Meetings are first and foremost about relationship management. You do not get to management and certainly not climb the management hierarchy if you do not at least implicitly feel this.
The actual meeting topic, while it can be relevant, is secondary. You establish and reinforce the pecking order, sense allegiance and subversion, or, feel out potential for reinforcing bonds or mitigating fallouts.
This is why people focussed on 'doing the actual work' hate meetings, while carreer focussed people love them.
Now I have exaggerated all the above, but only to make the point more clear. As always it is not black and white.
And sometimes, it is worse. There are realy situations with managers that schedule meetings and calls because they are simply bored at work. These are the types that when the step into the car to go to a meeting, will always have to get on the phone with some rapportee to have a quick 'update' that might just last the lenght of the drive.
I noped out of management track to focus on being a top level IC because I could informally do the actually valuable "management" stuff in that role anyhow (documentation, planning, mentoring, client consultation, etc) without the expectation that I'd get sucked into 5 hours of meetings a day. Leadership still knows who I am and what I do, now I just have someone else to relay a lot of the little shit, and when I communicate with them it's about really important shit that needs reiterating.
I have a lot of informal relationships with people because I'm a go-to, so I can still play office politics if I want.
Bezos forbade pre-meeting homework at Amazon for this reason. He was having a hard time keeping up with everything and the meetings were basically people recriminating each other for not being prepared then having to take up the first part of the meeting with catching everyone up anyways. So he structured meetings at Amazon as an introductory period of reading so everyone was always on the same page once discussion began. No slideshows, just reading a document of n pages where n is less than 6.
I personally find the high level IC pseudomanager role sad. I went back to IC to be closer to the metal. But the expectation is I’ll be a product manager, program manager, and people manager all in one while the focused roles work in a self limited silo.
Then they simply moved the implied 20-30 minute prep time everyone should be doing anyways into the meeting block itself.
If a meeting isn’t important enough to prep materials or an agenda for the meeting should be canceled.
My theory is all standing scheduled regular meetings are basically useless. If I run a startup again they will be outright banned for my org. Meetings about a specific topic or issue are different.
He meets with all the stake holders, determines their desired outcomes, makes sure they are all prepped.
Starts the meeting, sets the goals and the ground rules.
As soon as the meeting exit criteria are met (either another meeting, more homework or a decision has been made) the meeting is over. Done.
Most meetings with this guy lasted 12-17 minutes.
His job was toilsome, but he saved everyone else. I am getting teary eyed just thinking about it.
It’s not about delegation. Everything that can be delegated should be but often there are decisions that need to be made that involve more capital or other outlay/risk than delegates are entitle to have discretion over. Further there are cross organizational decisions where the “join point” is a fairly senior person and they need to tie break between delegates.
Amazon was pretty good about delegation and independent empowerment, at least at aws. But there were certain decisions that always went to Jassy or bezos. People moaned about how much work it was to prepare for those and what a friction it was but those frictions and efforts were throttles and high risk decisions to keep entropy from eating them alive due to the scaled and delegated nature of most processes.
To your point, I think this tone has to be set by the senior person or else it won't take. It has to be ingrained culturally.
Correct me if I'm off, but it seems like you're saying these things are true:
1) There are certain high-level decisions that must be made and only certain people can make them because of the risk.
2) Those people are busy and in meetings almost all of the day.
3) Because they are busy they can't do the homework.
All of that points to the decision-maker as being the bottleneck. Certainly I'm missing the nuance, but that doesn't sound like an organization that delegates effectively. Real delegation, where people are delegated the authority to make important decisions, could reduce the need for all of the above. What exactly are they being delegated if not the authority to make high-level decisions? It's sounds like delegation in name only, or a more superficial version of delegation. Sometimes I think leaders think of “delegation” as “allowing someone else to do the stuff I don’t really want to do.” That’s not the type of delegation I’m alluding to.
