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Thanks for asking this. I recently took a job with $MEGACORP after 5 years with start ups. I forgot how much $MEGACORP likes meetings. I found myself thinking

Thanks for asking this. I recently took a job with $MEGACORP after 5 years with start ups. I forgot how much $MEGACORP likes meetings. I found myself thinking about how gumroad has no meetings. I asked myself the same question as the OP.

offtop5 6y ago
As long as I can Bill my hours, I don't care all that much. I find smaller or more experimental companies to be much more unstable, and in my thirties I just want something stable and nice so I can save money and retire with a bit over a million in the bank at 40. Just want to be done with it
- fcardinaux 6y ago
  I wish I had thought it that way when I was in my thirties.
  - mmkos 6y ago
    How did you think in your thirties?
- spurdoman77 6y ago
  This is sane way to think. There are awesome workplaces out there. Whether you have a shot getting employed there is another question.
- bravura 6y ago
  If you retire at forty with a million in the bank, how do you make it if you live till 80?
  - CabSauce 6y ago
    Interest and live on <$50k/yr?
  - bawolff 6y ago
    A million in bank is like $35,000 a year in interest. Not an extravagant lifestyle, but certainly possible to live comfortably on that in a low cost of living area if you have low expenses.
    - atwebb 6y ago
      Where are you getting low risk 3.5% interest these days?
      - CleverLikeAnOx 6y ago
        I think the 3.5% number is not for low risk investing. Additionally, you would need to make something more like 5.5% to account for inflation. Still a fairly conservative number for investments in equities.
        ptmcc 6y ago
        The oft-quoted 4% figure is accounting for inflation. The nominal average return of a balanced portfolio over time is more like 7-8%.
        dbjacobs 6y ago
        FYI, the oft-quoted 4% figure was derived using a 30 year retirement time horizon [1]. Using longer time horizons will lower that number. [1] - https://financiallyfinanced.com/posts/will-bengen https://financiallyfinanced.com/posts/will-bengen
      - ptmcc 6y ago
        It's an average inflation-adjusted expected rate of return over time of a balanced portfolio, not a guaranteed rate every year. Some years might be 10%, some years might be -10%. Historically, about 4% is the safe drawdown rate. FIRE folks tend to be a little more conservative than that, though, because of the even longer time horizon involved with retiring earlier. Check out a tool like https://www.firecalc.com/ https://www.firecalc.com/ that is designed to run backtested simulations to see if your drawdown rate from your starting assets would historically be safe for your time horizon. The UI is clunky but the math is good.
  - CleverLikeAnOx 6y ago
    There is an idea called FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early). The first half is having enough money to not need to earn again, so you are not dependent on work or others. Once this is achieved, then you can retire early if you would like. The conventional wisdom in this community is that if you invest a sum of money in equities, you can withdraw a certain percentage annually without ever running out of money. That is, you mostly live off of the growth of your investments. Generally, 4% (inflation adjusted) is considered a safe withdraw rate. So if you have a million dollars, and you can live off of 40K a year or less indefinitely, then you can retire. Obviously this is a simplification and there are more considerations. Let me know if you have any questions. This is a topic I am passionate about and happy to give my 2 cents on.
    - war1025 6y ago
      I'm pretty well versed in the whole FIRE thing, and find myself more or less on that path. One conclusion I've come to is that after people "retire early", they almost never actually stop making money. It just tends to end up being more entrepreneurial stuff that they make money off. You don't "have to" work, but you "might as well", and all the sudden you may even find yourself in a more lucrative gig than you started with because you changed your focus and found a niche you can fill nicely.
      - offtop5 6y ago
        I'd love to have free time to pursue other hobbies like working on video games, and making music. If I had the million dollar cushion, and then maybe I only made like $500 or $600 a month with my hobbies that would be awesome. Life is too short to do anything else in my opinion. unless I guess I end up with a family but that's not really in my plans
      - stocknoob 6y ago
        Yep. The type of person who gets a high-paying enough job (and has the discipline) to save $1M usually doesn't have trouble getting extra work if they want. But now there's no pressure, they can take "fun" gigs that couldn't have supported them previously (musician, librarian, teacher, etc.).
  - offtop5 6y ago
    Move to a country where I can live off the 40k -> 60k a year an interest or whatnot. This basically means either Southeast Asia, or some parts of Latin America. Asian languages tend to be extremely hard, and it might be a lot easier to sort of blend in with the populace in Latin America. The last thing I want to do in my retirement is draw needless attention to myself.
    - war1025 6y ago
      > Move to a country where I can live off the 40k -> 60k a year an interest or whatnot. You realize the median US household income is like $40k/ year right?
      - offtop5 6y ago
        Yeah but I'm not trying to struggle in America, so cómo estás ¿
      - pvarangot 6y ago
