to place technical work of an IC above that is ridiculous folly. Skyscrapers and bridges and big complex things like software requires human organizational structures which we view as 'bureaucracy'.

One way to really understand the organisational BS phenomenon is to study the really old books on administration. Read China's Han Feizi, Legalism; India's Chanakyan Arthashastra; Perhaps even Machiavelli (less recommended - since he was not really a hands-on leader dealing with issues of the day actively). In these works you will see naked desires of individuals expressed clearly.

The men who established bureaucracies truly saved humanity from collapse, from utter chaos; by establishing laws and regulations, they restrained the animal within man, even without having any technology. I consider the establishers and enforcers of law the least appreciated in human history. It is a humongous task, to take up utter entropy and convert it into a semblance of civilisation, where the animal in man is kept within limits.

These things were invented long back, 2000+ years ago, and the formations have stood the test of time. They are still in use, the same ruthlessness is used to control human impulses. However, at a shallow level, our language and our "aspirations" have moved on. So we like to speak in more flowery language, hide the animal in man in public, and have forgotten why were the laws and regulations put in place by our ancestors.

I believe human regulation, through means other than bureaucracy is on the way. This alone can help humans get rid of the need to BS. With technology there is a way to combine both education/training & laws/reguations. In place education/training allows for "kind correction" while automated punishment will ensure "harsh correction". Both are needed for successful existence of human civilisation.

Just got Arthashastra. It’s amazing. Han Feizi is next on my list.

I know it's not what you are going for, but this reads like the opening to a dystopian novel - maximum control over our impulses leads to maximum coordination but at what cost? Without some disorder there is only incremental advancement and life is boring. This isn't universally good.

incremental advancement > blowing ourselves up in exuberance

tolerable life > interesting life that ends in blow up

good enough > good

I feel "universal good" is too high a standard (pure fantasy even) for our species. I feel our species may disappear from the planet or with the planet at any arbitrary moment in the future; we seem not to recognise how fragile our existence truly is.

It feels like there’s a middle way here, between these extremes, that would be the best to follow :)

Thanks for the recommendation, comments like this is exactly why I come to HN.

Disagree on business and management work not being complex. It often involves a lot more uncertainty and you often don’t have enough data.

This is seductively true-sounding but I don't think it's true.

Imagine a business person saying, "Oh, programmers protect their work by making it needlessly complex. Every few years they invent new tools and insist that the old ones are broken, so that they can re-implement the same features over and over. Today they say it's vitally important to switch to the new thing, jquery or docker or react or whatever it is this month, and five years from now they'll say it's just as important to get rid of it. That's how they make sure they'll always have a job."

That's the mirror image of what you're saying. Perhaps some of those "layers and layers" really are useless but most of them are probably to satisfy auditors or something similarly opaque.

That businessperson would be correct too.

> Imagine a business person saying, "Oh, programmers protect their work by making it needlessly complex. Every few years they invent new tools and insist that the old ones are broken, so that they can re-implement the same features over and over. Today they say it's vitally important to switch to the new thing, jquery or docker or react or whatever it is this month, and five years from now they'll say it's just as important to get rid of it. That's how they make sure they'll always have a job."

Would they be so wrong? The state of the art is advancing, and these re-implementations can be huge improvements...but aren't always. The tools/techniques often seem to be used outside the domain where they're important (e.g. Big Data tooling used on data sets that can be processed on a nice laptop) or are so short-lived the switching cost is never reclaimed (e.g. always using the trendiest Javascript framework/tooling). This hypothetical business person certainly wouldn't be alone in wondering if the reason isn't sometimes job security, resume building, and/or to make a boring problem interesting rather than an attempt to find the most straightforward way of solving the business problem.

I can easily see the same applying to these business ideas. They sometimes make sense but often (usually?) don't.

Sure, but I don't believe anyone advocated switching to jquery (or, a few years later, getting rid of it) consciously thinking it was a useless thing to do; and similarly I don't believe any biz person introduces a process thinking, "haha this will help widen the bureaucratic moat around my team".

The truth is, a lot of those people spend a lot of time trying to streamline processes and remove bureaucracy, and if they didn't, it'd be even worse.

I returned to an office that I'd worked at, in the exact same role, 15 years earlier.

It's interesting to see the differences. The work is the same, the same people do it, but there's much more of it, there's slightly better tech, and they have correspondingly less time to do the work. There's much more middle management, but ostensibly the systems are all doing very close to the same thing.

The thing is they've been through 3 complete reorganisations of the ~1200 people. If they'd left it exactly the same structurally then it would seem to be in the same shape as it is now.

They've been through 2 renamings, 3 rebrandings, they definitely did nothing; the placement of the business is entirely unrelated to the brand image but each new CEO came from outside of the company seemingly used it, rebranding, to make the organisation "their own".

One of the experiences early on in my second tenure was a group doing a Myers-Briggs type activity, just like they would have been 15 years earlier, just with a slight difference twist. People there in the interim described a third-style of the same process they'd been through.

Maybe you're not wrong.

> each new CEO came from outside of the company seemingly used it, rebranding, to make the organisation "their own"

This is the hacker equivalent of wanting to do a greenfield refactor of the code base. There's an erroneous assumption all the problems that exist within the current code base will be avoided when rebuilding. These efforts are occasionally successful, but mostly end up being just sound and fury with little measurable results.

It is true. What your imaginary businessperson is saying is also true.

It's bullshit jobs all the way down.

You're absolutely correct. Of course this phenomenon applies to exactly the framework and platform musical chairs that the industry plays. Politics is human and exists in all areas of life. Many things on the technical side have absolute reason to exist, because it would be impossible to build a complex system without them. Some things are BS. On the flip side, some things on the management side are absolutely essential to the profitable functioning of a company, but there is also a huge amount of room for BS to thrive. It's possible for profitable companies to exist basically due to the law of large numbers, but this is not possible on the technical side unless you are training ML models.

How does this trope still get repeated so often? It has been debunked time and time again: strategy and management are infinitely more complex than almost all technical work. Assuming a group is incompetent just because you don't understand what they're doing (even when they dumb things down to just a few buzzwords for the desperate hope that talking like a third grader will enable you to follow along), is such an obvious folly that it should at least raise some red flags in your head. Even if you feel this way you should at least consider how repeating it is of no help to anyone.

"strategy and management are infinitely more complex than almost all technical work"

Lets not get ahead of ourselves now. It's folly to write off management, marketing etc's jobs as pointless, but its equally foolish to believe what you've just espoused.

There is only so much complexity that a single human can grasp, and that is why we specialise within organisations.

> Business and management work is... not nearly as complex. But the people doing that work have the same highly complex brains as you do. They can handle the same deep complexity as you. So with all this extra mental space, they add layers and layers of complexity to seemingly simple business processes. This complexity builds the moat protecting their turf from others. It creates the irreplaceability that you get for free.

This is one of those fictions that engineers love to believe about management because it imbues a sense of superiority. Who doesn't like feeling like their job is better or more important than others'?

Having been an IC, middle manager, upper manager, and back to IC a few times, I can tell you this is a false notion. Business and management are different problems, but they're not necessarily "easier". As an engineer-minded person by nature, I honestly found the technical problems easier to handle than a lot of the management problems I had to deal with. Managing a computer program is generally easier than managing people. People are hard.

There is “complex” and there is “hard” and they aren’t necessarily the same thing. A good strategy is rarely complex and often very straightforward, but consistently executing to it is hard. A technical problem may be complex, but it might be easy to actually implement against and especially easy to make sure it stays implemented.

Many management and business problems fall into the “straightforward to understand but hard” category. The apparent “unnecessary”complexity around these problems is sometimes self important fluff, by far, far more often it represents individual or organizational learning about what is actually necessary to solve these “simple, but hard” problems.

I agree that people are hard, but they are hard specifically because of what I said, they need to protect their turf and conquer new turf. Management problems are difficult because of politics, and at the root of politics is self and tribe interest. Having management meetings be a bit impenetrable is a symptom of politics.

I disagree and think you have a cynical take. The root of politics is resource distribution. Because this is complex, humans do a job that is a mix of self-interest, Compromise, and (hopefully) some vision.

When it works, we don’t even see it. When it fails, we do what our brains love to do: over extrapolate incidents to patterns and lock it into our confirmation bias.

Given the current state of the governance of the US, maybe you can forgive some cynicism.

The trick is that not all of the complexity is protective politics -- some of the complexity is carefully created diplomatic language to keep together a coalition of cranky managers who managed to agree on _this very specific version of The Plan_.

And unless you're savvy, it's difficult to tell which part is which, thus the problem OP is having.

Computers are hard, but do precisely what they are instructed to do even (unless actually defective). Correctly translating what you want to instructions the computer understands is hard and complex.

