Sorry, I'm in a meeting | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, I'm in a meeting

iminafleeting.com

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At a past firm I managed a team of SREs.

This was very much a "fire drill all the time" kind of place (vs "slow and steady"). The team came to me and said:

"Alex, we keep getting bombarded by meeting requests and have no focus time."

My solution was to create a weekly "team meeting" from 8am to 11am every Friday and invite all of them to it.

They loved it!

I mentioned to them that making a meeting like this was something they could have done themselves but they responded:

"It carries more weight coming from you. Plus, if someone tries to schedule over it, they are more likely to think twice and/or I can say 'Hey, you have to talk to Alex.' "

This is brilliant, excellent example of the ideal of "management as shielding devs from higher-level corporate shenanigans" in action.

I tried to embody this ideal when I managed a team, but realized shielding too much meant less connection of members with the wider org and too much dependency on me for context and such. Overall, this meant we were a lower value team for the org.

> too much dependency on me for context and such

If you're management, that's literally your job. Synthesize and communicate the important context bits.

Sometimes. When my manager went on sabbatical I had to reach out directly to other teams. We got so much done with that higher bandwidth, unmediated communication. OTOH my boss's boss was constantly breathing down my neck for status updates. There's a balance to everything I suppose.

Your boss forgot his other most important job: Being a communications router, not a communications bottleneck. There are many most important jobs for bosses.

That makes the manager a bottleneck. The manager should shield their direct reports from harm, but also enable independent cross-team communication/collaboration. Otherwise many new problems arise.

Well there is a balance. For certain things it is natural, that you are the one giving them the information. For other things that are much smaller and much more a out generally being aware how others departments deal with certain tasks it can be enough to pick one "ambassador" that maybe does small projects with them or goes to a short weekly meeting or something.

It really can help an organization if departments are not siloed off. But sending everybody into every meeting is a recipe for not getting anything done.

Maybe it's not the same scale, but I recently came across this passage in Cryptonomicon which I find applies to a lot of middle management.

> The extreme formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my problem, sir, is doing it. My gung-ho posture says that once you give the order I'm not going to bother you with any of the details--and your half of the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not bother me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with for a living. The implied responsibility placed upon the officer's shoulders by the subordinate's unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their orders.

Again, this is definitely not this extreme in corporate culture but this is exactly the kind of division of labor I see with most successful teams.

Independently, that exact excerpt occurred to me, too! Stephenson is full of observances. Sometimes i think I've learned more from fiction than non-fiction writing.

Our product security and engineering teams do the same thing to defend against the project managers - an 8am-2pm product sync every monday and friday. Its worked for years now.

I have done the same. FWIW, a 2-3 hour block seems to be the sweet spot, as far as keeping it off the radar goes. Ironically, having multiple a week doesn’t seem to raise an eyebrow.

Weaponizing meetings for defensive purposes. I love it.

Working in education I am glad that this is not a problem where I am. As government employees we are all understaffed and overworked, and all meetings are short and to the point, because they are good when you need them, but most of the time you don't and a well written Email or a phone call is enough.

I've been fully remote fo a long time now, but I used to do this with my team and other colleagues. We'd book a conference room and create a 'meeting', but it was just a bunch of us quietly working on our laptops in the conference room (no audio, no calls was the rule), uninterrupted for a few hours at a go. It was quite popular.

yep, did the same for my team at one place "[IMPORTANT] CUSTOMER OUTAGE" (or something similar).

We had a publicly viewable calendar policy. And I couldn't believe the audacity of people in other areas to take it upon themselves to just book over the top of existing meetings because they had decided their meeting was more important. And I'm not talking a group meeting where it's hard to find a gap that works for everyone, these were essentially 1:1 meetings where the organizer was someone with a little more seniority. No polite ask/DM first if it's ok, or a note in the invite to explain. Just see "focus time - no meetings" or something else _they_ deemed not important and they'd schedule it in that block and assume the IC wouldn't challenge their authority.

So had to play them at their own game to give my team their time back. The meeting was as much as an invite to them to challenge my authority as their previous attempts were. Conveniently it worked and nobody would book over my meeting. I do not miss working for larger companies.

It depends. In the situation where an Ops team has become stuck in firefighting mode, that's something which is often painfully obvious to the rest of the org. And, in that case, it's possible to make a good case for deliberately reorienting towards strategic rather tactical work.

Blocking out, say, 2x2 hours each day for "problem management" (fixing root causes of recurrent issues) becomes easy in that situation, with no subterfuge needed. Alternatively, you can nominate part of the team to be either on-call or entirely dedicated to incidents, shielding everyone else who can be dedicated to strategic work full-time (obviously, you need to do regular rotations).

The team themselves often need help in adjusting to that (firefighting can make you feel like a hero so, although stressful, it can be addictive). Blocking out specific timeslots can be helpful from this point of view, too - incidents often seem a lot more manageable if they're not crashing in on top of you at unpredictable intervals.

My favorite example of the heroic engineers are "helicopter" engineers who fly in, "solve" the problem at the expense of something else being made much worse. Usually getting the accolades of upper management.

Then the heroic engineers get promoted and then learn that they can use their weight to shove others around. Meanwhile the ICs that had to do fire drills to make crap happen don't typically get anything out of it, other than watching some manager that shoved them around get promoted.

