5 ms·

I’ve been in those meetings, we’ve all been with different responsibility levels, we know that people are slacking at least 80% of the time and that most of th

I’ve been in those meetings, we’ve all been with different responsibility levels, we know that people are slacking at least 80% of the time and that most of those meetings could be efficiently replaced by emails. So if your work is 90% meetings I am sorry but you have a bullshit job, nothing more, nothing less.

ipaddr 5y ago
I hate how meeting people need to meet over everything. You start typing on slack something simply and they have to throw a zoom meeting at you. Seems overly hostile.
- akerl_ 5y ago
  Ah yes, damn those people who would rather have a 5 minute Zoom call instead of getting carpal tunnel bike shedding over Slack. I bet they’re the same people that talk in the cafeteria instead of texting across the table. I get that it’s fun to bash excessive meetings, but trying to hash out a complex topic by lobbing Slack message grenades back and forth over the wall is often the worst idea.
  - zzt123 5y ago
    I prefer typing over slack because it’s easier to be rigorous and concise in exposition in writing than it is when speaking (you can’t erase what you already said without breaking a train of thought). Writing can be consumed at the consumer’s pace rather than the producer’s. Additionally, writing can be searched later, so there’s no fog of memory. But, typing can be a bottleneck for people I suppose, both in speed and pain as you say. I wonder if there’s a WPM inflection point for chat vs call preference.
    - jstimpfle 5y ago
      I value zoom for 1 to 1 or small group interactions. It's very suited for work on something specific where you need live interaction and where a shared screen tells more than a 1000 words. For general coordination, a written medium is better, especially since one can take the time to be precise, and the content is searchable later as you say.
    - jld89 5y ago
      I mean you can always have the best of both worlds. Do the zoom meeting by all means but never forget to send a meeting summary to all parties with an agreed statement about the objectives and assignments. This way there are no ambiguities and no one can evade responsibility. This avoids a he-said vs she-said situation as well.
      - zzt123 5y ago
        Until you have disagreement on the summary because it turns out not everyone came to the same understanding verbally - they erroneously thought they did. I’ve come to prefer having as much as possible of the common, written reference come before, not after the meeting - with time to consume and digest prior. A meeting has value beyond just the words themselves, which is where writing meets its limit.
        jld89 5y ago
        > Until you have disagreement on the summary because it turns out not everyone came to the same understanding verbally This itself is a victory. This means the subject needs more discussion or is too complex for a 5 minute meeting. I prefer to spend 2 hours to make a subject clear to all parties rather than developing under a false interpretation and having to fix the issue through a grueling 5 day back and forth. I think writing before and after the meeting is both desirable. Before to specify the object of the meeting and to limit its scope, afterwards to conclude and archive the decisions made.
        OJFord 5y ago
        Or that if you wrote it in the first place you wouldn't have agreed?
        jld89 5y ago
        Sure, it really depends on the subject. I have a slight preference for the quick meeting (5 minutes) -with a followup email- rather than a long come and go in slack.
  - the_gipsy 5y ago
    Incapable of synthesising ideas. Decision by exhaustion.
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    As you see at this person's calendar, they all take 30 minutes at least.
  - gatlin 5y ago
    You inserted detail here not present originally. I know anything said in a zoom worth remembering will be written down. Why not save some steps?
  - bennysomething 5y ago
    Agreed, I switched to call this morning and quickly realised I was banging my head against a brick wall, I gave up the fight we were having (the guy didn't understand something very basic) and switched to doing some actual work. This would have gone on for hours in a text chat. face to face can be much quicker at times.
- ls15 5y ago
  > Seems overly hostile. I find that invasive too. For me, this often turns a 5 minute interaction that fits in the middle of a task into a 30 minute interaction with the same outcome, but with a huge interruption of my workflow, which may mean that I lost an hour or more.
- fnord77 5y ago
  set some boundaries. say "no".
- coding123 5y ago
  Why would someone use Zoom all of a sudden when they're already using a calling app (slack). I don't get this.
  - rendall 5y ago
    Slack video meetings aren't as mature yet as Meet (for instance), in my experience.
  - clintonb 5y ago