Humans are hard, and cannot be forced to do anything no matter the instructions. Individuals may be coerced or motivated or bargained with in specific ways. Correctly translating what you want to instructions the human understands is also hard and complex.

The real answer is probably somewhere in the middle. Using ubiquitous language from DDD would be a godsend to bridge the gap of understanding between tech and business, but every single time I’ve pitched it to the business side they have absolutely balked, which makes me suspicious of their motives.

Management is definitely not easier. It’s dealing with abstractions around intractable problems that aren’t well defined as well as people at the same time. IC work feels easy after this which is why so many managers go back to being ICs all the time.

I think part of the issue is that developers and engineers tend to think in concrete terms because to make things work, they must be concrete. People in sales, marketing, and management often speak in jargon and metaphors that cover for a lack of substance... though, to be fair, many of them don't know they're doing it because they don't really implement things themselves.

Years ago, I worked at a company where the head of marketing gave a 40-minute presentation to management about the new marketing strategy to drive growth. Her presentation was such a success they told her to present it to engineering, thinking it would whip up enthusiasm about what great vision the company had and how fast we were poised to grow.

The woman presentated to a sea of bewildered faces. None of the software devs could figure out what she was saying, and that's a problem, since marketing's job is to convey a clear message.

Finally, we started peppering her with questions. Not in a rude way. We were genuinely trying to pin down some concrete meaning behind the flood of jargon. After ten minutes of questions, one dev finally summed it up: "So we're going to run more ads and let people know we offer a broad selection and good prices?"

"Yes," the woman said. She seemed frustrated and defeated, though all the devs were happy to finally understand a message that made sense.

Then she blurted out, "God, I hate talking to developers!"

That's why companies need middle men such as BA and PM who can do the translation.

That seems like a waste of headcount if you have middle men just to "do the translation" between different people. It sounds like the marketing person needs to understand their audience better and make a better-crafted presentation for the audience.

"I have people skills. I talk to the customers so the engineers don't have to."

What is perfectly fine if them you can talk to the engineers better than the customers can.

Usually there are a lot of things to translate so sometimes it's valuable to have a dedicated middle man. The middle man should also work on writing up technical wikis and shield engineers from constant requirement changes. Translation is just part of his job. He can perform other tasks too if he has the capacity, e.g. working on some early analysis for the engineers.

or dev evangelists

It's more cost effective to have one person do it all.

... until that person can't do it all and you have to replace them or can't grow more.

I suggest a read (or re-read) of the Tao of programming which has insight relating to understanding corporate goings on:

https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html

May you find peace in book 7 which includes…

In the East there is a shark which is larger than all other fish. It changes into a bird whose wings are like clouds filling the sky. When this bird moves across the land, it brings a message from Corporate Headquarters. This message it drops into the midst of the programmers, like a seagull making its mark upon the beach. Then the bird mounts on the wind and, with the blue sky at its back, returns home.

The novice programmer stares in wonder at the bird, for he understands it not. The average programmer dreads the coming of the bird, for he fears its message. The Master Programmer continues to work at his terminal, unaware that the bird has come and gone.

I feel like a lot of the criticism and dismissals of management and corporate meetings like this unfairly and naively denigrate the value and importance of corporate strategy and processes in nearly the exact same way as engineering work and processes are often denigrated and misunderstood by non-engineers.

Early in my engineering career, I had the privilege of being personal friends with the older CEO of my company who was very much a business/corporate type but valued engineering as well though he was not an engineer himself. He was able to help me see through several product cycles that sales and marketing was, in many (or even most) cases, more pivotal to the success of a product than engineering. That's not to say that engineering does not matter -- it does, especially when it comes to scale and technical debt that affects release velocity, but the end customer in 99.9% of cases does not care about the engineering behind a product, only whether it solves their problem. The business and corporate meetings (when done properly-- there can be complete BS business/corporate stuff but that's a matter of incompetence) should focus efforts on delivering what customers need. Seeing that first-hand gave me a much greater appreciation for other disciplines within successful companies as well as some humility around the magnitude and importance of my contributions as an engineer. It takes all kinds and the talented business types who can proverbially sell ice to Eskimos are force multipliers akin to the mythical 10x engineer and worth their weight in gold.

Absolutely this. While of course there are true bullshitters out there, HN's consistent snarky dismissal of any possible value to non-technical business processes, while simultaneously getting self righteous about management's lack of understanding of engineering practice, is kind of embarrassingly un-self-aware. The fact that other fields in the business have their own jargon does not change that fact.

It also sounds like OP is just not the actual audience for the meetings they're in. Either someone at their company needs to rethink how wide such meetings need to be, or OP needs to figure out what parts of it are actually relevant to their role, and not worry too much about the rest.

(I am a SWE btw)

I think there’s two things here. The easier one to explain is the “omnichannel” bit.

It reminds me a lot of dev teams creating a microservice and giving it a code name. Imagine someone from business joining standup and hearing a bunch of microservice code names and acronyms. They would be really confused! Maybe the same thing is happening here to you?

The second thing you mentioned is their explanation about Robert Smith etc. You came out more confused after the explanation! To use the same standup example: the business person asks in your standup what does the “Odin” micro service do? It might be quite hard to explain what a single microservice does to someone without prior experience in that field.

Long story short: the best way you can get an understanding for what they’re talking about is to build a background in it. Feed your curiosity! Read a good intro book on business or economics to get a good foundation. See if you can setup some kind of regular 1:1 with a business person over lunch to learn more, etc.

> It reminds me a lot of dev teams creating a microservice and giving it a code name. Imagine someone from business joining standup and hearing a bunch of microservice code names and acronyms. They would be really confused! Maybe the same thing is happening here to you?

Yes, and now, imagine someone from business joining our sprint starter meeting and having it explained in clear and concise way, as well as discussions over potential caveat/blocking points because we have two hours to give details and not fifteen minutes.

Imagine being marketing (so not business, not tech) and being invited at a corporate meeting, then at a PI planning from a big (50-100) dev team. I guarantee you will understand way, way more from the PI even if you are just being around and not actively asking questions (and actively engaging with adjascent team will make you understand more).

It sounds like a mix of you being invited to meetings that you don't need to be at, and you not being interested in learning about the business.

To solve the first problem, just stop going. See if anyone notices/cares.

The second problem isn't really a problem depending on your career goals. You can be a fine engineer if you don't understand the business, but you'll never get to the highest levels. At the highest levels, even as an engineer, you need to understand how your work fits into the greater business goals.

If however you are worried about career advancement, then you need to figure out a way to understand the business and the business needs.

The best way to do that is to just ask. If someone says something you don't understand, make a note to speak to them about it later.

This right here

If you don't know what's the subject of the meeting, why are you attending?

Regardless if it's BS or not, if you literally couldn't care less about what Robert is doing and his latest report, and it doesn't concern your job, you shouldn't be on that meeting. Period.

Some of this might be a function of your seniority, experience, and overall care about the business.

When I was a more junior dev, I really didn't care about any of the specifics of business decisions. I cared about high-level things the company was doing, but when it came down to the specifics, I just was not interested. When we were updated on where the business was going, of course I cared about how successful we were, but how we got there, in terms of marketing was uninteresting.

Over time, I started to care more about those specific business decisions, because I had enough experience seeing failed outcomes in previous teams & companies. So, naturally, I started paying more attention about what "Robert Smith" was doing in the "communications department". I still didn't fully understand it, though, and this is where you can either believe what they're doing is kind of bullshit, or, more charitably, what they're doing is really hard to quantify.

I believe in the more charitable interpretation now. I've quit my job and am working on my own project, trying to structure my efforts, and I'm realizing that once you start thinking about business beyond just what code you're working on, what you're trying to do is very much ill-defined.

It's not as simple as coding work where you know you are trying to write a specific feature or refactor some code. Instead, at a business level, you have to come up with initiatives and goals which are very hard to quantify. You have to start thinking "I'm working on feature X and I'm hoping this will feed into improving the marketing of Y, and it will attract user Z." But, it's still very hard to measure if those efforts are actually making any difference. So naturally, IMHO, a lot of those goals and decisions start feeling a little bullshitty, but it's hard to avoid because the domain you're working in is so imprecise.

Taking and distributing meeting minutes is a superpower that no one wants.