I often call them by their title, "Staff Engineer" ;)

But then why do a rather passive-aggressive calendar booking instead of first pinging folks on chat and asking "hey we really need your help asap but there is no gap in the calendar, could we work sth out"? No matter seniority.

To me this seems like a matter of company culture that is set from the top. If CTO and VP level act like that, it trickles down and that tone becomes the norm. In either way.

How does it depend? It’s remarkably easy to send someone a message and ask rather than just scheduling a meeting over top. It’s a basic social skill and basic courtesy.

Or you simply auto-decline conflicting invites

When someone books over their meeting i don’t understand why people don’t just decline the meeting with a note saying “this clashes with a meeting already in my diary”. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this and puts the onus back on the person to find a bigger time

I don’t even bother adding the note. People booked over it, they know it clashes with another meeting. No need to tell them the obvious.

I've done this, but IMO one of the nicest things about it is that people have the option to use it as an actual meeting place. It's like taking over an open conference room where people can wander in & out at will -- except invited members of the team are the only ones who can actually get in. Do your collaboration and then wander off, or just take your headphones off. There have been many times I've joined the meeting and there are two or three people in there just silently working. They just wanted to be near each other and hide from everybody else! Adorable.

I once worked on a team of SREs where the workload was so atrocious that we had HR make up new virtual employees Team On-call Primary and Team On-call Secondary and, other than the manager, they were the only accessible team members. We gave these virtual employees their own laptops and phones. When your shift ended, or you needed a break, you handed the gear to the next guy. We didn't have a formal schedule because it was common to get burned out in just three or four days, or if it was a rare calm period you might hang on to the laptop a bit longer until you got a chance to get properly throttled.

It worked exceptionally well because then the other employees were unable to individually bother team members. The team name in the HR directory was something vague and reported to the skip level, so unless you were in the know, we were totally invisible to the rest of the org. For some context we were keeping many millions of dollars of daily transactions afloat and it was not unusual to receive death threats from business folks when they couldn't do their jobs.

I don't miss it remotely, but I sometimes miss being a member of an invisible force with superuser privileges, with the blessing to unfuck anything we saw fit.

> we were keeping many millions of dollars of daily transactions afloat and it was not unusual to receive death threats from business folks when they couldn't do their jobs

That's crazy. My team works on a part of a system handling several million $/day, and if something goes wrong then everyone's chill about it. Lost $100k revenue? Happens. We'll have the comms team send out something about it. The most heated things got was a time that a manager said something along the lines of "yeah it'll be bad if we can't roll out this thing in the next 2 hours." If I got a death threat that's an instant email to HR.

> My solution was to create a weekly "team meeting" from 8am to 11am every Friday and invite all of them to it.

I've been part of these and the focus time is nice.

It doesn't address the root problem, though. If engineers are being bombarded with meetings, those meetings just get squished into the afternoon time slot.

The secondary problem was that some people started treating the blocked-out time as their only work time. Once that dedicated block came to an end, they mentally switched out of work mode and were not going to do any more work until the next morning. Before all of the "nobody can do more than 3 hours of good work per day" replies, this was a real problem because people also used this time for discussion things with each other on the team, actual team meetings, and various things other than heads-down work, leaving less than the allotted time for actually working. It was also a problem when something would come up at 2:30PM and the person responsible would defer it to next morning's work session instead of taking an hour to do the work. This might all sound like minor annoyances and it was only some people doing it, but the theme repeated itself so much that many of us soured on the idea over time.

The bigger problem was that it didn't address the real issue. Every situation is different and in my case the manager was part of the problem. His solution to everything and answer to every question was to get two people talking. He thought of himself as a switchboard, routing people to other people on our team.

Blocking out meeting time helped a little, but what we really needed was an active manager who was handling communications himself and only bringing the team in when needed. We also needed him to have our backs when we declined meetings or asked if they could be an e-mail.

The healthier managers I've had take a constant, active interest in keeping their teams' meeting workloads down and rooting out interruptions and distractions. They also empower their team to forward meeting requests to the manager to evaluate and ask that external requests at least cc them for visibility. Every time I've had a manager like that, I haven't felt the need for blocked out focus time.

I do this to make sure I get time for lunch— I mean, time for Daily Nutrition Sync lol

At a previous company I had a one hour "Eat or Die" in my calendar every day at noon. It worked pretty well, at least people would usually check before booking over it.

We used to schedule a ‘16yr planning’ meeting for our friday afternoon whiskey tasting and were once praised by an exec for our diligence and forethought

That reminds me of the monthly PSMB Load Balancing meeting a few of the old BIG-IP data plane folks used to have many years ago. (Peat Smoke and Malted Barley.) RIP, Jack.

That's some cute management jiujitsu there, scheduling "focus time" two hours before anyone normally gets to work. Morning people absolutely kill me.

I try to warn junior devs about people like you who "have their back".

> "They loved it!"

No they didn't. Especially if you were in the "meeting".

My understanding was the point was the time was blocked out Not that they actually had to go to anything.

Actually it is your job as a boss to protect your team from external sources of noise and distraction.

