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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s pretty clear to me. I am much happier to be quietly doing research, writing code, testing, writing documentation, fixing bugs, writing emails, etc. Now stick me in a meeting and I soon become very unhappy. Why? Because I’m really not interested in listening to people complain about stuff unrelated to my tasks or giving updates about random stuff or whatever.

Now I don’t mind socializing with people at work and making a bit of small talk but I have zero interest in the sort of collaborative work that involves daily meetings. I’m far more productive when I can be left alone to focus on the task and it drives me crazy when people constantly interrupt me.

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Here I would find some support for the parents point: There is a lot of room for interpretation.

To me, writing an email can be the most intense "working with people" thing, more so than any amount of small talk or doing manual labor with people. The amount of stress that goes into a hard to write email – mostly because it will also be a hard to read email and then also the anticipation of some sort of unpleasant reaction – and the amount of time you have to wallow in that stress, rivals few other social interactions in its intensity.

See, I find writing an email to be a totally straightforward, impersonal task. Like writing code, but in English rather than a programming language. Just the facts, no sugar-coating or other nonsense!

Then you end up on the job market.

I know the emails they’re talking about. They’re not as simple as writing the facts. Writing an extremely complex technical email in jargon and ways for people who aren’t familiar with any of it - even slightly - and explaining each detail concretely is quite the process.

It’s annoying when I have to write a 6,000 word email that is easily misunderstood because most others barely have an idea of the subject matter but it happens more often than I’d like to say.

Tbh - I find the emails pointless but this is what happens in low trust (dysfunctional) organizations.

It depends on the quality of the meetings. My last job I hated them for all the reasons you said. My current job they are enjoyable and productive. That's because the agenda is a "living" document that anyone can edit during the week, and the meetings stop when we've nothing left to discuss or need to get back to work

That's true. At my last job the meetings basically served as a way for the manager to broadcast stuff that could've just been sent out in an email and then collect updates on what everyone has been working on which also could be done with email. There was almost no back-and-forth to it at all, yet the damn thing took 2 hours per week. A huge waste of time!

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