        With $40k a year you can live with the rich in some Latin American countries, if you can also spend 250k/350k on buying your own place in a high rise with private security or a gated community. You won't have access to Amazon and be able to buy all the top notch gear for your new hobbies in a week like as a tech worker in the US, but you can have a nice house with cleaning staff, a nice car or just take Uber or private cars everywhere, and do fancy dining two or three times per week. The median American household doesn't have all this luxuries.
    - groby_b 6y ago
      You assume that a million generates $40k to $60k, inflation-adjusted, for the next 40 years? I suppose that's one assumption to make. You know that the last time the US GDP grew more than 4% was back in 2000, right? And 2010 worldwide? Both with a continued downward trend since at least the 60's? (This obviously doesn't preclude >4% ROI, but that in turn means increasing income inequality, and at some point, there's a price to be paid for that)
      - 6y ago
  - jandrewrogers 6y ago
    A reasonable investment portfolio (in the US) will reliably generate enough inflation-adjusted growth on average that this will afford a modest lifestyle in most parts of the US. $35-50k/year (today's dollars) without much risk, which is a fairly average wage. It is only unrealistic if you live in an expensive city with a lavish lifestyle. Anecdotally and ironically, many tech people that do this end up making a loads of money after they "retire". They don't sit on a beach and do nothing. The ability to be highly selective about what they work on, and to defer any compensation, often leads them to invest all their time on software projects they are passionate about, which not infrequently ends up throwing off a large amount of incidental income even though that wasn't the objective per se. I like the term "recreationally employed" to describe this lifestyle. I know many engineers who ended here and some of them make more money "retired" than they did work the 9-to-5 grind at a big company.
- xienze 6y ago
  > in my thirties I just want something stable and nice so I can save money Shoot, the article yesterday had me searching for how I can apply to Gumroad on top of my day job. They were claiming $50-250 per hour with as little as 10 hours a week. You want to save money? Have a stable day job and work at Gumroad for 10 hours a week. With such a short work week I can't imagine you'd be doing much more than simple bug fixes. I can swing 2 hours of that a day. > retire with a bit over a million in the bank at 40. You might have to set your sights a little higher. That's not gonna carry you to potentially 85 years old.
dbrueck 6y ago
Similar experience here - lotsa years at startups, then something worked out great and part of the deal was I had to join $MEGACORP for a couple of years. I left as soon as my time was up, and a big part of it was due to the absurd amount of meetings. Now back at another startup (10 people), we have no meetings other than a 20 minute Monday call for some sync-up that otherwise doesn't occur naturally. It's wonderful.
- blackrock 6y ago
  The worrying thing about a 10-person startup is their lack of money. And possibly their unproven business model. Which can lead to managers making petty decisions about money and individual worth. Since not every 10-person startup becomes the next Google. Instead, most of them becomes the next Froogle, that probably shouldn’t have existed to begin with.
  - war1025 6y ago
    > The worrying thing about a 10-person startup is their lack of money. I work at a company this size. We've almost gone under quite a few times. We're still here. It's an interesting way to live. It's certainly not for everyone, but you get an enormous amount of influence and autonomy. The pay isn't "great", but I make enough that my wife can stay home with our three kids and the numbers in the bank account just keep going up. Of course, a lot of that is lifestyle decisions, but working at a small company is a lifestyle decision as well.
  - dbrueck 6y ago
    Yeah, but that's orthogonal to the question at hand, no? Sure, startups aren't for everyone, just like big corporations aren't for everyone. For me, working for a /particular/ startup is unstable and risky, while working for startups generally has been extremely stable. Other people find them too risky, and that's fine. Some people love the perceived stability of a large company. OTOH, big corps are known to do across the board RIFs, independent of how well a particular division is doing. Or killing off a whole department on what seems like a whim. YMMV.
  - pickle-wizard 6y ago
whymauri 6y ago
Interesting... I went from MEGACORP to startup, only for the startup to have, literally, an order of magnitude more meetings.
- city41 6y ago
  I think it depends on the company. I've worked at two megacorps, one where meetings were absolutely nonstop and the other where I had about 2 a week.
  - kondu 6y ago
    Do you mind telling us which one each was?
    - city41 6y ago
      Sure. I had a lot of meetings at Netflix (was there for 5.5 years, left in July). I had almost no meetings at Microsoft (was there for 3.5 years, left 10 years ago). This was just my experience. These are large companies so there is really no one overall experience, especially at MS. Oh and I was an IC at both companies. More junior at MS.
pelasaco 6y ago
you dont have to be in a $MEGACORP to have tons of useless meetings. You just have to move to a company where the people are proud to do SCRUM by the book, with reviews and retrospective (each one 4 hours long)
- eastbayjake 6y ago