This has real demand, I ended up in the Gitlab secondary youtube channel one day, ordering by most views, and I found a video [0] of a seemingly normal uninteresting meeting with millions of views. Turns out people were using this as an excuse for looking like they were busy. They disabled comments now but I saved some of them because I thought it was hilarious:

I play this when I need my family to leave me alone - so helpful 4.5K I play this when I pretend to be busy. This meeting is literally about anything you want it to be about lol 1.5K I love that we all arrived at this video for the same reason 2.6K Every now and then I'll pause it at a good point in between them talking to make my own voice heard contributing to the "meeting" lol. Gets the full effect in! And the beautiful thing is their conversation just flows with it like they heard me lol. 562

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBVtvOpU80Q

For people without adblocker the trick will be ruined at some point by something like loud enthusiastic ClickUp ad.

I was one of those people skeptical that ad-free YouTube was worth the high price, but now firmly a convert.

Get it! The best deal in streaming content. Unlocks such a better experience you’ll find a dozen whole new areas of valuable & enjoyable content to explore.

Why not just block ads?

At some point, paying for something and knowing it will work is worth it. In particular, ad blocking YouTube on mobile is frustrating.

If you can. A lot of subscription TV channels have ads even though you have to pay to get them. Does paying for youtube block all ads, and if so will it continue to, or will they change as so many others have and just make your payment remove some ads? I'm not even counting sponsored content in a lot of videos as ads, but they are annoying too.

If you are a YouTube Premium subscriber you actually do get a button that skips in-video sponsor ads.

Why bother about what YT will do in the future? Nobody can answer your question, but when/if they stop blocking ads, we can stop paying from Premium. Same as when any service becomes enshittified. For now, Premium does block all ads except sponsored content (i.e. stuff in the video itself).

As for sponsored content, I don't think that's under YT's control (other than that they allow it, imagine if it was forbidden: authors would complain about that arbitrary restriction). Sponsored content is like product placement, if you pay for a cinema ticket, why does the movie advertise products, cars, stores, etc? And is it the movie theater's fault?

Not getting sucked into YouTube on mobile is a feature, not a bug

Why? Much like with the person who mentioned YouTube is their primary online entertainment, it also is for me. And I'm using my phone in more situations than my laptop, e.g. when doing the dishes or some chore.

I don't watch ragebait videos either, I watch either music videos, or stuff about my hobbies.

Ads would kill either. I hate random ads popping up.

NewPipe is the way to do that on android...

Yup. Astounding how many tech people just fork over money to an evil company instead though.

Smarttube on Android TV's works exceptionally well, too. I've seen people recommend Tizentube over it because it's nearly indistinguishable from the standard YouTube app, but with adblocking--but I actually prefer the more minimalist UI of Smarttube.

is there something for IOS?

My solution is to watch YouTube on brave browser.

They could raise the price or start having ads even if you pay. You're a renter. You have no rights.

If they rise the price or start showing ads you can stop paying for Premium, same as with any service that stops being useful to you.

Not sure why you need to mention the "renter" thing, this is literally a service you're paying for and that you can stop paying the minute it stops being useful to you. There's no vendor lock-in, just stop paying for Premium when if it ever becomes shit.

The OP is not saying Premium will always be good, they're saying why they find it useful to pay for Premium now.

Had they done that from day 1 you woulf have a point but it sounds like extorsion to me given youtube got rid of most of its competition and established its casi monopolistic position being adfree.

That is not what extortion means

I've been using YT on my FF mobile browser with an ad block and it's been working great.

I don't block ads because stealing ad revenue from companies is unethical. These companies have workers who have families that they need to feed. They provide a service for free, so it's the least I can do. I watch every ad in full.

My cousin, however, stopped blocking ads on YouTube when the YouTube warnings showed up. She is scared that at some point Google would ban Gmail accounts for doing it, and she's had hers for 10 years and really relies on it. She also says YouTube videos are really easy to download so anything she really wants from YouTube she tends to have a local copy of.

Corporate psy-op

The mafia is also made of hard working people with families to feed. Sometimes industries deserve to die. Even if the people working in them don't deserve to lose their jobs. That's life in a free market.

There's nothing more "free market" than ads. Ads literally cost you no money (free), and you don't even have to buy the product they're advertising (freedom from market if desired). If I know I'm not going to buy the product in question, I use the time to meditate, or take a moment to enjoy a cool, crisp sip of Kool-Aid. It's delicious when prepared according to the instructions. Oh Yeah!

IMHO it's more ethical to block ads than not to block them because if you don't block them you're supporting unethical business models such as massive privacy invasions by collecting and selling user data, ad-based malware delivery, and scams.

There's nothing more free market than an ad blocker. Alice agreed to provide a service to Bob for and bundled in ads, Bob accepted the service and declined to run that JavaScript or render those images when Alice passed them along. If I drive past a billboard or accept a flyer on the street, no one would suggest I'm obligated to look at it.

Agreed! And it goes great with TACO BELL® DORITOS® LOCOS™ TACOS SUPREME® XTREME™ CRUNCHWRAP™ DELUXE® BLASTERS™™®™®! They're delicious! Try some today!

You're right, I didn't think about the thousands left destitute by them using UBlock Origin to play a fake meeting video

It isn’t unethical to block ads; the norm on the internet has always been that senders send any not-actively-malicious bits we want and the recipient renders them however they want (including not).

