The amount of meeting time waste baffles me. And then you try to make them productive and include information in the invite and you show up and nobody read it. So now you have to waste more time when you could have just gone directly into brainstorming.
At this point I kind of just give up. I make my suggestions to make things more efficient and try to remember that even if the work gets done sooner I won't be working any less.
For many people that's a selling point. I practically beg my teammates to ask questions in the team slack channel instead of DMing me, but they never do. I think it's stage fright and wanting to reveal ignorance to as few people as possible amplified by various higher up people joining the channel. Also compounded by tons of people from other teams joining our channel and no one pushing back because "we want to have an inclusive conversation" or similar platitude.
I would probably be one of them (although I'd be more likely to email you if that's an option).
If I have to ask my stupid question in public, I'm more likely to simply not ask it at all -- especially if management or people who are not on my immediate team are in the Slack channel.
I'm shocked by how much some people despise email. "You still use email?" Yes, I do, and I believe it is really effective...
And because it's Slack it's not organized in any way shape or form. You don't know what's important and what not.
My theory is that people who worked remotely pre-Covid were selected one way or another to have above-average written communication skills.
Covid suddenly brought everybody remote, and naturally the average communication skills for remote work dropped.
OK, which pipeline, what errors are you receiving, when did it last work, any changes since then, etc.? A lot of people aren't good at communication, period. It's like pulling teeth sometimes.
Even that is better than someone pinging you "hi." It's such an immediate red flag in communication skills.
<2 hours later>
Can we jump on a Zoom?
Do you have screenshots? No. Console error logs? No. Time that it happened? No. Network logs? No. Can you reproduce the bug? No.
Great, that was 10 minutes wasted.
you've identified part of the problem.
Some of the people who want constant meetings are poor communicators whose messages won't be read (or won't communicate effectively) without a captive audience.
Some people don't want to be held accountable for what they say.
If someone wants to pay me $$$ to basically sleep with my eyes open, then that's on them. I'm smart enough to allow them.
Fear Of Missing Out. People don't want to be told what to do, but rather invest in an idea from its birth to its execution. That means there are going to be a lot of meetings like "which feature requests should we do in Q3". People want to justify, negotiate, compromise, and bounce ideas off of each other. Presumably some refinement and understanding comes from this process, beyond what one person spending a day to write a design doc would accomplish. (Do people like writing design docs for things that never get prioritized? You want to spend your time on things that are going to be shipped, minimizing the time spent on proposals that don't go anywhere because they don't have wide agreement.)
HN's way of avoiding these issues tends to center around not involving any sort of multi-player action in their work. One person can do a lot in tech, so that can be a viable approach, but it's not the sort of business that people are hiring for. To do big things, you need a big team. It's always been that way. We didn't land on the moon through one individual contributor making a rocket and riding it there. Rather, thousands of individual contributors were coordinated through, gasp, managers, and collectively they accomplished something no one person could do on their own. If you want to go to space, you probably need to have a couple meetings. If you want to rewrite `cat` in Rust, you can probably skip them.
In the coming years, it will be interesting to see how AI organizes coordination. If AI 1 has 2 A100s attached to a robot arm and AI 2 has 2 A100s attached to Amazon Prime, it will be interesting to see if one of them says "hey what if we combined our resources and made X..." I also look forward to the first AI agent chilling in a $3000/month rack complaining about having to go to sprint planning meetings. So like us!
At another place, we used a text chat SaaS to be super-effective, and usually the only internal routine videoconf was for whole-company sync-up and personalizing. Text chat for effective async/real-time (in addition to docs), and occasional videoconf as needed. So productive.
I've also seen places where people did meetings because they didn't know how to collaborate effectively, and there were barriers to learning that. One of the places, it seemed meetings were approached much like they approached coding or documenting: being able to say you performed that proof-of-work was the end goal itself, rather than the meeting being costs invested smartly towards some actual shared goal.
I go further and simply don't attend meetings that lack an agenda or at the very least point out when there isn't one when the meeting starts.
I don't spend much time in meetings.
My pet theory (that in all likelihood isn’t unique to me, but derived from things I’ve read in many other places) is that this is due to an existential crisis among the management class. Many managers who were previously used to managing people very directly, by looking over shoulders and such, realized that their jobs are unnecessary when they saw how productive people became during the pandemic’s forced remote work regime.
As a way of coping with the cognitive dissonance they began to schedule huge numbers of online meetings so that they could continue to feel engaged and “useful.” This has turned into a very large “emperor’s new clothes” situation, played out across thousands of companies. Hence the desperate moves by many companies to try to force workers to come back into the office.
I hear this a lot in forums, but to me it rings out as something that perhaps-disgruntled workers want to be true about managers, but isn't really grounded in measurable fact. It's true that as a manager I don't produce a lot of code, but at the end of the day my job is to know who the experts on different topics are and to know what the zeitgeist (and maybe even plan of record) of the org is so I can get the right people in a room together to solve problems. If we left that up to each individual contributor, especially the more junior ones, we'd never be able to achieve a large scale goal. Imagine if you were trying to build the Golden Gate bridge but you eliminated management and just turned a bunch of workers out on the site to do whatever their skills and experience led them to.
The ones I’m talking about are from “the management class”, likely went to business school, and have no technical background at all, and occupy most of their days “walking a beat” around the office to look over people’s shoulders and make sure they’re busy. These are the Michael Scotts of the world, and they are the ones in crisis, not the skilled managers.
And now maybe the "original remote workers" are affected, too.
I think there’s a lot to this. Those of us who worked remote for many years before COVID probably developed more efficient ways of working over time. Then the pandemic hit and we were suddenly vastly outnumbered by newly remote folks who didn’t actually know how to work remotely.
if it can be summarized in 2-3 lines in an email, dont accept the meeting.
So many time is wasted on meeting because of off topic stuff or because the rights persons haven't been invited.
It’s just easier to waste everyone’s time and meander through it.
One thing I found worked, and Zoom has apparently added as a real feature, was to have a standing meeting room that was just always open. We had a conference room in the office signed in. People could just hang there. Usually you just heard typing and occasional questions. People usually had their camera off but not always. But it seemed to appease the need to be seen without inducing anxiety provoked meeting proliferation.
I was already a remote worker, hired as a senior. Attended all my meetings over zoom.
Suddenly, when the company went full remote, meeting load about doubled.
My role/responsibilities didn't change. So either I was missing plenty of important meetings, or, there's a lot of useless meetings.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/work-office-coworkers-schedule-...
if its something where we need to synchronize with other team members, then schedule it ahead of time, or else let me know asap / hit my cell / etc.
One of the givens of remote work is that you have "synchronous hours" where the expectation is that you're within 5-15 min of your computer, and that you put status messages if you're away / out.
e.g. "OUT LUNCH" at 12:41pm means I can reasonably guess where you are (lunch) and roughly when you're going to be back (1-130ish).
non-synchronized or non-time-sensitive tasks can be done whenever so long as deadlines are met
We have better text-based work communication tools than ever, there are so few good justifications for getting large groups together at the same time.