  Hoping this is hyperbole, but if your reviews or retrospectives are actually four hours long, you should politely point out that these do not need to be more than an hour (and many mature scrum teams do both in an hour total)
  - trustfundbaby 6y ago
    Why ... so you can be labelled a malcontent, non-team player, denied promotions and eventually managed out of the org at first opportunity? :)
    - eastbayjake 6y ago
      There is a way to give this feedback that is positive, collaborative, and highlights what a great team player you are -- the sort of thing that gets people promotions. But YMMV!
  - pelasaco 6y ago
    it's unfortunately not a hyperbole. It takes us literally 4 hours. Mostly the scrum master do it as a monologue. We all just zoom out and do other stuff. Last sprint i finished a lib that i was working on and deployed our code twice in production to avoid dying live on teams.
  - gamacodre 6y ago
    Interesting. It usually takes us most of an hour to get through our reviews, and I don't feel like we have an unusually high number of deliverables (10-15 tickets on average maybe, representing 1 or 2 larger projects and a small batch of regressions/spikes/featurelets, for a 3-dev team). Retros are taking around an hour, faster than last year by 2x but the time still feels like it's well-spent.
emdowling 6y ago
I'm at a $MEGACORP and actively work to reduce meetings as much as possible. I've found there to be far less need for meetings as my colleagues are more experienced than those at startups. I can trust them to execute, make smart decisions and escalate if need be. Startups tend to require a lot more hand holding (and therefore more meetings).
fsdfgsfsdfsdfsd 6y ago
What happens if you simply decline to attend?
crossroadsguy 6y ago
I see startups having a crazy amount of more meetings than mega corps, especially the ad hoc ones.
bastardoperator 6y ago
I work for an ultra mega corp and honestly the amount of meetings would be comical if it wasn't so monotonous. The recent meetings have centered around increasing capacity, I've tried to explain that less meetings would give folks more time to produce value, nobody gives a shit so I stopped caring too.
- gherkinnn 6y ago
  I have come to the conclusion that those kinds of meetings have nothing to do with exchanging information, finding solutions, or anything remotely related to creating value for the customer (tm). Though I have yet to figure out what they’re really about. An easy way to pass the time? People relying on them to validate their salary? The only way a weasly middle manager can get himself heard? Cargo culting? Probably a mixture of all and more.
  - cedricd 6y ago
    I know this isn't a fun answer but in my experience it's just bad process and culture Basically nothing can be done / no decisions made without a meeting. Why? Because X number of people feel they need buy in. If you don't get them onboard and give them a chance to voice opinions you'll be pushing uphill to get work done. And meetings are actually a fairly effective way to do that -- you have a group's attention for a set amount of time. If you just sent a doc then you'd have to follow up, etc. That sort of becomes the default, so there are meetings even when that sort of buy in isn't necessary, bc meetings are just how things get done.
mediaman 6y ago
I recently became a supplier to a megacorp. They'll plop a weekly meeting on eight peoples' calendars like it's nothing. I tried sending out email summaries on various projects, so they could just refer to that instead of having meetings, but they decided they would then just read through the email summary during the meeting. I am discovering that I need to significantly increase prices to compensate for the additional navel-gazing inherent in working with a large company. It's one of the reasons I still remain bullish on the strengths of small companies: large ones just begin attracting people who apparently enjoy frittering their education and talents away on pointless zoom calls.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  The zoom calls are the symptom. Meetings are a way of "doing something" without actually doing something. Most megacorps waste millions spinning their wheels on nonsense, but they're established and make money so it doesn't matter. A strong small team working on a specialized product will always win - that's why they get gobbled up eventually by the megacorps - there's no way they can compete with that internally.
  - adflux 6y ago
    It's economies of scale versus companies being too large to manage
  - sangnoir 6y ago
    Meetings are a result of having a large team (or many teams) which require work/information to be synced periodically. I have not seen a software product that can tackle this problem: I only want to see progress on team Y for delivery 1 that my team needs for delivery Gamma. Also, strong, small teams usually don't scale well - which is why they sell themselves to megacorps who can (e.g. megacorps are much better when it's time to localize to 20 countries on 3 continents and navigate the legal labyrinth necessitated. All that work requires meetings to coordinate, even if legal ends up only asking the engineer a single question)
    - 6y ago
tegiddrone 6y ago
Sometimes the meetings at $MEGACORP feel like useless ceremony. However I have worked with people who don't frikken read and do their own thing. For these people meetings are where you have to harvest their attention towards the cards/issues/wiki/specs/diagrams. Still not cool.
sershe 6y ago
Heh, I just go on my phone in meetings that are truly useless, especially these days when it's an audio call (my camera is off). Or better yet I can just work on something not requiring an entire brain/focus.