First, something you thought of as nonsense may actually click when you author the summary. Second, by sending out minutes, you have an opportunity to followup for clarifications and then can frame the knowledge and deliverables. Third, people often repeat themselves and call meetings when they feel they are not being heard -- accurate minutes help people grok they are being listened to. Fourth, you can cc your boss on it, so their inbox fills with meeting minutes, and then you can tell them it's hard to work with so many meeting interruptions (tell your manager that each 1h meeting is 2-3h because you have to take notes and assimilate them, otherwise, why are they sending you to a meeting?). Fifth, some participants may change their mind or be more informed themselves when reading meeting minutes, improving team effectiveness. Sixth, you have a record of soap boxing, so you can visibly take a "break" from taking notes when someone starts to wax, sort though a hard copy of the minutes, and then ask: "Pardon my interruption, but you brought this up on X, Y, and Z... has anything changed?". Seventh, the notes provide great skimming for team members (and future self), especially when things go south.. or you ask to be moved to another team. Finally, being known as a helpful person with thoughtful notes creates informal power for yourself because as you become the expert by assimilating peoples's knowledge. This credibility and proof of work creates opportunity.

This is the most underrated comment on this post. I recently started at a large tech company, the largest I’ve ever been at, and taking meeting notes is the most important decision I’ve made. I have a record of everything that’s happened and the decisions we’ve made. It helps me focus on the meeting instead of getting distracted. I’ve had issues with dominating conversations, so the note taking helps me focus on listening too. Really good choice.

It's because a lot of corporate communications are more like strings made of pointers to concepts rather than strings made of words.

The exercise that helps me, personally, is to ask a series of context questions:

* Who is the intended audience? Why would the intended audience care about what's being discussed? Corporate communications tend to err on the side of broadcasting too widely rather than too narrowly.

* What is the communicator actually trying to get out of this communication? It's often not what it says on the label. With some people it's usually not what it says on the label.

* When they use a specific buzzword or marketing term, why did they use that term and not any other term? It's easy to dismiss buzzwords as bullshit (e.g. omnichannel marketing), but they didn't catch on out of sheer luck, so why is it that this specific person is using this specific term?

There's much more there, but in general I will try to focus on understanding the context that whatever is being communicated fits into, and once I understand that then things tend to be easier to parse.

You're definitely not the only one who struggles with this. I've tried a lot of different approaches for what to do during the meeting, but tbh what I've settled on is:

1. Avoid meetings that I'm not going to get value from OR am unlikely to add (sufficient) value to.

2. In some meetings I'm going to add more value by facilitating, etc., than by just saying whatever's on my mind.

For 1: I decline a lot more meetings than I used to. Sometimes it's a straight decline, sometimes I'll email the organizor or other people who will be attending and say, "I don't think I have a ton to contribute, but ping me if you need me to jump in," sometimes I'll decline and suggest meeting to provide feedback offline or in a smaller meeting if I actually have suggestions on the topic, etc.

For 2: sometimes you can't get out of going to these meetings. :) If I don't have anything to contribute on the topic of the meetings, taking notes (usually just to share with people on my team who couldn't attend... hopefully the organizer has planned on taking notes as well but :shrug:) or helping ensure that quieter people get a chance to speak is still a way to add value to the meeting without being on top of the subject matter.

Edit: one nice thing about these strategies is that you can apply them regardless of the reason/blame for not following these meetings. It works the same whether it's complete BS or something you really "should" be up to speed on already.

First, I find it really bad on an org’s part to throw people into meetings like this that requires context and some prior knowledge without prepping them. I assume from your post that you are in an engineering role of somesort. I would ask for some training or perhaps a brief prep session on your company’s business side. Get lunch with someone in sales and ask tons of questions. Imagine if someone without any knowledge of front-end dev got thrown into a technical standup? Same thing is happening here.

That being said, one tip for meetings like this is to not get too hung up on the exact details in the moment and just soak it all in.

>Meanwhile I'm there wondering who is this [Robert Smith] of the [communications department]? What is the [transformation strategy] and why does it need a [quarterly review]?

Like this should happen AFTER the meeting. In the moment, your brain should trying to follow the flow of narrative:

“Someone did a thing to accomplish a goal and it seems like people are happy/sad/angry/frustrated/etc. about it. These people say this. These other people say that. I don’t know who that someone is, or what that goal was, but people seem pretty opinionated and seeing how everyone got thrown in here I guess it’s important. After this meeting I should go talk to Bob because Bob seems to have a lot of insight into this, seemed pretty level headed about the whole thing, and is a nice guy who answers people’s questions. I can utilize him to find out more.”

You will still feel lost, but you will at least walk away having a good idea of generally what happened and how people felt about it.

The other key to meetings like this is to not take every term at its absolute denotative value. Words will be thrown around that are suggestive of some general idea that is specific but pretty loose about the exactness of the term (“omnichannel strategy” for example. Complete goggbledegook.)

Honestly what you're saying is not fundamentally different from what a marketing person is thinking in your technical meeting. Basically its just stuff that you can decide to not care about. It has relatively small impact on your day to day work. To be clear that's not a judgement on whether its meaningful or not.

Can you figure it out? Of course! If you were really interested, then after the meeting you would go and find out the answers to your questions. It will help you understand the business better and that can turn into better understanding the the reason for some of the software requirements.

I'm fully convinced most (not all, of course) of these people are just babbling words they've heard without making any sense. They talk a lot, but rarely actually say anything. I hate to paint -everyone- that way, so just speaking from my experience.

At my company, a few years back, 'quantify' was the word du jour. Every person used it, most wrong, and no-one ever batted an eye and said 'what the hell are you even talking about?' I'm talking about sentences like 'Let me quantify that by saying, our growth initiative in sector x is our leading priority'. Half of them were using it as a synonym for clarify or qualify, I think. One can never be sure, because the speaker didn't even know. But it's a fancy sounding word to mark off the corporate speak bingo card.

I'm pleased with how many replies here acknowledge that business and marketing is a legitimate domain of expertise. I was expecting HN, which skews "young programmer" demographic, to just call it all BS. It's not, it is just another area of important expertise.

People working in early stage companies often get more of a first hand experience working on both sides of the business/tech fence.

I don't expect management to understand the codebase, so why are coders expected to understand management buzzwords and such? Looking at the comments here it seems like people are pulled into these meetings unwillingly and subjected to the managerial nitty-gritty, and expected to participate, but it's a one-way street because the management is never subjected to the technical side of things. I think that's where the sentiment is coming from.

That's unfortunate.

I was once tasked with writing a very important system and so started to attend meetings with higher-ups to discuss what had to be done.

I had no idea what they were talking about 90% of the time.

After 5 or 6 very long meetings, I decided to propose what I think should be done in the hope that their feedback would give me some insight.

The result was that the final product was exactly what I had proposed.

Speaking as someone who experiences this, it's because you're tuned out. It's non-technical, and you fundamentally don't care. You haven't invested (wasted) the time to learn all of this trivia because you don't feel it's pertinent to your actual job function and getting real work done. In many ways, you're probably 100% correct. You're a tactical, hands-on keyboard type, and all of this high level strategy means exactly nothing to how you do your day-to-day job. It's the flavor of the month, and the next time a new executive shuffles in, they'll lift their leg and spray out another "transformation strategy" to mark their territory. All while you still have to get stuff done.

The problem is that the non-technical people think this stuff is important. They're so invested that they feel the need to call big meetings and talk about it, instead of letting you get actual work done. And they notice that you don't care about it. So, be aware that this could hinder your career.

The simple answer is that it's code-speak, and it's designed to make people feel better about their jobs and salaries. Speaking in plain English makes many things seem childishly simple—which isn't good for anyone's ego.

Obviously many fields are specialized and technical, and complicated language is the simplest way to get ideas across, but I think we can draw that line pretty clearly.

Business and marketing disciplines have mature fields of study with many concepts more complicated than a few word phrases.

EBITDA is a meaningful term that communicates a lot of information. "Synergy" is useless, and is essentially an SEO tag for an idea you want people to pay for.

I'm not saying that different disciplines don't have jargon that is useful, I'm saying that a lot of jargon is not useful.

You're lucky he was referred to as Robert Smith. In my company they'd just have said 'Robert', and I wouldn't even be able to look him up in the directory to find out what the hell his job is.

If you think the terms might be nonsense, test it. Say you've struggled to understand, and press them to define what they really mean. They genuinely don't know fairly often.

My first job was at a telecom equipment company. The head of engineering listed out a bunch of acronyms as what we'd be working on in the next year, and emphasized how critical it was we "followed the plan". I raised my hand and asked what a random acronym was, and I got "I have no idea". I started periodically asking after that.

That just makes you sound like a stirrer.

Like stirring up trouble? I don't do it very often, and it's hard to get mad at someone who emphasizes wanting to understand you.

I struggle with it in the sense that it maddens me. I do typically understand what is said as from 20 years of experience I developed an internal corporate nonsense translator in my head.

Paragraphs after paragraphs of fluffy academic corporate language about some omnichannel strategy could just be: we now also sell in stores. Everybody gets that, which is the damn point of language.