That said I’m also worried about getting banned for blocking too many YouTube ads (Google doesn’t have any obligation to send me emails after all) so I… just don’t go there.

> I watch every ad in full.

Same here. When I am watching an ad on my phone, I make sure to smile and nod REAL big at the screen-side camera - sometimes throwing in a big thumbs-up - because I need these corporations to know that I love everything they do and stand for.

Sometimes I wish that YouTube was just 100% ads. Been ostracized at more than one party for saying that, though.

This is the society we live in folks. We have no choice but to accept it. Might as well stop and smell the roses - or in this case, LOL at the LiMu Emu.

> Sometimes I wish that YouTube was just 100% ads.

This is the way. Remember Bitcoin faucets? Watch an ad and get 0.000000xx BTC?

A YouTube consisting of 100% advertisements that pays viewers pennies per watched ad will turn all the time people spend doomscrolling into a positive economic engine.

Stealing my data bandwidth by sending me unsolicited ads is also unethical. Profiling my online behavior and monetizing it is also unethical. YouTube doesn't seem to be bothered with compensating me for that. Why should I care about them?

I block ads because giving ad review to unethical companies is inherently unethical.

Because with google it's an unwinnable arms race.

I have never run into issues

Or, you know, you could just pay for a service that you enjoy. I watch a lot more YouTube and see a bigger need to keep it alive than Netflix, HBO and co for which I am paying good money already, why should YouTube be exempt from that? Also if Netflix goes away tomorrow, you’ll find their content on torrents easily, but if YouTube goes away, we will lose decades of videos that no one has backups of. Expecting them to offer this service for free and without ads is crazy.

The percent of people who know how to install an adblocker out of the global YouTube audience is so minuscule.

Well some people are in the massive minority that despises modern youtube, even if its ad free.

Look at it through a few different lenses and you'll find plenty of reasons to think youtube is overall bad. People seem to love to retreat to the dishwasher repair instructions for some random old model, to try to defend modern youtube. those videos were all over youtube before it became a vile ad infested infinite scroll attention demanding app, and the product has been on a steep decline since the perverse incentives to chase attention by any means have been added.

The core of modern youtube in 2026, is a bunch of "creators" pumping out x amount of minutes per week or as often as per day, of low quality content dressed up in a video format to disguise how low quality it is, to their viewers that will click it and not realize how poorly crafted it is because its their main feed of information and that is their baseline. You can deflect this and say there is some high quality stuff, sure, but there is no way you can possibly say that the vast majority isn't absolute garbage, and that youtube isn't incentivized to keep people watching for as long as possible with no regard for which level of quality content they are watching.

Literally everyone i've talked to that defends youtube, accepts that they watch some absolute garbage at times, and deem it worthwhile for some reason. I have no understanding for why so many people are just content burning time watching actual garbage, when there is so much high quality stuff elsewhere.

Sure, it's not for everyone. But if you're someone who's blocking ads to view YouTube comment, then that doesn't apply. Which is the context of this subthread.

The context of the subthread was how lack of adblock would ruin the illusion of a meeting, which pivoted into what i view as a weird defense of youtube as a product, i pivoted back towards more things that ads potentially ruin about youtube, if anything despite the amount of replies, the defense of youtube's structure as a product is imo the bigger tangent.

1. YouTube is my primary entertainment so I don’t mind paying for it in lieu of Netflix or Hulu or whatever

2. I like that it directly benefits the creators of the videos I watch

3. It gets everyone in my family ad free viewing for 0 effort across all devices (I primarily watch it from Apple TV app)

4. Gives you higher quality bitrate option sometimes

5. It gives me the moral and logical high ground when arguing with nerds about YouTube online

6. Can download video on most (all?) devices, comes in handy sometimes, but I don’t use it frequently

7. In the past there have been preview features / experiments that were locked behind it, I think PIP was one of them, may be wrong on that. Nice to check them out or get them first

How does it give you a moral or logical high ground?

By arbitrary moral systems, same as everyone else.

For example, it's a counter to the standard argument that "you claim you're against obtrusive ads yet you're unwilling to pay to remove them, you want everything to be given to you for free!", etc.

This is not moral. You're in fact encouraging intrusive ads by paying to remove them.

It's very immoral from that perspective.

You might disagree with it, or you might consider it counterproductive, but it's a moral stance that acts as a counterpoint to the other, also moral, criticism.

I know the moment we all start paying, they will add the higher tier of subscription without ads and basic tier would have ads again

> It gives me the moral and logical high ground when arguing with nerds about YouTube online

The thing with paying for YouTube is that you’re giving Google money for them to get more data on you. Logically that seems like a bad deal. I get that you probably don’t mind it, but other people rightfully do.

> Can download video on most (all?) devices

Is that download as in “they are available offline in the app” or as in “you get an MP4 that you can watch in your preferred player”?

It is "they are available offline in the app". They do not give you an MP4 export.

What and people pay for that? Why not just download with yt-dlp

Why would I bother?

> Why not just download with yt-dlp

This gives me vibes of that famous HN comment about Dropbox.

Alternative: Change the URL from "youtube.com" to "pwnyoutube.com"

Reg. point 2, creators get a fraction of a cent for your view. Just send them a dollar once a year, and they will benefit more. Then install adblocker.