The thing Bezos did with Amazon was create a scale free organizational culture which is resilient and highly adaptable. You can’t do that by adopting processes and organizing artifacts that depend on perfect execution by everyone everywhere all the time against some ideal. You have to build processes that are resilient to inadequacy and even incompetence yet still be successful at all levels reliably. When you’re managing an organization of over a million employees with a pretty flat org structure this becomes even more important. Saying “delegate effectively” is not a resilient thing - setting up a structure that ensures delegation happens but executive leadership is aware of and involved in enterprise critical decisions is hard to do.
One way Andy Jassy does this is he requires the documents to be read in his meetings to always use a specific style including Oxford commas. If he reads the document and there aren’t Oxford commas he ends the meeting and you have to reschedule - which can take months. So, you really are certain you have made the most succinct document according to a protocol that’s very low cognitive load for him. He delegates most decisions to his team and they to theirs but at the scale of aws or Amazon, there are some decisions he is a part of. And that number is a lot because Amazon is enormous, not because he doesn’t trust his team or delegates.
But some things he doesn’t. At aws he never delegated pricing decisions. He scrutinized any pricing change in detail. If you did a good job and everyone on his team already was bought in he invariably had something incredibly insightful no one else thought of. He would send it down and his subordinates would often be empowered to approve it. But he always reviewed pricing at least once. This was less about micromanagement and more about choosing to apply his time against what he felt his org should really care about. Margin, cost, scale, and customer experience of these things.
>scale free organizational culture
The fact that the meetings are bottlenecked by decision makers ability to synthesize information imply it is not, in fact, “scale free”. Scale free would imply there are not such bottlenecks.
I agree it’s about developing resilient processes. What you allude to is not that, because it implies single points of failure within decision-making, bottlenecks etc. It doesn’t come across as a clear understanding of true process-oriented culture.
>he reads the document and there aren’t Oxford commas he ends the meeting and you have to reschedule
I can’t know, of course, but I suspect this has more to do with ensuring due-diligence than document formatting. It’s the same thing Van Halen did in the 1980s by requiring brown M&Ms removed from the bowl in their dressing room. It was a quick heuristic to ensure the venue read their rider/contract completely and adhered to it because a lack of due diligence in set design, pyrotechnics etc. would have been a major safety issue. I’m willing to bet checking for a lack of Oxford commas is shorthand for “what other details did they miss?”
>And that number is a lot because Amazon is enormous
Again, this implies the opposite of “scale free” culture. A true scale free org wouldn’t have any nodes with a large number of connections. A large number of decisions does not mean any single individual has to involved in those decisions directly. Why is he not willing/able to select someone capable of making those decisions? (Honest question to understand the dynamic).
Aint no way anyone’s going to adjourn this meeting just because someone isn’t prepared.
Honest question, how many people have this happening at where they work?
Most of the meetings where I work at now are on Teams, and are (for the most part) recorded so if people need to drop, or miss it because they can't make it for some reason. This also allows people to go back and watch at a faster speed or skip to presentations or important parts. The huge advantage is those meetings have a transcript so you can also read or scan the transcript instead.
I'm just wondering if in 2025 people are still having meaningless meetings.
Meetings at my workplace are to the point, never longer than they need to be, and while yeah I weasel out of as many as I feel I can, I don't send an AI notetaker nor do I need it summarized. We meet for a topic, we discuss that topic, usually bullshit for a little in and around the topic, and then we get back to work. I would say most of our half-hour scheduled meetings are 10 minutes, and most of our hour scheduled ones are about 30-40 depending what it is. If we have a LOT to do, VERY occasionally, we actually use up the full time and then end things promptly because we all have more to do.
We don't backstab or plot on one another, our work relationships are built on mutual respect for one another's contribution to our goals. Meetings (nor even being in leadership) are not about jockeying for power, they're about enabling the best of us to help push our goals forward.
I'm getting whole new kinds of appreciation for my job and it's deliberately small, flattened structure because apparently the default state of business is to turn into high school with higher stakes, and I would genuinely rather run into traffic than work at some of these places.
“I noped out of the management track” = “nobody was considering me for the management track”
Doing this is considered proof that this person is a natural leader who steps up to solve organizational problems and get things done. You can guess why this leads to many many layers of management mostly just having meetings with each other, and a confused bottom layer of people who have to use this deliberately broken human telephone to communicate with their real ultimate bosses, the owners.
