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copperx

Please go on. You mean at Amazon you would be grilled with questions if you were the presenter?

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Standard procedure at the time for a meeting was:

- no PowerPoint

- 1-6 page write up of the problem, proposed solution and timeline, and alternate methods that were not chosen

- meeting participants ideally have already read the paper, but given 10-20 minutes in silence to read and mark up their thoughts.

- presenter says their piece, mostly just summarizing the paper and clarifying tricky sections

- intellectual bloodbath as all participants try to poke holes and see around corners not foreseen by the presenter

- follow up next week, until the group/manager is satisfied about the direction of the project

This is great when everyone is smart, aligned in the purpose, has no politics, dog in the fight, but awful everywhere else.

It's the difference between peer review by leaders in the field trying to make your paper better, and juniors wanting to be heard or insecure academics trying to get an ego boost by nit picking and wasting time.

Intellectual bloodbath sounds like so much of the latter with point scoring being the goal.

That’s a great meta point.

Intellectual honesty, saying "I don’t know", for example, is only possible in low-politics environments. Otherwise, you make yourself vulnerable to the wolves.

I wonder if the 1-6 pages are all AI written nowadays and if people are allowed to use AI to summarize the pages. Anyone know?

You can use AI to help, but a badly-written narrative isn’t going to do the author any favors. You want to maximize the probability that your narrative will be accepted.

Summarizing with AI isn’t usually a problem, but the objective of the narrative is to gain a deep and detailed understanding of the proposal or problem described within it. The reader or decision maker often can’t do their job well unless they read the whole thing. These narratives are often thoroughly marked up with commentary during the review, sometimes every paragraph.

It's almost like working with a coding agent.

We have a bunch of Amazon transplants who newly arrived at my company and have started doing this. I thought I would love it, because I'm a good writer, a great reader, not great at PowerPoint or meeting gamesmanship, etc. Turns out I kind of hate it. The silent reading time is annoying, especially when you've already read the doc or when most people are on zoom, etc. The intellectual bloodbath doesn't happen at my company. The most senior people are given the floor and they usually spout nonsense because they haven't had time to read the doc, are miles away from the intellectual details, are too busy playing office politics, etc. And then there's just as much meeting gamesmanship as before. I was hoping decision would be more scientific but that just hasn't happened. Maybe we're doing it wrong. Maybe we've hired the Amazon rejects. I don't know. Hoping it improves.

Asking the grandparent:

The what is the idea behind the "ideally have already read the paper, but given 10-20 minutes in silence" part?

The fact that people that have already read it have nothing to do and waste time sitting around bored sounds like an obvious flaw, are we missing something?

I take issue with the “ideally have already read the paper” part. That’s actually not true for most of the attendees. There will be some who have, though, and those will be your co-authors or others who have helped you prepare it before the meeting. And they don’t mind waiting in silence during the reading period, because they have a stake in the outcome.

Also, 20 minutes of respite isn’t necessarily “waste.” Having 20 minutes of time to think deeply on something is often a gift!

Can you really think deeply in 20 min, while on zoom or in a meeting room?

I think this gets to the heart of my complaint. I thought this would increase the water level on our technical discussions. It hasn't. Like I say, could be the documents or people are poor. In any event, I'm one person that believed in this right up until my org implemented it.

We’re talking about the quiet reading period here. If someone has already read the document or participated in its authorship, they get 20-30 minutes of silence to think about whatever they’d like. And yes, those minutes can be a useful respite from an otherwise hectic day.

I have no idea how your org implemented the table read, so I can’t comment on why it may not have been effective there.

Wait, so, there's silent reading time that you hate, AND somehow seniors still manage to claim that they didn't read the thing?

Well they don't say they didn't read the thing. But 10-20 minutes often isn't enough time to truly digest the arguments. And even it were, I'm not sure it would matter. What I've seen is 10-20 minutes of awkward silent time followed by a level of discussion that isn't notably better than meetings before we adopted Amazon ways. Probably we are doing it wrong and/or have the wrong people in the room.

10-20 minutes seems short. Most doc reads I’ve been in at Amazon have a 30-40 minute reading phase. 10-20 minute reads would only be for very short or simple documents.

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