I blame the schooling system. It's typical business school language, but you'll see the same effect in the academic world and even in politics. Somehow none are able to speak plain English.

Abstract language is not just annoying and inaccessible, it's also highly convenient to mask bad news.

Let me help you put a term to this behavior: Managerial aesthetics

And schooling (and higher education) is not the cause, but has been warped- by businesses- to normalize this kind of business jargon. And can you blame them? Shareholders love to hear corporate buzzwords, so companies only hire people who are fluent in it.

You're not wrong. But why do shareholders love buzz words? It's realistically not in their interest at all?

The older I get, the more I'm inclined to join the dark side. To just play the game and not fight it. As such, I'm actually able to produce such fluffy language myself. In the rare case that I'm in trouble, I can use it to bullshit myself out of it.

Buzzwords are vague/ambiguous. They're intended to lack any precise meaning.

Marketers, salesmen, and (some) customers/shareholders love buzzwords. Why? Because buzzwords allow room for one's imagination to fill in the meaning. This in turn, allows appeal to a broad group of people, as people will fill in the missing blanks using their personal (but different) imaginations. Thus buzzwords, can help mass sell an idea or product (or ease the worries of disparate shareholders).

For a stupid example: A new buzzword is in town. Susan think it might be a sort of flower, Bryan thinks it's a dragon. Bryan likes dragons, Susan likes flowers, so they both buy into the idea. Had the new idea been clearly communicated as a bag of sand, neither Susan or Bryan would have bought into the idea.

A lot of interesting responses.

I sit in a ton of different department meetings and I find most departments (most people) don't set clear agendas or define terms up front. This is the fault of the meeting organizer (hopefully there is one!).

For the discussion itself it sounds like a lot of very specific company specific vocabulary is being used. This feels comfortable because these people have probably had a lot of discussion using this term but it's hard for new people because it requires specialized knowledge to collaborate.

Technical teams are also capable of bad meetings but at least they are usually building something specific rather than describing general strategy.

One very important corporate survival strategy is to learn who your actual bosses are. If the CEO has an hour long all-hands about "corporate strategy" then that's not something you need to worry about. The only reason that meeting was an all hands is because the CEO has an ego to feed.

If your department head has a meeting about your department's priorities then you need to pay attention because they are the ones who are actually going to be observing and evaluating your work and how much they solved the problems that the department is being graded on. Pay attention to the people who pay attention to you.

those meetings, and epic emails are sometimes useful for getting a read on where things are headed. But if you're busy yes, you can safely ignore

Remember: "if you are not the buyer, you are the product". Here, it looks like you are the product.

Specifically, "Robert Smith" needs to say to his superiors that the "quarterly review" was discussed (socialized!) in various stakeholder groups. They already had a previous meeting with a different group and whatever was said there (useful or not) translated into "We've received a lot of positive feedback". After this meeting, they will say "We've received a lot of positive feedback from round-table meetings with 2/3/4/15 groups within the company".

The "same people" group is just playing this game to be visible. If you stay in the company long enough, you can play bingo with what they say, regardless of the specific discussion topic. Don't play this game, if you don't want to. And if you don't know who you are sucking up to (or nobody), you probably don't want to, at least in this particular way.

The real questions, in my opinion, are: 1) Why were you in the meeting at all? If it is "All Staff", then maybe you can skip it (especially if it is recorded for "those not able to be present"). If it is a specific group, then which group (your IT team, group one-above your IT team, etc). Are you a member or a representative of the group? The further away, the less it matters. 2) Are they asking for written feedback, actively? By a specific date? If not, the meeting is not relevant. 3) What is the related timeline (on feedback and on document itself) and where the document goes? That's a question you can totally ask. "Hi, I admit I am not super familiar with the subject. Where does this document goes next? Is there a specific deadline for it?" 4) If you are not there once, does anybody notice? E.g. a direct follow-up for "comments from you or your team?" Have a medical/whatever appointment once and pay attention.

One book you may find interesting is "Political Savvy: Systematic Approaches to Leadership Behind the Scenes Hardcover" by Joel R. DeLuca. It is not a perfect match to the situation, but it certainly helps to think about it in the way that's more aligned with developers' mindset. Unfortunately, it may be hard to get new.

> Here, it looks like you are the product.

I dunno. It looks a lot like somebody is trying to push the OP into a senior role, but he is not ready yet.

Are you a junior engineer? Or someone without a lot of years under your belt?

That's probably why. A lot of these discussions don't really pertain to you, and that's okay. Those types of meetings are more for your PMs and your high level staff engineers to understand a project more holistically. To a new engineer, it's 100% fluff they don't care about.

They'll make more sense in time, but don't worry about it for now. You'll learn more the business and grow in responsibilities and then those meetings will both make more sense and have more interest.

100% this.

I struggle with this too. But I also know I'm low enough on the corporate ladder (senior dev! not even junior!) to know it pretty much is all irrelevant to my day-to-day work, so I show up, tune out, bill the time (and eat the free food if offered).

Just ask questions. If you don’t know what something is - ask. Forget about everyone else in the meeting - chances are someone else feels exactly the same way and is also too nervous to speak up and ask for help.

Let the meeting driver keep course, if they don’t want to take the time to explain, let them say so and ask to “take it offline” for follow up.

The whole purpose of meetings is to get aligned. If you’re not clear on what it is to even be aligned with, that’s step one and that is totally fine, there is no shame. You have to put yourself out there and speak up, otherwise you will get left behind, because only you are looking out for yourself. No one is going to drag you along besides simply inviting you to the meeting. Take the opportunity into your own hands and demand clarity. Either you get it, problem solved, or you receive pushback, at which point you’re clearly not needed in the discussion and so you dismiss yourself to more important things.

In your example, “I don’t know what any of those things are, can you explain?” is a perfectly valid piece of feedback. Rinse and repeat until you get clarity or someone tells you it’s out of scope for the discussion (which means “catch up on your own time”). If anything, this is valuable feedback to the meeting driver that maybe not all communication is taking place as it should be, why are team members not informed? This leads to learnings, which is why it’s valuable for everyone involved if you speak up.

I don't struggle with it, because I am entirely convinced that it is not important.. (to me)

The meetings must be held to emit that information, not because the information needs to be received or understood, but because thing have been done, or are planned to be done, and part of the ritual is that it must now be spoken in plenum so that responsibility is diluted and the process has been adhered to.

I'm not saying it can't be understood, just that it's of no consequence.

Some people are very worried about the inner workings of their corp, they get some feeling of comfort, control and safety by knowing these things, so those people will have a much fuller model of the corp, and so will know who the people and departments are, not that they can actually do anything with that information (short of maybe knowing when to jump ship or ask for a raise), but simply because they "need to know" the same way someone "need to know" who won some sports event.

There are people in other strata in the corp, usually outside the "actually building stuff" group, who actually find this information useful, and they can and do act in some accordance to it.. However, it's most often that these people always know the information "unofficially" or have other ways of accessing it, but because that information is important to them, they extrapolate that it is important to everyone else too.

Sounds like you’re getting pulled into meetings without context. You should either ask the person who pulled you in to clarify the context or ask to be excluded and get heads down time back.

I experience this in my non tech, corporate job. Its mostly non pertinent information to my actual job which is why I think I generally tune out, but of course all the suits think it’s just the most important info so they hold meetings. And all your peers that do know what’s going on when they don’t actually need to, are suck ups who probably are not good at their job and want to get into management. I wouldn’t worry about it unless you have dreams of becoming a suit, but that is just my 2 cents.

There's some great stuff in here I won't go over, but it's mostly performance theater. Management, and people, love to talk, but especially management. I'm always amazed how some people would rather have a whole day of meetings to figure out what should happen, when one person could just test the theory in an hour or so. But people love theory and hate facts. In theory no one is wrong, the conversation can go forever, and it's fun to have your mind think about something less mundane for a while.

I'm reminded of a study although the link currently evades me. It was something about who feels best after a meeting, feeling the meeting was productive. It was usually two groups, which many times were the same person - the organizer, and the manager. Both of these people feel like even having the meeting is some kind of grand gesture of teamwork that is good, even if it was a complete waste of time and sent your team angrily in directions toward bathrooms on different sides of the building.

The more people present at a meeting, the more useless they are. Of course the prime example of this is the "all hands meeting". Never go to these. They are a waste of time, and at worst, you can ask anyone else what else happened.

I struggle to understand what's happening in corporate in general, not only in meetings. The state of things are so broken that I get in total desperation sometimes.

As someone working in consulting, I can attest to the fact that most of the phrases you just ran off are buzz phrases that are the verbal representation for "kool aid". Leadership has to basically put out reports or justifications for the latest projects and how they will help drive the company forward(whether it will or not is pretty much always in question).