offtop5 6y ago

As long as I can Bill my hours, I don't care all that much. I find smaller or more experimental companies to be much more unstable, and in my thirties I just want something stable and nice so I can save money and retire with a bit over a million in the bank at 40. Just want to be done with it

fcardinaux 6y ago
I wish I had thought it that way when I was in my thirties.
- mmkos 6y ago
  How did you think in your thirties?
spurdoman77 6y ago
This is sane way to think. There are awesome workplaces out there. Whether you have a shot getting employed there is another question.
bravura 6y ago
If you retire at forty with a million in the bank, how do you make it if you live till 80?
- CabSauce 6y ago
  Interest and live on <$50k/yr?
- bawolff 6y ago
  A million in bank is like $35,000 a year in interest. Not an extravagant lifestyle, but certainly possible to live comfortably on that in a low cost of living area if you have low expenses.
  - atwebb 6y ago
    Where are you getting low risk 3.5% interest these days?
    - CleverLikeAnOx 6y ago
      I think the 3.5% number is not for low risk investing. Additionally, you would need to make something more like 5.5% to account for inflation. Still a fairly conservative number for investments in equities.
      - ptmcc 6y ago
        The oft-quoted 4% figure is accounting for inflation. The nominal average return of a balanced portfolio over time is more like 7-8%.
        dbjacobs 6y ago
        FYI, the oft-quoted 4% figure was derived using a 30 year retirement time horizon [1]. Using longer time horizons will lower that number. [1] - https://financiallyfinanced.com/posts/will-bengen https://financiallyfinanced.com/posts/will-bengen
    - ptmcc 6y ago
      It's an average inflation-adjusted expected rate of return over time of a balanced portfolio, not a guaranteed rate every year. Some years might be 10%, some years might be -10%. Historically, about 4% is the safe drawdown rate. FIRE folks tend to be a little more conservative than that, though, because of the even longer time horizon involved with retiring earlier. Check out a tool like https://www.firecalc.com/ https://www.firecalc.com/ that is designed to run backtested simulations to see if your drawdown rate from your starting assets would historically be safe for your time horizon. The UI is clunky but the math is good.
- CleverLikeAnOx 6y ago
  There is an idea called FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early). The first half is having enough money to not need to earn again, so you are not dependent on work or others. Once this is achieved, then you can retire early if you would like. The conventional wisdom in this community is that if you invest a sum of money in equities, you can withdraw a certain percentage annually without ever running out of money. That is, you mostly live off of the growth of your investments. Generally, 4% (inflation adjusted) is considered a safe withdraw rate. So if you have a million dollars, and you can live off of 40K a year or less indefinitely, then you can retire. Obviously this is a simplification and there are more considerations. Let me know if you have any questions. This is a topic I am passionate about and happy to give my 2 cents on.
  - war1025 6y ago
    I'm pretty well versed in the whole FIRE thing, and find myself more or less on that path. One conclusion I've come to is that after people "retire early", they almost never actually stop making money. It just tends to end up being more entrepreneurial stuff that they make money off. You don't "have to" work, but you "might as well", and all the sudden you may even find yourself in a more lucrative gig than you started with because you changed your focus and found a niche you can fill nicely.
    - offtop5 6y ago