An (good) AI manager is far more efficient than any human manager, and doesn't need to resort to this tiered system. In theory, they are far faster any any human manager too, meaning the company can scale around them without any issue.
Maybe you still have a board that reviews decisions at a high level, and an office of human manager cogs that can review the individual AI decisions, but then your company structure can become such that a corp of 1k+ individuals can _directly communicate with their customer(s)_
Now, of course I'm not going to pretend that this won't come with its own share of issues, but that's what the "manager cogs" are for...
Which just feels like efficiency if you're the owner: less people reaching out to you with problems!
I don’t know if this holds any more than saying “the only people who get into management are those that couldn’t hack it in the technical side”. There are many people who get recruited for certain management tracks and turn it down so they can put more focus on technical problems.
IMO at the end of the day, every job is about solving problems and it’s up to you to choose the track that aligns with the problems you want to work on. Some want to focus on people and administration, others want to focus on technical problems. A problem arises when orgs only have one route to promotion (eg, you must get into management if you want to be promoted).
It would be like me saying I noped out of the starting lineup of the LA Lakers to with on the custodial staff.
This thread is insane. Plenty of people have turned down managerial opportunities. The inevitable path for any IC is this offer. Countless have told stories of their regret for either path.
* Keeping everyone working on a complex project updated on progress
* Keeping everyone 'aligned' - (horrible corporate word but) essentially all working together effectively towards the same goals (be they short or long term)
* Providing a forum for catching and discussing issues as they arise
* A degree of project management - essentially, making sure that people are doing as they said they would
* Information sharing (note I prefer to cancel meetings if this is the only regular purpose)
* Some form of shared decision-making (depending on the model you have for this) and thus shared ownership
If a meeting 'owner' is sensitive to not wasting people's time and regularly shortens or cancels meetings, it can be done well, I believe.
Similarly I've had so much feedback that people wanted to have a better idea of what everyone else in the department was working on. So various things were tried. Summary emails, brief section in monthly all-hands, yet many of the same people who asked for it didn't pay attention in the meeting and didn't read the email.
Still if you want to stick to what you know, that’s fine too.
I tend to grab the more interesting issues, which is easy because nobody else wants them. But in general I hate my job and I can't learn much from it.
I have to admit that if I was in a more fulfilling position I'd be happier to collaborate. But I'll never be a "team player". I just don't have this in me.
- 2 . Use Zulip - and integrate them with project management tools.
- 3 . Zulip is good for this also
- 4 . Unless you need to share screen and explain things , you don't need meetings for that.
- 5 - Chat please
- 6 - Brainstroming is only place where meetings are needed.
Project management tools are there for the long view and tracking, I don't want to juggle priorities of a JIRA backlog, it basically pushes the burden of PM to me. With a meeting if someone has a blocker thats on me I prefer if they raise it in front of the team and we agree if it should get done now or later. Other than that I share what I am currently focusing on and ignore the rest until I have to deal with it. Multitasking and context switching is a PITA and I will gladly delegate that to PM and hop on a meeting to sync with everyone.
I don't want to be spammed with JIRA updates on dozens of tickets I might be needed on, only to forget about them in 15 mins when something more important comes up.
And written communication takes more effort, it's a tradeoff for sure.
Reductionism is easy, and cheap.
I work with engineers - actual electrical and chemical engineers that design processes and controls - and I make the software side of their ideas happen. They can't do their job without me, and vice-versa. But I'm a SCADA integrator, not an engineer, dammit.
You might be hitting on a specific personality type, rather than a goal of meetings.
In his book “Never Split the Difference”, Chris Voss relates three kinds of people differentiated by how they relate to time. One group thinks of time as a way to manage relationships. That’s the manager you allude to. But another type is the classic Type A personality who views “time as money.” If the meeting isn’t getting to brass tacks and outlining strategy and tasks, they will be frustrated. The last group thinks of time as a way to wrap their minds around a problem to reduce uncertainty. The authors point is that you need to understand how people view the time spent discussing a problem to really know how to manage the interaction.