To be honest, you can benefit from it by learning what the terminology is and how it translates into actual changes for the future of the company. If you can identify the places that leadership is putting emphasis in, you can work on things that further that initiative and likely catch the flow into promotions and bigger roles at the company.

For example: A company says they are doing digital transformation by moving their data from Excel spreadsheets into a Salesforce instance. This will be a multi year project that will hypothetically increase efficiency and raise revenues by 50%. If you are working on the Excel side of things, this would be a good time to consider learning about Salesforce!

Not everyone(hell, I would say most people) wants to do this, and that is totally okay. If you're in this camp I don't see a problem of just going about your business and day to day work.

Are you familiar with "The Emperor’s New Clothes"?

> Two swindlers arrive at the capital city of an emperor who spends lavishly on clothing at the expense of state matters. Posing as weavers, they offer to supply him with magnificent clothes that are invisible to those who are stupid or incompetent. The emperor hires them, and they set up looms and go to work. A succession of officials, and then the emperor himself, visit them to check their progress. Each sees that the looms are empty but pretends otherwise to avoid being thought a fool. Finally, the weavers report that the emperor's suit is finished. They mime dressing him and he sets off in a procession before the whole city. The townsfolk uncomfortably go along with the pretense, not wanting to appear inept or stupid, until a child blurts out that the emperor is wearing nothing at all. The people then realize that everyone has been fooled. Although startled, the emperor continues the procession, walking more proudly than ever.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes

In the corporate world, the emperor has clothes, but they are underwear and everyone pretends its a full suit and tie. Basically speaking, in order to sound more important people say "Omni channel sales strategy" but what that actually is a small Salesforce integration.

One way to not have to attend those meetings is ask questions like "by Omni channel sales strategy do you mean..." and remove the fluff from whatever they are saying, basically be the child in the story.

The not attend meetings trick boils down to: if other people don’t like me, they won’t bother me.

Not the best strategy in my opinion. There are far better ways to slip out, but they require more careful maneuvering.

My typical strategy is asking the right questions to the right people. I try appear helpful, while indirectly pushing to make the meeting more relevant or my presence less necessary.

I’ve often made the offer to be available when they need my input. Helps smooth things so people see me as busy, rather than deliberately avoiding them.

It really depends on who is in the room. In my experience founders and people who are busy (C level folks, IC's) tend to prefer my style of commutation, it's middle managers who end up not liking me. Career wise that tradeoff appears to have been a pretty good one to make, but caveat emptor of course.

Sometimes you can be surprised with this question and they will explain a actual strategy with multiple moving parts and everyone is better off by having it explained. Often you can catch a technical gap or two during this explanation and improve on the approach.

It's really only the incompetent that get offended.

Some companies have a culture where everything is discussed in meetings, and if you aren’t in all the meetings none of the context is anywhere else to be found.

The best thing to do (if you want to catch up) is ask someone who seemed to know what was going on to get you up to speed after the meeting. Or, if you don’t, just try to get out of the meetings. Nobody realised you had no idea what was going on.. they probably won’t notice if you weren’t there at all.

That's just business. "Omnichannel" is pretty dated buzzword, but the notion of reaching users through different mediums (ads, emails, push notifications, even paper mail) is still very relevant and if you're a B2C it's probably really critical to success and a thing that your leadership are investing in at least as much as building a platform. I recall sitting in a brown bag session early in my career where someone explained a "sales funnel" and it just lit up my understanding of the kind of science that goes into user acquisition and conversion. Developers and product managers spend a lot of time thinking about serving their users, but acquiring and retaining users is a whole art and science unto itself and you'd do well to study up and get at least a cursory understanding. It will open your eyes to a lot of what makes a business run. There are a lot of technically trivial things that can unlock a ton of value in ways that really aren't obvious. Especially, tech savvy people who tend to mute notification, run ad blockers and block email marketing may not realize how much average consumers respond to that kind of thing.

>tech savvy people who tend to mute notification, run ad blockers and block email marketing may not realize how much average consumers respond to that kind of thing.

Or may not realize how much they respond themselves.

But yes, whether B2C or B2B there's a huge amount of marketing machinery that's needed to reach customers at various stages of the "buyer's journey" through a variety of channels--and to make anyone involved in sales more effective.

I would suggest asking your manager a few questions [not in meeting]:

I am having trouble relating the [transformation strategy] to the tasks/projects I am working on this month / this quarter. Can you please explain if there is anything I need to do differently?

What do you believe the impact of this [transformation strategy] will be on our group/team?

Is there any specific critique or feedback on this [transformation strategy] that you would like to me provide you?

At least your problem is not following. It is pure torment, especially townhall meetings for me.

What is happening? What is this bullshit they're talking about? I don't care about any if this, am I supposed to pretend? What does that entail? Smile and nod? If I look bored or not paying attention I will get in trouble but what the hell is this diversity strategy inclusion about Joe being promoted as vice chair or human resource value extraction planning and the corporate strategy of revenue growth blah blah. I work in IT, I mean I do pay attention to business deals being made and other changes because I work in infosec and that is strategic intel ("now China may attack us because we are competing against a state owned company in their sphere of influence" type of stuff) but I dread those meetings. It reminds me a lot of highschool and teachers talking about random shit and trying to be your friend and relate and tell you about politics and their personal stories and philosophy -- jusr like then I was stressed by trying to act as if I am ok with it when infact I just want the education about the subject and go home now I feel like it is mostly corporate indoctrination.

You want to know my theory? A lot of people actually like this and care about this. Like they feel like an actual family and included and they matter and for HR this sort of bs is needed to retain a lot if people. Also, managers want to feel important and show value before each other and HR and everyone else has to endure it for their sake.

"Transformation strategy" Haha, My brain goes into a specific distressed mode when I hear that phrase. Part of me is in flames desparate to tell the speaker what the hell are you talking about and why have you held me hostage for over an hour to listen to this?

It all boils down to the fact that people need to feel useful. This is part of the society as a whole. During this meetings, look at who need attention, and praise their propositions.

On some rare cases it is a power move, in such cases either you can play the power game or you can't.

Regarding power games, the real fight happen before the meeting, so if you feel unprepared and you know someone in power is going to pressure you: don't go.

No decisions will ever be made in a meeting like this. That's not the point. The purpose of these is to disseminate decisions that have already been made through side channels, and to consolidate the power of those making them. Anything you do or say in one these meetings beyond nodding politely can only hurt you. Remember, the decisions have already been made. So just be present, smile, and wave.

Pro-tip: if you have to say something in a meeting, but you don't know what to say, just ask "what's the timeline on this?"

Have you tried asking your supervisor, or a friend at work, to explain these to you? It sounds like nobody bothered to onboard you properly and give you the low-down on your business.

Omnichannel just means "all the channels". A "channel" in this case probably means a particular sales path, e.g. website, app, brick-and-mortar, maybe phone, fax, distributors, resellers, whatever. Sounds like your company sells the same product/service through many avenues.

As for the reviews and strategies, eh, that's just the corporate world at work. There are people whose job it is to figure those kinda things out. If they're good at it, those are the sort of visionary changes that guide the company over the long term. If they're bad at it, then it's just the bureaucracy keeping itself busy with nonsense.

I dunno what your particular role at your company is, but if it's some sort of hands-on/in the trenches stuff, like you're a dev or designer or some such, you can just ask your supervisor "So all of that strategic stuff is a bit above me. Is any of it critical to my work or our team?" If not, then you don't have to worry about it.

Oftentimes, it goes the other way too... you show those folks what you've been working on and their eyes glaze over because it's not their area of expertise. It's OK. Big companies have different specializations of labor and you don't need to know all of it to be a valuable contributor.

If you do ever want to move into management or similar roles, though, you might want to pay more attention and get more clarifications from the people around and above you. It's OK to ask questions, but it's a trial and error process to identify the people who have the time, patience, and knowledge to give you useful answers.

This used to happen to me a lot, and after seeing a therapist for something I thought was completely unrelated it turns out I have adult ADHD.

> it turns out I have adult ADHD.

The same for me and I'm under medication. I still zone out in meetings, but maybe not as much during meetings that actually convern me.

I have been in plenty of corporate meetings where it was abundantly clear that the people talking, exchanging information fundamentally didn't understand each other and the meeting was a string of people responding to each other in a way that was at best vaguely related. Because the people talking were "important" nobody wanted to say "I don't understand" and nobody wanted to call out anybody for not understanding.

It was not my job to make people understand each other and it was not at all possible that it was going to be my job, so the only thing to do was to do my best when things were relevant and to nod and smile otherwise. And after not so long leave because long meetings filled with nonsense are a major red flag.