Fwiw, creators get much more for views with Premium than for ad views. Still not a lot though. I think it was Linus Tech Tips who said that you buying one item of their merch gives them more money than watching every single video on their channel combined.

>moral high ground

Depends who you ask. Many would say supporting companies that are so anti consumer is in a meaningful way contributing to the problem.

Many would argue using "free" media sources is more moral since you're not supporting what many consider to be evil companies.

> Many would argue using "free" media sources is more moral since you're not supporting what many consider to be evil companies.

They’d be wrong because you’re still supporting the platform by patronizing it in general, talking about it online, etc. You’re contributing to its popularity and legend. If you believed that Google is uniquely evil, then you should abstain altogether.

Say I know a pedophile cult owns a local pizza restaurant. A group of coworkers go there to eat, and I join. I eat a slice of the XL pizza. I don’t pay my part of the split because I don’t support pedohiles. Was this moral?

just curious - so is YT Premium really ad-free on mobile? I've been burned by streaming services taking my money and still pushing ads in my face. that's the main reason I haven't signed up for YT Premium.

It's really ad-free everywhere EXCEPT for those sponsor segments that the video authors themselves add to their own videos. In those cases, YT premium usually shows a "skip this segment" button.

Whereas alternate YouTube clients that implement sponsorblock can skip those automatically

Yes

Because there's so much more value to YT premium (including YT music) that goes beyond merely blocking ads. It's really a no-brainer if you watch YT often.

There is YouTube Premium Lite now which gets you ad-free long form videos. It’s decoupled from YouTube Music

i mostly watch YT via the apple tv app where you can't

AppleTV

YouTube inserts server-side artificial 5- or 30-second delays before streaming can start in order to force you to waste the time that would be taken up by the ad either way.

One of the best products ever created, and they deserve the dough for serving me all the gigabytes. Fast, reliable, and one product not headed for KilledByGoogle. (Did I jinx it? “We’re transitioning to a vertical-video only platform to meet our billion users where they are…”)

100% agree. I likely would have stuck with adblockers but watching on TV(s) is worth the monthly fee alone. Also you can "watch" (ie listen) in the background on the mobile app too.

I watch YouTube alot btw. :D

The basic install of Kodi on LibreELEC blocks the ads on YouTube. I left Roku after using it for a long time, and the experience with Kodi is far better. Simple setup, too.

For mobile, I use NewPipe which allows background YouTube as well.

Might not work for everyone but I never see an ad on YouTube.

I've been a YouTube premium member twice. Both times, a few months in they start showing ads anyway. Fewer, but still not none.

I've had premium for years and I've never seen an ad. Where did you see ads?

I've had YT Premium for years now and I've never seen an ad (other than sponsored content within the video, done by the video's author).

I’ll disable ads! Apologies :)

What a miserable piece of software. We don't go a day without cursing it at my company. Jira was dog slow but it mostly worked, ClickUp is incredibly buggy and trying to be an "Everything app" while failing at basic tasks.

- A very dissatisfied user

ClickUp was the first software whose AI integration was actually useful to me, but simple because its UX is so mind-bogglingly terrible that I'd rather give an LLM a minute to give me the information I'm looking for.

I don't think there is a human left without an ad blocker at this point. Am I wrong, or are people still clueless?

I would download it rather than run in browser.

Why don't you just decline calls with text messages, or just ignore them, or simply mute your phone?

People take offense.

So?

You would not know as you declined?

> People take offense.

Sounds like something people low on the corporate ladder say

Yes. These tools are for them. If you're high on the ladder you can play Solitaire openly.

I think a good rule of thumb is to avoid people who have this level of lack of empathy. I can be on the toilet, running, on a roller coaster, or at a myriad of different places where I don't or even can't have my phone with me. If they think, that I avoid them because of them, then that's on them, and I cannot care less. I avoid such Mexican soap opera generator people like plague.

Sometimes it's not a choice who is hired and kept as your coworker. Complain and be considered difficult to work with or not a team player.

In other words, toxic work environment. But of course, lying won't help with that at all.

You try ignoring when the family helpdesk is called. You never hear the end of it.

You have way bigger problems, if a text message about the same thing is not enough. They think that you lie to them... and you do.

Are they monetizing it? If not they are missing out!

It certainly sounds a lot more believable as a meeting than the obvious voice acting on https://iminafleeting.com

There's no one talking over another, each audio clip plays only, and immediately after one stops. The voice clarity is also too clear as most synthetic voices are for the obvious reason of being understood. Never sounding organic. Does this fool my toddler? Maybe.

It's like the old 'Boss' screen in 80s videogames. It's a thin veneer so that anything just cruising to see if you're available will be deterred.

The scripts are hilarious, yet not inaccurate. I can't stop chuckling. 'Are you happy with that?' 'Happy is a strong word' 'OK' moves on to the next topic

Definitely AI slop speak though. Nobody talks lke that.

Reminds me of the "boss mode" / "boss key" in old games, like MS-DOS days, which would switch the screen to some spreadsheet mockup or suchlike, updated for the current century.

This was tickling something in my brain and this was it! Thank you.

I think Sierra games like Leisure Suit Larry had that (F11) if I recall correctly. Priceless.