If you read many of the responses to your post in this context, it becomes clear which group each commenter belongs to in many cases.
So how did this end? Well despite literally ignoring and not in any way doing their actual job because of this, they were promoted to management.
So yeah, meetings are about reinforcing mgmt power above all else.
In other words, a total waste of time for me. I don't care about pecking orders, I ignore them anyway.
> This is why people focussed on 'doing the actual work' hate meetings, while carreer focussed people love them.
Management isn't the only option to make a career in.
They add no value, except for themselves.
A client buying your product couldn’t give two fucks whether your manager asked you an ice breaker that ate 10 minutes of a 30 minutes meeting. And managers that don’t understand this are self interested parasites, or just completely inept. Most of the management I’ve worked with have been a combination of the two.
and getting stuff done is what makes the company money, "establishing the pecking order" is just leeching from the company to fuel your own sense of importance
That's not entirely it. Some people just won't say something unless put in a setting where they are explicity asked for it. I've had meetings where I ask for a status, and someone says they are stuck on X, and they've been stuck on X for two days.
And I'll ask why they didn't just ask for help. They weren't comfortable asking for help. They were only ok stating the problem when asked specifically for status.
So it also creates that environment were some people are more likely to share.
It will tell you how much time you spent working on tickets, and how long to spent working on the perfect reply for hacker news.
Much easier said then done. Especially if this really goes towards technological unemployment.
This might not scale well to larger teams, but we simply write a short message in a dedicated channel each day. It contains a short status and a few bullet points to plan the next day.
Slack makes this conventient because you can write a top level message and then use the reply feature to add more details.
Anyway, I’ve come to really dislike async comms. If something is being communicated to you over async, it’s something not important enough that you can ignore it, in many cases indefinitely. Meetings are still the best way to keep everyone in sync and it’s a structural strategy to keep everyone accountable for making progress at their jobs.
Sync is even worse at scale. I had the pleasure of attending standups in a 20-person team. It was a nightmare where I said two sentences and then wasted the next two hours of my life listening to things I either know or are unrelevant to me.
>you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read
Great, because skipping three pages of unimportant conversation is faster than skipping 30 minutes of banter between two extrovert UI developers as a backend specialist.
>structural strategy to keep everyone accountable
Sounds exactly like something mid level managers say to themselves. Structural synergy? Keeping people accountable? I just want to work, damnit.
Why is your team 20 people if the majority don’t do anything you’re remotely close to? Someone should have split the team or at least the standup.
Why doesn’t your lead enforce a time limit and script?
It can happen the other way round as well. My team is small but only I ever stick to the script. Every one else talks in detail for 2-3 minutes. Their updates could have been 20sec.
You wouldn’t be complaining if someone actually did something about it.
Again the problem is that no one is interested in processes to make things better or more efficient and then people blame the process.
The process might have plenty of short comings, but we’ll never know.
All of that can happen just fine in a real-time team chat as well - and give people the chance to provide actual context and links, and also check back at the actual discussion later.
What? Instead you are punishing everyone to sit on a meeting, hearing two people discuss something that could have been a dm. I get that some people prefer meetings but to me every meeting with more than 3 people is a massive waste of time
I’ve got ~90 years on this planet at best. I’m not interested in wasting 1/5th of my working career in meetings, listening to people I don’t even know, telling me personal details about their lives I will not retain for more than 5 seconds. To me, it’s genuinely insulting to my time to waste it with these pointless fake displays of familiarity instead of getting to the work at hand and ending the meeting early.
Don't even be sure they're real; there are increasingly people who outsource their work to bots these days.
When we treat visible presence as a proxy for being "real," we exclude people who can't - or shouldn't have to - mimic neurotypical behaviour just to belong.
In practice, this is harder because people don't speak up unless prodded. And on Slack, I spend a lot of time and effort prodding people for that update, whereas a stand-up takes 15 minutes, tops.
Not attending stand-up is a lot more visible than silently ignoring an async update request on Slack.