There is a level of learning the dumb corporate language which will help, but focus on keeping people happy with your work and accepting that sometimes people in meetings will go on endlessly without saying anything of substance.

ITT: Sour technical people shitting on business people who they see as lesser. (“Business people are smart but their job is easy so they make it complicated”, “they’re being vague on purpose”, “they’re bullshitting”)

You will not good get answers here. Perhaps asking in a subreddit specific to managers, project managers, agile, etc would be better.

Looking at some of the reasons that Tyler Cowen proposes for why meetings are so bad [0], it seems you don't like meetings whose purpose is any of the following:

> to instruct everyone in the nature of an idea....“We need to get everyone on board.” Ho hum.

> to flex muscles and show a demonstration of power/support for a person or idea

> so that everyone can feel involved in a decision

And all of these can be frustrating.

To quote another Cowenism: "context is that which is scarce" [1]. I've had exactly one corporate job and I had absolutely no clue what we were talking about at meetings and I typically tuned out. But when I tuned in and asked questions -- things like, "you mentioned [some person] i've never heard of, who is she?" or "what was that acronym you just used?", my coworkers would typically pause and explain what they were talking about, and sometimes, I got the sense that they were made aware of how inscrutable their evolved conversation was to newcomers.

I don't think it was malice or a deliberate power move, I think they were just not actively thinking about how scarce context is and how, if we want to clue people in, we need to make an active effort to do so.

I left that job after about 9 months and found a place where the stuff that people say at meetings generally makes sense. It's a sign of culture fit.

[0] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/01/wh...

[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/co...

If you don't understand something, just ask questions. You'd be surprised how often you'll get a useful answer if you ask a relevant question!

If someone hosts a meeting about a transformation strategy, it's probably because it's their job to work on it. They are likely working on this topic for 40 hours a week. Most people will not understand a thing about what you're doing for 40 hours a week too, so it makes sense if someone else works on a topic for 40 hours a week not everything is immediately clear to you as well.

If you feel like you don't understand, then you probably don't understand. Like you would maybe understand Kubernetes, these people don't know a thing about it either and don't have any clue what you are doing in your job as well.

Assume positive intent. If you do, it will make everyone's live more enjoyable.

Certain words, which get used a lot in our industries, mean different things at different companies. Many of the conversations are the same, but depending on where in the cycle things are, the topics tend to be either expanding or contracting, heading towards a decision or updating people of a decision. Or collecting to see if anyone knows if a decision has been made or is pending.

There are people who will speak up immediately, and people who will wait until those people have spoken.. to speak up. I'm of the latter sort.

Not everyone has to say something at these meetings, but these meetings will usually have at least one person who heard somewhere, from someone, that you should never go to a meeting and say nothing. If that person is one of those people who speaks up immediately, your meetings will necessitate a follow-up meeting.

There's a lot of siloing along lines of role, power and seniority going on in the comments. In any suboptimal communication situation like this try for Communicative Rationality [1]. It's no use different groups inventing their own languages and rationales for speaking past one another as a form of combat.

To pick the most important ones (in my opinion) keep it:

- Sincere

- Relevant

- Falsifiable

- Goal directed

Also keep it inclusive and acknowledge conflicts and power relations [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_rationality

[2] Some people do not like having power relations made explicit (because they essentially derive their power from subterfuge and insinuation). Openly doing this may cause trouble in some settings (see "48 Laws" by Robert Greene).

Would you expect to be able to walk into the middle of a complex technical discussion on a long-running project you're not familiar with, and immediately understand every bit of jargon and shorthand?

Why, then, would you expect to be immediately able to grasp every detail of a complex nontechnical discussion about a long-running project you're not familiar with?

The real issue here seems to be that you're being invited to a lot of meetings you shouldn't be wasting your time attending, because you're not being properly prepared for them so have nothing useful to contribute. Talk to your manager about making more productive use of your time; if they need you to contribute ideas they ought to be giving you the necessary context ahead of time.

I'm the same way. I just assume that they're biological GPT-3:s. They run a complex word generation algorithm in their heads, but they're not actually intelligent. Trying to find logic in their sentences just melts your brain, so try to avoid it and just go with the flow. The less you think the better you'll manage it.

The funny thing is, if you're able to generate similar word salad non-sense, all of them will nod their heads and applaud your thoughts, even if you're not making any sense at all. No one will call you out for not making sense, it just has to match their patterns for human speech. Try to insert popular words into your sentences and talk with confidence. It's quite hard though if you're not natural.

so much this

Yeah, I feel like that a lot.

1. Usually I've found it takes about 1 year to fully understand a significantly large organisation and how it works.

2. After a while, it stops mattering. I came in to do a job, to focus on building whatever it is you asked me to build, not follow the office growth strategy day to do.

I feel like a lot of places do this now as a part of "transparency", but it's not really transparent. Any questions they don't want to answer they'll use more jargon to dodge it.

It's kinda like sports. I'll go to a baseball game, have a good time in the crowd, enjoy myself, but if you start throwing stats and the team story at me I'm lost. Some people love following the "sport" of office politics and goings on, other don't.

Functional business vocab is about a thousand words that comprise a domain-specific language. If you really want to master it, simply take notes in meetings (generally, this is a hack for any "boring" meeting that lets you actively choose to digest the material).

Words like "channel" simply have domain-specific definitions, and the domain isn't that hard to master. It's not as hard coding.

Eventually you can go semi-pro and either share your notes or simply refer back to them ("Thanks Bill, wondering how this relates to what we talked about last week with regard to X?"). This will probably help advance your career.

When you're ready to go full-pro, start rejecting invites to these meetings. This will rocket you up or out of the company.

much of this is to give recognition to people. The [communications department] is working on something incomprehensible, but [Robert Smith] is doing good work that was approved by the higher-ups, so they'd like everyone to know.

Now, imagine that you and upper management agreed to convert all space-indents to tabs - you might be up there getting recognition too. But since management has no opinion on the matter, you aren't.

That's about the significance of most company meetings. Sometimes you can get a sense of the power dynamic by seeing who's there, but most of it is irrelevant.

If there's something that directly affects you, it won't be stated explicitly, but your immediate manager will call another meeting immediately afterward. Then watch out!

From someone much wiser than me: "There are two ways to make a living: Take something hard and make it look easy, or take something easy and make it look hard."

Read that over a couple times and quietly think about it for a few minutes and keep it with you.

I will say it again. 99% of the marketing people are just posers with little to no skill. This post's example/company might be different but majority of the marketing departments of the companies I've worked in the last 20 years all replaced by new posers. They usually last 6 months, and within that 6 months, they talk as much as they can to look like they do something.

Managers depend on the new hires to do tasks and brag about them, while new hires or marketing department don't know jack about what they are doing because they are 20 year old kids with instagram and tiktok knowledge thru their own phones. It is a joke but part of corporate culture.

I’ve experienced this, and I’ve found it often involves a fair bit of engagement in other parts of the company and often is probably a couple of layers above your day-to-day stuff. If you’re heads-down most of the time and delivering to your team and PM, you might miss the emails and announcements about strategy and synergy.

How to handle it is up to you. If you want to engage more with that, go for it. IMO it’ll probably be more work outside your comfort zone, but also opens doors for career growth that might otherwise be unavailable.

If you’re Comfortable and don’t find it relevant or useful, keep going as you are. I wouldn’t be overly concerned about it.

> Meanwhile I'm there wondering who is this [Robert Smith] of the [communications department]? What is the [transformation strategy] and why does it need a [quarterly review]?

IMO, whoever is running the meeting isn't doing a good job of giving everyone the requisite background to understand the the purpose & content of the meeting. The only exception I can think of is that if it's expected that you repeatedly interrupt the meeting to get yourself up to speed (i.e., you're expected to aggressively get the relevant info).

More often than not, what you describe is due to someone running a shitty meeting, which is more common than not.

A lot of cynical, businesspeople-are-full-of-shit responses here. But omnichannel is a very simple thing to understand. Customers want to be able to be able to reach businesses in a variety of ways: more extroverted people may want to have a phone line for customer support, more introverted people may prefer text messaging. Each line of communication between the company and a customer is a channel: omni- is a prefix which means "all".

It's obvious to me that software engineers are smart enough to understand these things, but I think many purposefully turn their mind off when there is something "businessy" about a subject.

You might enjoy the wisdom of Kapil Gupta: https://soundcloud.com/i-am-sovereign/sets/kapil-gupta

When I realized many meetings were just an interchange of dominance gestures between two or three people, with the rest as passive spectators, it all made more sense.

It didn't help me enjoy the meetings or remember one thing that was said.

You can tell they are BS because there are never minutes or notes released after the meeting.