      I'd love to have free time to pursue other hobbies like working on video games, and making music. If I had the million dollar cushion, and then maybe I only made like $500 or $600 a month with my hobbies that would be awesome. Life is too short to do anything else in my opinion. unless I guess I end up with a family but that's not really in my plans
    - stocknoob 6y ago
      Yep. The type of person who gets a high-paying enough job (and has the discipline) to save $1M usually doesn't have trouble getting extra work if they want. But now there's no pressure, they can take "fun" gigs that couldn't have supported them previously (musician, librarian, teacher, etc.).
- offtop5 6y ago
  Move to a country where I can live off the 40k -> 60k a year an interest or whatnot. This basically means either Southeast Asia, or some parts of Latin America. Asian languages tend to be extremely hard, and it might be a lot easier to sort of blend in with the populace in Latin America. The last thing I want to do in my retirement is draw needless attention to myself.
  - war1025 6y ago
    > Move to a country where I can live off the 40k -> 60k a year an interest or whatnot. You realize the median US household income is like $40k/ year right?
    - offtop5 6y ago
      Yeah but I'm not trying to struggle in America, so cómo estás ¿
    - pvarangot 6y ago
      With $40k a year you can live with the rich in some Latin American countries, if you can also spend 250k/350k on buying your own place in a high rise with private security or a gated community. You won't have access to Amazon and be able to buy all the top notch gear for your new hobbies in a week like as a tech worker in the US, but you can have a nice house with cleaning staff, a nice car or just take Uber or private cars everywhere, and do fancy dining two or three times per week. The median American household doesn't have all this luxuries.
  - groby_b 6y ago
    You assume that a million generates $40k to $60k, inflation-adjusted, for the next 40 years? I suppose that's one assumption to make. You know that the last time the US GDP grew more than 4% was back in 2000, right? And 2010 worldwide? Both with a continued downward trend since at least the 60's? (This obviously doesn't preclude >4% ROI, but that in turn means increasing income inequality, and at some point, there's a price to be paid for that)
    - 6y ago
- jandrewrogers 6y ago
  A reasonable investment portfolio (in the US) will reliably generate enough inflation-adjusted growth on average that this will afford a modest lifestyle in most parts of the US. $35-50k/year (today's dollars) without much risk, which is a fairly average wage. It is only unrealistic if you live in an expensive city with a lavish lifestyle. Anecdotally and ironically, many tech people that do this end up making a loads of money after they "retire". They don't sit on a beach and do nothing. The ability to be highly selective about what they work on, and to defer any compensation, often leads them to invest all their time on software projects they are passionate about, which not infrequently ends up throwing off a large amount of incidental income even though that wasn't the objective per se. I like the term "recreationally employed" to describe this lifestyle. I know many engineers who ended here and some of them make more money "retired" than they did work the 9-to-5 grind at a big company.
xienze 6y ago
> in my thirties I just want something stable and nice so I can save money Shoot, the article yesterday had me searching for how I can apply to Gumroad on top of my day job. They were claiming $50-250 per hour with as little as 10 hours a week. You want to save money? Have a stable day job and work at Gumroad for 10 hours a week. With such a short work week I can't imagine you'd be doing much more than simple bug fixes. I can swing 2 hours of that a day. > retire with a bit over a million in the bank at 40. You might have to set your sights a little higher. That's not gonna carry you to potentially 85 years old.