Then you have to exit the game.

My favorite was the one in Space Quest III. Instead of showing you a spreadsheet, it would pop up a dialog making it clear that you've been playing a game, and would state exactly how long you'd been playing it. You'd have to dismiss multiple such dialogs before you could get back to the game.

https://biobreak.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/bo...

Oh my God that's a nostalgia rush. I loved that game. I was impossible hard but so rewarding.

https://hackertyper.com/ and others. Full screen code stream

Audio seems broken now, maybe hugged to death. Console:

  HTTP load failed with status 404. Load of media resource https://iminafleeting.com/media/people/standup-a.mp4 failed

There's a few that don't work, I was able to get the some of the "scoping" meetings to play the audio.

Do people in offices typically just blast meetings out of their computer speakers? Everyone I work with uses headphones so we're not disturbing other people in the office...

Unless you have good ANC headphones, or find something like pink noise that fits you, you're still dealing with all the talking to microphone of your colleagues.

I have reasonably good headphones and nice music

It's less noisy when you hear 5 people talk in 5 meetings than when you hear 50 people talk in those 5 remote meetings.

It's hard to describe how difficult it is to hear someone talking and then a second later hear then in your headphones. It really breaks my concentration. And it's a solvable technology problem - just use the local network for people in the same subnet. But every meeting provider wants _everything_ routed through their servers. There's no escaping they prying eyes.

You know what's worse? Talking, and then hearing yourself half a second later.

I worked at a callcenter that had a problem that sometimes that would happen. The pet theory was that meant they were recording the call to audit it.

You end up stuttering because you think the caller is talking and you want to listen to them, but it's just your own voice back.

You do eventually learn to deal with it, but it was always terrible.

Ohh. You hear yourself through their non-isolating microphones. Argh. That's a brutal one.

No, I don't think it was a microphone problem. It was only like 1 in 20 calls. Really rare, and that meant it was always a surprise that made you sound like an idiot. And back then, almost nobody used a headset on personal phones. Cellphones weren't even that common.

Teams has "room audio" and "join without audio" options, if you are talking into a magic box placed on the center of the table the first one helps.

In google meet you can ask anyone to "join audio" and if they approve, neither you nor them hear each other through the meeting, and you can listen to them talk next to you. But honestly a mildly noise reducing headset is enough.

Yes, because that's exactly what offices are for. I wouldn't do it if I had to sit out in the bullpen with the commoners though.

Going to the office to have a remote meeting is pretty awful.

Truly uncanny!

Only the British audio works for me, though - if I try American or International, the relevant meetings are silent with a "Join Audio" button which doesn't appear to do anything. (Firefox on MacOS, if that's useful)

Same here - Brave browser. Only British works

Same, console says something about missing or "unsuitable" audio resources.

Sad, I wanted the international broken Zoom call

Yeah we need a dial to mix accents and dialects, and level of English fluency. I could want 50% English, maybe some Northern English, Welsh or Scottish, and mix in Indian accents, various American, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Scandinavian, the odd token Aussie. Etc.

That I could enable more South African, or Middle East accents in some meetings would be true to real life as well.

Not Finnish. The silence would not work :)

Needs some Singlish and Hongkie accents.

I wondered why it didn't work. Chrome here, same experience. British is fine.

Thanks, British scoping meeting worked on iOS. Probably would pass muster with family. Even a little laugh in there I heard after a joke.

Same in Chrome and Firefox for me

It sounds like professional broadcasters acting out meetings. Perfect enunciation. Nobody whose name is called is tuned out, or has to pause to think before answering. No pauses at all, in fact. Also, in the fake meetings I sampled for a brief time, every speaker was native North American.

In real meetings, people are untrained orators with boring, monotonous voices, and various kinds of speech idiosyncrasies. Workforces are international so you hear multiple world dialects of English as well as ESL acents.

I didn't hear any stray noises. Lips smacking, throats clearing, background crap in people's microphones. Such artifacts would also add realism.

Simulated voice-activation also, gating out noise, and cutting out parts of the speech here and there.

A couple of years ago, I needed some meeting recordings to test speech-to-text models and ended up going to YouTube. At first, I didn't understand why meeting videos, such as this one, had millions of views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53yPfrqbpkE&t=33s. until I realized people were using them to fake being in a meeting; Read the comments :D

There's count down timer videos on YouTube with millions of views. Like, we live in such a time of digital excess that a video of a timer, thrown over the Internet, is just how some people do timers. I'm very confused by it all.

> Want to feature your product in a fake meeting? > Advertise with us →

Best monetization strategy for a shitpost I've ever seen!

I think the audio is missing a lot of the hiccups, delays, and quirks that come with humans in meetings but the rest is pretty good!

Some decades ago there was an actual product you could buy that did the analog version of this service. It was a cassette tape with various background noises, so you could call your boss or spouse from a payphone and play background noise from (for example) a car mechanic’s shop while you explained that you’re not coming because your car broke down. The auto repair recording had a convincing mix of clanging, hammering, and car engine sounds, but there were a dozen other scenarios to choose from on the tape.

This is quite relaxing as background noise I can safely ignore and work on my project in piece. Working solo all day at home can eat into my sanity :)

It's basically big corp ASMR.