Some meetings are OK. One job the quarterly meetings were masterpieces of clarity and transparency. Times were tough, they told us. Times were good, they told us. Product dev on ZXJ-50302 was lagging, they told us.

Even group meetings were variable and some were OK.

I think a half your problems would be solved if you asked about those terms outside of that meeting. Ask someone technical - more senior to you but close in ranks. If you wont understand answer, ask "what exactly that means? It is too abstract for me, can you show it to me in our app?" or "what does it mean practically" or something similar.

To add, this happens because you are not learning about what is going on outside of those meetings. The confusion in the meeting is just consequence.

I’m thankfully at a stage of my career where I’m not afraid to interrupt the meeting and ask questions. Earlier in my career the thought would terrify me. In hindsight if I were bold it would have actually helped half the room. I encourage you to do it. These days: Who is Robert? What does Communications dept do? What has changed since last review? What metrics did the strategy move? What is the outcome you want from this meeting? Next time can we do email?

Usually in these “all-hands” type of meetings, nobody considers the “all-hands” audience and instead crams their presentation full of jargon and acronyms. This is usually because they recycle decks from other meetings.

Your audience isn’t going to know specific finance, marketing, or engineering jargon, so use it sparingly and make sure to define it. The new-hires and interns (and even senior people) will thank you as they learn a little bit more about a field that isn’t their own.

Over time I’ve recognized that certain managers will focus on certain things and their messaging gets somewhat repetitive, making it easier to understand what they’re saying.

I've suffered through numerous meetings like that. The managers leading such meetings, for me bring to mind a passage from Shakespeare's Hamlet: like a poor player who struts and frets an hour upon the stage, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.

There's nothing missing from your brain. I'm not sure people leading corporate meetings even have a brain. Certainly not one that can accomplish anything useful.

I have been working for the same company for more than five years and I understand 1/20th of what is communicated in meetings with more than 10 people attending.

The company (legacy tech) I work for appears to be quite bad at communication and not welcoming, looking at facts and not at manifestos of intents, to professionals who are not coming from the company's core domain.

I don't have impostor syndrome, I am overall a mere impostor.

> Does anyone struggle with this, or do you have any recommendations for people like me who do struggle to understand what's happening in corporate meetings?

Your brain is functioning well, especially the filtering mechanism. There's nothing going on in those meetings. They are boring. I don't go, get work done and nobody complains.

In general meetings with more than 6 people(this is already too many) are not worth going to.

It's very, very easy for the audience for a corporate meeting to be too broad.

Depending on how big the company has gotten, odds become high that the piece of the elephant you're holding is nowhere near the pieces that the CEO / owners / etc. care about on the day-to-day, but what they care about on the day-to-day tends to shape the contents of corporate meetings.

If you want to derive more value from these meetings, it can be useful to switch context from the what is being discussed to the who is discussing. Those are the people at the company that the operator of the meeting thinks are doing things worth telling you about. They have the ear of top-level management on their projects, and it might be worth keeping tabs on them if your goal is to increase your impact in the org. But if your goal is to heads-down improve your piece of the elephant day-to-day, don't stress too much about these above-your-paygrade conversations.

Now, how do you find out more about the stuff discussed? That depends on your org. The first conversation I'd have is with my immediate manager. A lot of companies have an internal wiki of some kind to track this info, and you can read up on the topic from the meeting there. If your boss doesn't know how to know more, then it might be a good skill for you and your boss to learn. Now, if it's not possible to know more, than your company might have a comms gap and these meetings might actually be wasting your time.

(Just as a side-bar: I was in a site-wide meeting once where a team had succeeded in making one system much faster. Site lead wanted to celebrate their achievement, but he knew a lot of folks would have no idea what they did or why it mattered... So he bought some cheap tape measures, pulled one out to one foot, and then had the team that did the thing stretch the additional five around the room over and over. "This tape measure represents how many queries per second we used to support, and these..." gestures around the room "Are our new capacity. Big round of applause."

Keep an eye on folks who can do that... They know how to communicate to people who aren't in the loop, and that's a key leadership skill.)

p.s: One final thought on this topic: don't get discouraged if the company's doing something big that doesn't make sense to you. It is the nature of big companies that nobody can wrap their brain around the whole thing... That's why they are multi-person projects in the first place. Nobody at a large enough company, not your boss, not the VP of your org, not the CEO, actually knows everything that's going on.

I also struggled to follow corporate meetings for a very long time and even went to therapy over them - it feels bad to be called incompetent for asking what an Information Summary Validation Assessment Risk Actualization is.

Sometime last year I realized that these meetings and terms don't have anything to do with rock climbing or mountain biking. Hopefully you can find that kind of peace too.

Find someone from [communications department], and ask them after the meeting - hey, can I pick your brain? Tell them you don’t understand and ask them to teach you. When they use high level buzzwords, ask “can you login to that system and show me?”. From my experience, they will be excited to teach you about their field and super interesting things can come of it.

I was surprised to Cmd+F and not find "Amazon" mentioned here, because they seem to have some interesting approaches to meetings, such as distributing a memo and reading it (silently) en masse before discussing its contents. Some structure and especially some written direction sounds like it could seriously help in such confusing circumstances.

It takes effort to understand this stuff. Don't worry: that's normal. If you want to understand it, treat it like anything else you want to learn. Make notes, review them, and prepare before the meetings.

A simple way to begin is to start a cheat-sheet. Names, projects, dates, a glossary of unfamiliar terms, etc etc. Bring it each time and keep it updated.

> Does anyone struggle with this

Not since I started skipping these types of corporate-speak meetings, usually held over lunch. I don't mean to sound too cavalier, but I found skipping some of these meetings has had a net-neutral effect on my career, and net positive effect on my well-being. Skip the free pizza go outside for lunch.

After working in large companies for a while, I've come to think that meetings are a checkmark for moving forward because you can point back to them and say XYZ was decided therefore what you did was justified. But beyond that they're basically useless and more impactful as a way to show off and get visibility

These strategies exist in documents, probably many, many versions of them. If you care, you can get your hands on them and read them. You can talk to these managers and find out more. But if you're so disconnected from the strategising and planning processes, there probably isn't any point.

I have much the same struggle. I have no advice for you, other than to follow along and hope clarity emerges.

Before the meeting starts I confirm there is an agenda present, and ask the organizer to provide one if it's missing, and skip the meeting if no agenda is provided

I also usually ask at minute zero for the organizer to state the desired outcome of the meeting

I drop if I am not providing or gaining value

I would first check if I am required/optional in these meeting invites. If optional, skip it and if any of these meeting subject/agenda piques your interest; watch a recording (assuming it's recorded). Make questions and ask your manager in your 1:1.

If the company is otherwise pretty good, it's good to be candid that you don't understand the context or goal and could use some background. Usually I find that there are other people equally confused but also not speaking up

If I don't understand something, I'd ask about it. If I don't understand the answer, I'd ask more until I understand it. I don't know, may be that looks rude in the west, but that's how I'm behaving.

> If I don't understand the answer, I'd ask more until I understand it.

Before that, I will ask if I am really needed in this meeting or if I could save the company some money.

Could it be that there is a lot of bluffing going on?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spyJ5yxTfas&ab_channel=Nicol....

Ask if this really leverages synergies as effectively as a blockchain operated lateralization paradigm.

And if not, why, and how could we therefore proactively think outside the box and hit the ground running in a mutiscalable fashion?

PSA for tech minded folks: if you don’t want to spend your limited time on earth deciphering these types of meetings for decades, pursue financial independence and live life on your own terms.

> Am I the only one who experiences this?

No, everyone experiences this. This isn't a non-technical vs. technical thing either: I've certainly talked to non-tech people who left meetings unsure what the point of it was or what was even being discussed.

There are several reasons why this happens.

The first reason might sound cynical. There are people out there that do things that don't really need to happen, or need to happen but you shouldn't really need to worry about.

Sometimes this stuff matters, but it matters to the business but not to the tech team, or the way it affects those of us in more technical roles is maybe not apparent unless you've seen that sort of thing before. To take the example you provided: to "allow customers to collect and return online orders from our regional stores" probably requires changes to several different systems, some of which your team might be responsible for, but some of which might be a different technical team, or might require putting manual processes in place. Return handling by itself opens all sorts of process questions, and some of those processes will be automated in code.

Sometimes this stuff matters, but it's explained poorly. [Robert Smith] should be able to articulate the "So what?" in his [quarterly review]. If not, hopefully he gets appropriate feedback to make it more clear next time. In this case, it's not you, it's the person communicating who failed to communicate, but often everyone is too afraid to look like a dummy to ask the obvious question to explain what's going on.