If a second "please respond, I need the answer now" Slack message is not enough, you have bigger problems
Then the meeting is pointless. But not all projects allow for that.
Perhaps, for efficiency, they could ask everyone simultaneously in parallel, or at least roughly around the same time?
To maximize creativity and opportunity, perhaps we could then figure out some way to share each person's status update with every other person on the team?
You still don't need a meeting for that if everyone actually does it.
This is a nice way of saying that some people just won't tell you what they're up to async, you have to wring information out of them synchronously. They're just bad at communicating.
On a well functioning team I can rely on people just reporting status themselves when something relevant happens and reaching out for help. But some people just don't do that, especially people from other teams, departments, etc.
Like, you explicitly ask them in an IM and they don't tell you?
Not telling you on their own, I can understand. If the former happens though, you have bigger problems, that asking on a real-life meeting wont solve.
A team meeting should not be the go-to solution for "Bob is bad at communicating"!
> But some people just don't do that, especially people from other teams
Hope this helps.
If you're the manager, YOUR job is to figure out how to get the information from the people who owe you a report, not weaponize my presence at a meeting to ferret out people you can't manage to reach.
But honestly the condescending tone of this whole exchange tells me everything I need it to about why you struggle to get information out of people.
You're reading things into what I'm saying that aren't there.
My job is to defend my direct reports from having their time wasted and clear blockers for them. Sometimes, yeah, this means meeting with people to ferret them out.
I'm not weaponizing anyone's presence at a meeting except mine.
If you need to babysit bunch of juniors thats fine, but it should be clear from one's role in team/project that this needs to be a continuous effort (at least till they grok how to step up, but it takes years if at all for some).
This is a real thing but it should only be temporary. If your culture is good and amendable to this sort of thing, then the IC should learn fairly quickly that they need to ask for help.
This behavior in ICs is, believe it or not, trained. I'm sure they've worked somewhere before or with a different manager in the past who would get annoyed at them asking for help. So they've tuned their behavior to that.
Instead they'll just wait until the next meeting and basically ask you to give a tl;dr or 'context'. I wasn't sure if it was a case of just having poor literacy or just some bullshit power play on their part.
In the most egregious cases I started to get petty and just read my message aloud, verbatim, while they had it open on the screenshare. Not as if their time is automatically more valuable than mine.
Then I attended our first parent-teacher conference at kindergarten. It was incredible: 2.5 hours of discussions and ridiculous complaints ("why does my child has to put on splash pants on rainy autumn days, putting them on is just such an ordeal!!"), and not a single bit of relevant information was transmitted. Not a single decision was made. I went home in utter disbelief.
Currently, our parents' council is trying to organize a party for the children who will be going to school after summer. What should've been a TODO list where parents can write down what food they will bring and who will help with what escalated into 2 evenings of discussions, a Skype meeting, and a Whatsapp group where several fractions of parents have been fighting over whether T-Shirts should be printed to celebrate the end of kindergarten for over a week now.
It's like... people, is your time not worth more than this thirty minute bun-fight over summer clubs?
Still hate meetings though.
Also the opposite effect, where the most productive and important engineers seem to cause most problems and seem incompetent.
I've been in my share of useless meetings.
However, I've been fortunate enough to be able to cut down the useless meetings at most of my jobs (with one exception, which was awful).
The problem now is that the AI note takers are turning even the good meetings into useless exercises. It's obvious that the AI note taker participants have no intention of participating during the meeting. Then 3 hours later you start getting follow-up questions that they should have asked in the meeting.
Everyone knows "This meeting could have been an e-mail" but fewer people recognize when "This 50-response e-mail conversation spanning 3 days could have been solved in the 30 minute meeting"
The root problem is people trying to transform their own work into async at the expense of forcing everyone else to accommodate them.
We can’t have people going back and forth over chat to work out an issue. I need to start a meeting so I can monologue the portion people already understand again and then I can complete the work because my portion is complete.
I already completed my work so I don’t need to change with these back and forth messages finding oversights or conflicts. I can just sit back and coast.