dbrueck 6y ago

Similar experience here - lotsa years at startups, then something worked out great and part of the deal was I had to join $MEGACORP for a couple of years. I left as soon as my time was up, and a big part of it was due to the absurd amount of meetings. Now back at another startup (10 people), we have no meetings other than a 20 minute Monday call for some sync-up that otherwise doesn't occur naturally. It's wonderful.

blackrock 6y ago
The worrying thing about a 10-person startup is their lack of money. And possibly their unproven business model. Which can lead to managers making petty decisions about money and individual worth. Since not every 10-person startup becomes the next Google. Instead, most of them becomes the next Froogle, that probably shouldn’t have existed to begin with.
- war1025 6y ago
  > The worrying thing about a 10-person startup is their lack of money. I work at a company this size. We've almost gone under quite a few times. We're still here. It's an interesting way to live. It's certainly not for everyone, but you get an enormous amount of influence and autonomy. The pay isn't "great", but I make enough that my wife can stay home with our three kids and the numbers in the bank account just keep going up. Of course, a lot of that is lifestyle decisions, but working at a small company is a lifestyle decision as well.
- dbrueck 6y ago
  Yeah, but that's orthogonal to the question at hand, no? Sure, startups aren't for everyone, just like big corporations aren't for everyone. For me, working for a /particular/ startup is unstable and risky, while working for startups generally has been extremely stable. Other people find them too risky, and that's fine. Some people love the perceived stability of a large company. OTOH, big corps are known to do across the board RIFs, independent of how well a particular division is doing. Or killing off a whole department on what seems like a whim. YMMV.
- pickle-wizard 6y ago

whymauri 6y ago

Interesting... I went from MEGACORP to startup, only for the startup to have, literally, an order of magnitude more meetings.

city41 6y ago
I think it depends on the company. I've worked at two megacorps, one where meetings were absolutely nonstop and the other where I had about 2 a week.
- kondu 6y ago
  Do you mind telling us which one each was?
  - city41 6y ago
    Sure. I had a lot of meetings at Netflix (was there for 5.5 years, left in July). I had almost no meetings at Microsoft (was there for 3.5 years, left 10 years ago). This was just my experience. These are large companies so there is really no one overall experience, especially at MS. Oh and I was an IC at both companies. More junior at MS.

pelasaco 6y ago

you dont have to be in a $MEGACORP to have tons of useless meetings. You just have to move to a company where the people are proud to do SCRUM by the book, with reviews and retrospective (each one 4 hours long)

eastbayjake 6y ago
Hoping this is hyperbole, but if your reviews or retrospectives are actually four hours long, you should politely point out that these do not need to be more than an hour (and many mature scrum teams do both in an hour total)
- trustfundbaby 6y ago
  Why ... so you can be labelled a malcontent, non-team player, denied promotions and eventually managed out of the org at first opportunity? :)
  - eastbayjake 6y ago
    There is a way to give this feedback that is positive, collaborative, and highlights what a great team player you are -- the sort of thing that gets people promotions. But YMMV!
- pelasaco 6y ago
  it's unfortunately not a hyperbole. It takes us literally 4 hours. Mostly the scrum master do it as a monologue. We all just zoom out and do other stuff. Last sprint i finished a lib that i was working on and deployed our code twice in production to avoid dying live on teams.
- gamacodre 6y ago
  Interesting. It usually takes us most of an hour to get through our reviews, and I don't feel like we have an unusually high number of deliverables (10-15 tickets on average maybe, representing 1 or 2 larger projects and a small batch of regressions/spikes/featurelets, for a 3-dev team). Retros are taking around an hour, faster than last year by 2x but the time still feels like it's well-spent.