Some specific tactics you can use:

1. Ask why should I (or if you'd rather, my team) care about [transformation strategy] or omnichannel strategy or whatever other thing gets raised. No one person can know everything, and your boss should be able to tell you what part you care about and why.

2. Rather than worry about [transformation strategy], worry about the metric that project is trying to drive. Tech and non-tech people alike use "SMART" (specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, time-bound) goals for projects. If the organizational stuff disinterests you, look instead at the metrics.

3. Hopefully you have permission from your boss to not attend meetings that aren't pertinent to you. If you did (1) from above, and your boss's response is, "oh, don't worry about that," then you should feel like you can ask your boss "Next time we have a meeting on that topic, can I decline and focus on my own project instead?"

Risky move but if it's really just BS being spouted, propose some truly wacky idea that sounds coherent with the BS words involved and see the reaction. If they laugh, fine, it's a joke /s

Compelling evidence that defining the word omnichannel is within scope of this meeting has failed to be presented by your person at this time. A re-training activity has been added to your queue.

Do you have this same experience outside of corporate meetings? Sounds like me with ADHD - but as always much introspection and perhaps a good professional diagnosis is the only way to know.

If you work from home, just tune BS meetings that don't involve you out and do something else.

If I had to go to the office and attend these things in person I'd quit for sure.

Organizational theater. Turn down the volume and watch a Jonathan Blow video instead? Or fix a bug? Read WikiPedia articles on obscure areas of mathematics?

You're just out of the loop on that. Probably someone who doesn't get the memo on omnichannel should not need to go to those meetings.

Yeah i'm assuming there is some foundational context missing for OP. If OP were to go to all business meetings they'd likely have more to go on - rather than one off

I always just asked what people meant. Have been asking inconvenient questions (respectfully) since elementary school. People don’t mind.

There's a lot of "pretending to understand" in meetings. Most people when presented with an unfamiliar term, or concept will just nod along and hope they'll be able to "backfill" the details and understanding later. I'm one of those people. My wife is not. She asks questions, lots of questions. Some of them are obvious and embarrassing but you know what? She gets answers and therefore understanding and often times the "obvious" question she asks actually has a non-obvious answer.

TLDR; Don't be afraid to ask "dumb questions" the rest of the room is probably thinking the exact same thing as you.

Are these in-person or virtual?

If virtual, you might be tempted to do other things on your computer - which would be making matters worse.

This sounds like Walmart Ecommerce. Do/did you work for Walmart Labs?

I think you just don’t care and that’s OK. Corporate stuff can be a drag.

A well-maintained document of abbreviations and acronyms is very useful. Go ahead, make fun.. but man alive, it’s great to know what the hell people are talking about.

I’ve been at companies where a lot of mysterious/cryptic team names are employed. Big save here is using the internal URL shortening service (7 times out of 10 it will link to team/project page).

But honestly, if you’re at a complete loss, it could mean that you’re just not in the lines of meetings and plans where that jargon/terminology is thrown around. If you find that you’re at a disadvantage (after learning what those topical discussions really mean), talk to your manager and ask for more context or who/where to go for more context. Perhaps there’s a quick summary page/doc that someone put up on your internal knowledge base system that can give you the TL;DR/elevator pitch.

If you read the history of Soviet Union and Chinese communist party, you'd find that they had lots of meetings similar to what you described. The trick, though, is that people made decisions before the meetings, all the negotiations, schmoozing, threatening, cajoling, betrayal, cliquing... They all happened before the formal meetings with more than 4 or 5 people. You use those large meetings for formality, and for observing: who gives you surprises, who is pulling threads, who is bullshitting with a purpose or not.

It's a nasty game. The good news is, you may choose not to play it.

This is my dilbert is funny, you’re not alone

oh dear i love hearing corporate buzzwords and holding my fucking laugh

Try this: think about what you do, then abstract it up into a named thing with inputs and outputs, and add a measure of how it changes over time.

A thermostat takes measurements and sends signals to the furnace and fans to optimize for a given temperature, and that temperature is a commitment to a habitable and comfortable home. That's what a manager does. They are thermostats.

The meeting you've described is a bunch of thermostats talking to each other about the temperature they affect, and the furnace and fans looking at each other and asking "wtf? just say more or less and past a point I need more fuel or electricity."

They're using abstractions to talk about relationships and power. What affects it, who has it, what the factors are. A channel is a category of potential customers with some common way to relate to them. A brand is a category of feelings strangers associate with your company and products. mono-/multi-/omni- means, "one, some, or all."

Managing something means extracting value from it. If you are an individual contributor who does work, at best you are managing things from which you extract value and pass it to your team. Managing people means extracting value from the work the team does and passing it along as commitments and outcomes to your execs. Managing relationships means extracting value from the interplay between different desires, needs, opportunities and possibilities as they change over time. Managing money means extracting value from assets that produce money.

Strategic anything means doing things that influence the balance or equillibrium of the things you manage. Multiple things happening at once is called a "dynamic." As a category, all management is extracting value from a dynamic. All dynamics are the relative equillibria of stuff that changes, and managing them requires sustaining the equillibrium of a dynamic - or influencing it without disrupting it so as to cause it to yield its value in a particular way.

Very few people are actually dumb, but most average people can manage, because it's a knack for a very specific human ability to play things off each other. Writing code and building things is not managing, but running code and services is. Building doesn't scale well, but managing dynamics scales almost infinitely.

The reason managers usually earn more money is because they extract value from more sophisticated dynamics of things than an individual simply solving problems and operating on things. Further, sometimes solving problems reduces their ability to be leveraged in a larger dynamic, and solving problems can even destroy value.

This is why I often tell clients in large organizations, their stuff isn't broken, you just can't see who it is working for.

This is a bit of advice that I give to all of my clients (who are mostly the CEOs and CTOs of startups):

You might be thinking, “What is wrong with group meetings? I love group meetings. I get to talk to everyone at once, which is much more efficient than talking to each person individually. Group meetings save me a lot of time.” If you feel that way, I should warn you, I’m about to attack your deeply held beliefs. Get ready. I once had a client who insisted that the marketing team should meet with the tech team once a month, to collaborate on the creation of marketing copy that would be informed by those who understood the technology. This was good in theory, but having less people in the room would have been way more productive. As it was, during a typical meeting we had twelve people in the room, most of whom were bored. The conversation was almost always dominated by the three most opinionated marketing people. Imagine this going on for 20 straight minutes:

Amy: Consumers are saturated with advertisements. The only way to break through is to connect with them at an emotional level. That’s why we need to consider long-form advertising. We need to tell stories that really reach them.

Henry: I couldn’t disagree more! Nobody has time to read a story! If you write more than ten words then you’ve failed. We need a slogan that is memorable, something we can use in every ad, something that —

Amy: No! Studies show that people don’t remember facts, they remember emotions. We need to connect with those emotions, which is why we need to consider —

Henry: Great, so we come up with ten words that pack an emotional wallop, but we don’t write a damn novel! Nobody has time to read anymore, nobody —

Amy: Well I read a novel a week, sometimes two. Some people crave stories and look for narrative structure and we should give them ads that they actually enjoy and want to share with their —

Kate: No, no, you two are both wrong! People don’t want stories so much as they want authenticity. We really need to forge a connection with them that feels authentic; if we hit them with an idiotic slogan or indulge in some silly fiction, that’s just going to —

Henry: If we find the right ten words, it will resonate with them as authentic. That’s our job, to find the ten words that feel authentic! What do you think we are doing here? A quick slogan gives us quick –

Kate: Authenticity is not a pack of Ramen noodles! We can’t create it in five minutes, it’s something that takes time to build and —

Henry: Remember the Budweiser ad, from the mid 90s, with the bullfrogs …??? Busch pulled off a Super Bowl commercial where the only word spoken the entire time was “Bud-wei-ser.” The ENTIRE time! Because the frogs were reciting it! To this day, my older brothers still talk about —

Amy: Oh my god, please for one moment try to get your head out of the clouds and think about how people actually associate ideas and products in ways that might be outside of your narrow —

Does this conversation allow the tech team to have a better understanding of the way the marketing team thinks? Yes, maybe. And if time was infinite, this would be a fun educational exercise for the tech team. Alas, time is not infinite. Such meetings encouraged the tech team to offer their non-professional opinion on matters strictly relating to marketing. Why would the marketing team want that? A bad manager allows these meetings to drag on. A good manager ends these meetings quickly and gets people back to their real jobs. A great manager never allows such meetings to occur in the first place.

you need more synergy

You have a soul. That's a handicap if you want to keep up with bureaucratic bullshitting.

> Meanwhile I'm there wondering who is this [Robert Smith] of the [communications department]? What is the [transformation strategy] and why does it need a [quarterly review]?

You're not prepared for the meeting. This is on you to fix.

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