What are all the names for the category of such software... "Self-defense Software", "Busy Simulation Software", "Faux Work Software", "Fake Meeting Software"[0], "Virtual Meeting Simulator"[1], "Prank Screens"[2], ...? Are there many others?

[0]: https://fakemeeting.app/

[1]: https://z.tools/t/fake-meeting

[2]: https://www.whitescreen.online/

I'd say a quintessentially British, tactical-yet-polite social interaction deterrent

Hah yes

Computer-Aided Boundaries? Social Assistive Software?

We need a fake teams / zoom UI with faces talking. You know, for those working in open plan.

Brilliant, this website is blocked at my work: "This content is blocked by your organization".

It's because it's a new domain. Very common in corporate IT.

I didn't know that was a thing, but that makes sense. Thanks!

Where's the HR-faced "Can everyone turn on their cameras please?" one with 200 people in the call.

Yeah where are the faces! (Or at least some!)

Voices sound too well recorded, and professionally coached. Theses sound like robotic voice-over artists or narrators. Normal people don't talk this clearly or have microphones set up this well.

Yeah it sounds like I'm listening to an audiobook, not a meeting

I retired a few months ago. These calls have taken me back to the horror of working in tech. It must be what PTSD is like.

Not sure I understand the site. Each option just shows a grid of names (like a Zoom call) but there's no audio or video. The "How It Works" section implies there's audio at least, but not working on Desktop Firefox / Linux.

No audio on Safari mobile either

For me it works fine on mobile safari, possibly earlier bug/hug?

try the British voices.

If you can't tell people you want to concentrate on your work, there's either something very wrong with where you work, or you.

Listen to a few seconds but all males talk with the "next week on..." promo voice and it's super unrealistic. I need more terrible accents (like mine)

It sounds like a listening exercise for TOEFL. Cadence is all off, real people don’t talk like this in meetings.

I appreciate the creativity, well done.

Fantastic product! Needs people talking over each other for greater authenticity, I reckon.

Great idea, but the voice or rhythm of the conversation still does not feel authentic. Might fool someone if it's in the background though.

Trying to access this site on my corporate Windows laptop and it was blocked "by your IT admin" (in Windows itself, not the browser/proxy). So it's already on some kind of list.

New domain registrations typically aren't on a list yet, which, in itself gets blocked.

Make it a Zoom UI and I’m subscribing right now.

This is hilarious but that API Design Review meeting is stressful AF. I can't have that on speaker anywhere near me and concentrate on anything else meaningful. Human voices are incredibly distracting unless there are enough of them to create a general background wall of sound - if I can pick out what individuals are saying, that's no bueno.

Same, wonder if that’s an ADD thing. Because most people don’t seem to have the same issue

That suggests reverse-isolation headsets, that play audio outwards but not to the wearer. Mount the speaker from a singing birthday card on a pair of ear defenders, perhaps

Maybe a silly question, but without video isn't this obviously fake? Or is it normal for all participants on a call to be audio only?

It's normal in many places for the only video to be shared screen

If you find use for this tool, chances are good that you're in an place where all the participants would be audio only

You get it.

Depends on the company, the team, the agenda etc

Pretty normal. Camera's usually stay off unless it's a 1-1, presentation, or maybe a VP level call.

Totally normal. The only time I ever used my camera is conducting interviews.

Depends on the company. At my last job it was rare for anyone to have video on in remote meetings, and at my current job it's rare for anyone to have video off.

Yup.

At the company I was at from 2014-2021, cameras were always off.

2021-2023, there the cameras were always on. Even during the all-company meetings, at least 80% had their cameras on. Though it was a small company of 75 when I started and 180 when I left (though it was becoming 135 as I was leaving).

At my current place, it's kind of a mix. Small team of 3-5 people, usually on. Larger group meeting, most people off. All-company (about 300 people), only about 50 cameras.

Well, not that plausible lol. I've never heard a more AI voice in my life, and I spend hours on TikTok daily..

I've just spent 20 minutes listening to a conversation about John Carol. Did you know...

This is fun. The audio isn’t particularly believable. Not that it matters for this project.

I’ve used a few tts providers and although a technical marvel they are all still easily identifiable as ai. Humans are very good at spotting fakes.

This project might work better with mostly canned audio clips of real humans.

I disagree. I think many of the audio elements are highly believable for lay people.

Hell no it's not. It's extremely uncanny.

What would "lay people" even be in this scenario? I'd wager most people know what a meeting sounds like.

My grandma who has never used ChatGPT would have probably been fooled. For the rest of us though, this has got that annoying ChatGPT voice inflection that is hard to miss.

It sounds like voice acting. And not particularly good voice acting. Too clear, a bit too bombastic, and as if reading from a script. At least the two that I briefly listened to.

This is not making me feel good about the real meetings I'm regularly in.

This is great, and the modern equivalent of the ancient "Fake Progress Bar" app that you could have on screen for the reassurance of bosses walking past.

A great future feature would be able to generate my own audio using AI on the topic I want and overlay it on this.

I am missing something about how this could hypothetically be useful. If I played this in the background it would be far too distracting to get any actual work done.