Also when it’s in chat everybody’s messages are the same size and you can’t just skip over them. By holding a meeting, I can disable everybody else’s mic and the chat or just talk over anybody else and win the discussion. By talking louder, my opinions are better and correct.
I don’t like when some random person causes me more work by speaking up in chat so that’s why we need to have meetings. Plus there’s a whole paper trail and it’s just messy and inconvenient.
It's not even that, they do the meeting to appear personally leading something. Modern companies confuse leading meetings with true leadership, because hardly anyone knows how to do the later. It is a fast, effective way to give an appearance of leadership and say they're doing something, while doing close to nothing.
The prerequisite of reading notes written by an AI means you have time.
They should just be honest and say "I don't need to be in this" or "I don't want to be in this" rather than pretending they do.
Authority is also much harder to deliver in an asynchronous format. If someone can just _not read_ the memo, it functionally has no power. The risk isn't that your memo might be questioned, it's that your memo might never be read.
About a year ago, I nearly quit my job over this, going so far as to put my two weeks notice in as a way to hold a gun to their head, repeating my frequent request that all directives handed down from on high _must_ be in writing if they are expected to be followed. My company had (still does, to some degree, but we are still working on it) a cancerous culture of he said/she said that was being abused to avoid any accountability from upper management, which was both impeding the actual work being done as well as demoralizing to th workers. We even ended up losing some talent over it before I used my own value and authority to put my foot down, making me wish I'd done it sooner.
Verbal directives only stroke the ego of the person delivering them and their meaning either evaporates or gets twisted as soon as everyone walks out of that conference room or logs off that video call. If the person issuing them is not willing to have their directives questioned when they are in writing, then they should not hold the position they do. It's not about questioning someone's authority, it's about ensuring the directive makes sense with the work being done and adds value or guidance to the existing processes. Screw the fragile ego nonsense.
Even people getting @mentionned on slack or in emails seem to find it acceptable to say routinely they didn't see/read whatever it was they were specifically asked to look at.
You're right, and that tracks with my experience too, sad as it is to have to admit.
However, if you're not holding people accountable for not reading the directive/memo, then that's on you. When you have something in writing that you can point to and say "look, there it is, I provided you with the information, you chose to not acknowledge it," it's very damning to the person who ignored it.
Without getting into details about the time I nearly left my company, I can tell you that one of my greatest weapons was (and still is) being able to literally recall emails, SOPs, and SMS messages that had been ignored. It makes me a thorn in the side of lazy managers and legacy hires that turned out to be freeloaders in my industry.
The people at the bottom of any organization have a responsibility to hold the people at the top accountable, just as it works the other way around. This is extremely hard for those of us near the bottom of an organization to do, I know, but if we don't, we are giving permission for the problem to persist and make our work that much harder. We all know that managers and those above them will avoid doing as much work as possible at any given time, but willful ignorance is not admissible in court of law, so why should it be any different in the work place?
It's a side effect of the information noise we're all subjected to, if we all received 6 messages a day we'd probably read them all but as we often get hundreds (thousands if you're getting automated messages) it's "OK" to miss a few.
Higher ups like meetings too, everyone likes feeling better about themselves by showing status. Perhaps A.I will be able to relieve us of that eventually ...
I'd say poor reading skills are even more of a problem
"Do you want these to fit together like this or like this?"
AI would only be able to summarize to the context of this comment.
I thought most meetings take place because people are to report how many meetings they organized/attended as this is considered a productivity metric.
This "writing well" as a form of good communication is needed, but while in school, those same people who cannot write well also likely were complaining about learning how to write essays and such. Over time, this sort of lack of learning has resulted in poor written communication into adulthood i reckon.
And with the advent of LLM and all these chatGPT-esque bots writing for them, esp. in school, the level of literacy skill is only going to continue to drop!
But if you do not hold the engineers accountable for reading the memo, that's on you (or whomever has the authority to do that). This is why having things in writing is important and verbal directives have about as much value as a fart in the wind.
That’s funny, because I actually prefer writing to make up for my poor meeting skills.
by people with low verbal IQ