emdowling 6y ago

I'm at a $MEGACORP and actively work to reduce meetings as much as possible. I've found there to be far less need for meetings as my colleagues are more experienced than those at startups. I can trust them to execute, make smart decisions and escalate if need be. Startups tend to require a lot more hand holding (and therefore more meetings).

fsdfgsfsdfsdfsd 6y ago

What happens if you simply decline to attend?

crossroadsguy 6y ago

I see startups having a crazy amount of more meetings than mega corps, especially the ad hoc ones.

bastardoperator 6y ago

I work for an ultra mega corp and honestly the amount of meetings would be comical if it wasn't so monotonous. The recent meetings have centered around increasing capacity, I've tried to explain that less meetings would give folks more time to produce value, nobody gives a shit so I stopped caring too.

gherkinnn 6y ago
I have come to the conclusion that those kinds of meetings have nothing to do with exchanging information, finding solutions, or anything remotely related to creating value for the customer (tm). Though I have yet to figure out what they’re really about. An easy way to pass the time? People relying on them to validate their salary? The only way a weasly middle manager can get himself heard? Cargo culting? Probably a mixture of all and more.
- cedricd 6y ago
  I know this isn't a fun answer but in my experience it's just bad process and culture Basically nothing can be done / no decisions made without a meeting. Why? Because X number of people feel they need buy in. If you don't get them onboard and give them a chance to voice opinions you'll be pushing uphill to get work done. And meetings are actually a fairly effective way to do that -- you have a group's attention for a set amount of time. If you just sent a doc then you'd have to follow up, etc. That sort of becomes the default, so there are meetings even when that sort of buy in isn't necessary, bc meetings are just how things get done.

mediaman 6y ago

I recently became a supplier to a megacorp. They'll plop a weekly meeting on eight peoples' calendars like it's nothing. I tried sending out email summaries on various projects, so they could just refer to that instead of having meetings, but they decided they would then just read through the email summary during the meeting. I am discovering that I need to significantly increase prices to compensate for the additional navel-gazing inherent in working with a large company. It's one of the reasons I still remain bullish on the strengths of small companies: large ones just begin attracting people who apparently enjoy frittering their education and talents away on pointless zoom calls.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago
The zoom calls are the symptom. Meetings are a way of "doing something" without actually doing something. Most megacorps waste millions spinning their wheels on nonsense, but they're established and make money so it doesn't matter. A strong small team working on a specialized product will always win - that's why they get gobbled up eventually by the megacorps - there's no way they can compete with that internally.
- adflux 6y ago
  It's economies of scale versus companies being too large to manage
- sangnoir 6y ago
  Meetings are a result of having a large team (or many teams) which require work/information to be synced periodically. I have not seen a software product that can tackle this problem: I only want to see progress on team Y for delivery 1 that my team needs for delivery Gamma. Also, strong, small teams usually don't scale well - which is why they sell themselves to megacorps who can (e.g. megacorps are much better when it's time to localize to 20 countries on 3 continents and navigate the legal labyrinth necessitated. All that work requires meetings to coordinate, even if legal ends up only asking the engineer a single question)
  - 6y ago

tegiddrone 6y ago

Sometimes the meetings at $MEGACORP feel like useless ceremony. However I have worked with people who don't frikken read and do their own thing. For these people meetings are where you have to harvest their attention towards the cards/issues/wiki/specs/diagrams. Still not cool.

sershe 6y ago

Heh, I just go on my phone in meetings that are truly useless, especially these days when it's an audio call (my camera is off). Or better yet I can just work on something not requiring an entire brain/focus.