I’ve disabled adsense so you guys can enjoy it with UX in mind - tho I have allowed for adverts to sneak into the meetings cough

The audio level is quite high...I had to set my speakers audio level down to 20% so as not to annoy the cats

So they focus-worked only on Friday 8am to 11am? I usually barely arrive to the office by 11am.

This is a hysterical idea and I love it. I have no need for it because wfh, but its so funny.

It made me realize how easy to would be to build your own custom version of the audio. Feed your corporate approved LLM some content to generate a script on, to mention your company name, your products, your stupid internal codenames because some exec thinks they are clever. Nothing secret of course, and have it generate a bunch of mindless chatter. "Ah yes, lets circle back about Project Panamax, the expected delivery in Q2 is pushed back to Q3 due to the release of the new Guard feature".

For maximum plausibility, can you please add the "scope deliverable asset" lady voice track?

Or just follow Alberta Tech’s lead: https://youtube.com/shorts/FLz04Wr14AM?is=T1UpCpKLJPwd5PuS

Reminds me of the fake Windows Update page.

Takes me back. I remember there was a version of the fake Windows 8 update sequence that had it infinitely loop between "Working on updates..." and the frowny-face :( BSOD

too good of the sound for plausible meetings

This is the greatest use of AI that I've seen so far - thank you :)

Please add other language versions! Should be easy to do, and would help us from non-English speaking countries.

I have that but I think translations and dialect will make it sound less convincing … I can always add it as a beta

Minor but when I took myself off mute, my box didn't reflect that. Not sure if bug or a feature.

takes notes thank you for the UAT

It’s all with a British accent though ... it won't fly for long!

I'm not getting any audio, bunch of 404s on loop.m4a... anyone else?

EDIT: seems like British audio does work

Audio doesn't work...

Wait a second is that ad thing ironical? Not a big fan of covert advertising.

Sorry, I cannot hear you, I'm kinda busy, K-kinda busy..

Awesome, if I worked in the UK.

There’s American accents ! Come on, day one it’s fun, if it gets legs I’ll add as much preferences as I can muster up

The American accent sounds British to this American.

Genius. The people need an MS Teams UI option :O

Yes we need Zoom/Gmeet/Teams UI options!!

Where is the one with the senior staff who dont know how to mute (nobody wants to lose their job by mentioning it), has what sounds like a blender next to the microphone and occasionally yells at their dog to get off the couch?

This is hilarious except not a single of the AI generated voices have Indian, russian or south american accents in any of the SRE, Software or API meetings so immediately suspect :) -also everybody is extrovert?

Listening to so many white-coded american voices talk about APIs has never happened in any American company I have ever worked for (Except maybe the Fed Gov)

-please do the needful

https://iminafleeting.com/?v=en-US&m=api

update: just realized there IS an Accents selector- excellent

why would I want to be on fake meetings when I'm already in so many real meetings

All Hands:

Worker: "I'd like to ask about pay review. The numbers look really strong, and some people are probably wondering if that's going to show up in review."

Exec: "That's a great question. I don't want to say anything I can't promise, but we're going to be looking at all our options and I'm sure we're going to look to reward great performance. Does that help answer your question?"

Sketch comedy writers, look out. This thing is sadly, hilariously, accurate.

I want to be far away from places where they ask if they answered my question.

I'd appreciate it if the exec said "The turnover rate for our seniors is very high. Does anyone have any ideas?" "Compensation!" Exec: "No, I mean, maybe pizza every Friday, or a team outing or something?"

(Really happened)

Hopefully it helped answering the turnover question.

Zen moment activated :)

This is super creative!

Nice, it's got real Interdimensional Cable vibes.

Good for laughs, but still not there in realism.

is this what other peoples meetings are like? huh.

is this the hacker typer of the new gen?

For those who don't need the audio and just need to look like busy on teams, there is still the possibility to start a meeting with yourself from the calender.

This is what I do if I kneed quite tunnel-time.

Every time I participated in corporate business calls I wondered "where these people take all these sentences and words from?". Now I know, they were computers.

coming from someone who is the farthest from an ai hater, these zero effort cookie cutter one shot claude sites are just bleh. Why would I bother using the site if you put in 0 effort

Because it’s interesting and useful (and if it isn’t, then a handcoded bespoke design wasn’t going to make it useful)

The ‘mixed’ accent option appears to be just British after all

Usefull!

I'm gonna ironically make a Claude theme and use that if I ever hand write a site again. :)

what a fucking stupid meetings with stupid accents and stupid people talking stupid corporate shit making it sound like they are engineering a rocket. ffs, you are the plumbers writing the cruds.

smart meetings have `pauses`, `thoughts` and `i don't knows`. this is so fucking stupid that i find it lame enough not to use it.

needs more "hmms" and "uhms" to sound believable... this is all fairly flat and evenly cadenced

This is the new BS generator, but more useful

This is hilarious, but I think people should be addressing the real issue instead of this, maybe that work environment isn’t for you and it’s time to look somewhere if you need to pretend. Just say you’re busy or fill your calendar with whatever you are working on without a meeting, in fact, a lot of meetings is a sign of a wasted time so if I see someone (especially technical) is doing a lot of meeting I know they are wasting time or slacking.

bro, that's cool. My friends disturb me a lot while working. This would definitely help

haha, now I can always use this website if I don't want to be interrupted lol

Can we just be honest?

You go first.

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