    Habit. It's quite easy for me to type, "/zoom" and click a button. I'm used to Zoom. I rarely use Slack's audio/video features.
- hudsonjr 5y ago
  I don't mind if it's something that does actually require more discussion. However, pre-slack there used to be a certain type that would never read e-mail, but instead would call 5 seconds after the e-mail and want to be walked through the e-mail rather than read it themselves. Also had one time about 15 years ago where someone literally tried to break through a secure door to ask about an e-mail I had sent 3 minutes ago. I was on VPN @ home, and they got pissed off thinking I was just ignoring the call to my desk.
feoren 5y ago
Thank you! The overwhelming feeling I got when reading this was "wow, this person really does virtually nothing!". I went in expecting a challenge to my view that mid-level managers are mostly worthless, but instead that view was reinforced.
dustymcp 5y ago
this was exactly what i was thinkink..
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>I’ve been in those meetings, we’ve all been with different responsibility levels, we know that people are slacking at least 80% of the time meetings are so much fun that of course people go to them all day long in an effort to slack off.
- stephc_int13 5y ago
  I get the sarcasm but this is not about fun, this is about faking work in a convincing way by doing the minimum amount. I used to sip coffee and daydream during most meetings when I was a junior dev.
- Jensson 5y ago
  Developers doesn't hate meetings, like lets say they had a meeting where they discuss the latest frameworks or technologies, they'd love it! The thing people don't like about meetings is the power dynamics, you can't speak freely with your manager in the room. Also if you have deadlines and people will get angry if you don't do the work and the meeting is wasting your time then you will feel frustrated since you know you will get shit for this that wasn't your fault. But what happens once developers gets the power? Just look at architects, scheduling meetings where he talks about the latest tech blogs he read. Or managers, scheduling meetings where they talk about the latest linkedin blog he read. Or even CEO who schedules a company all-hands where he talks about the latest team-building blog he read on HBR. In those cases meetings aren't work, it is you forcing people you have power over to listen to your hobbies and thoughts. Of course the participants wont like it.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    >like lets say they had a meeting where they discuss the latest frameworks or technologies, they'd love it! I hate those meetings.
  - benelvin 5y ago
    > The thing people don't like about meetings is the power dynamics, you can't speak freely with your manager in the room Why not? There may be a toxic management culture in some places, but in a well functioning organisation the manager wants people to challenge things.
agd 5y ago
I kind of agree. In my last role I ended up in a fantastic place where the teams under me could operate fairly autonomously and were happy. My only recurring meetings were: - 1-1s fortnightly and only with senior members - My 1-1 with my boss, again fortnightly - Senior leadership team, once a week I kept 1-1s to 30mins unless someone had an important issue, in which case I was completely flexible. Most of my time went on planning/strategy, customer research, and acting as an ad-hoc coach for the teams beneath me. The key things I found were: - many meetings can be replaced by an update email - decisions often work better through docs + feedback than big meetings - you don't need frequent contact with the team if the goals and constraints are communicated very clearly I realise none of this is groundbreaking. But it seems quite rare, and also hard to achieve in practice.
- polskibus 5y ago
  Are you still there or did you move? If you did move, what were the reasons? I'm honestly curious from career choices point of view.
  - agd 5y ago
    Moved to start my own company. So not to do with the culture.
- westurner 5y ago
  > - many meetings can be replaced by an update email Highlights from the feed(s); GitLab has the better activity view IMHO but I haven't tried the new GitHub Issues beta yet. 3 questions from 5 minute Stand-Up Meetings (because everyone's actually standing there trying to leave) for Digital Stand Up Meetings: Since, Before, Obstacles: ## 2021-09-28 ### @teammembername #### Since #### Before #### Obstacles Since: What have you done since last reporting back? Before: What do you plan to do before our next meeting? Obstacles: What needs which other team resources in order to solve the obstacles? You can do cool video backgrounds for any video conferencing app with pipewire. You can ask team members to prep a .txt with their 3 questions and drop it in the chat such that the team can reply to individual #fragments of your brief status report / continued employment justification argument > - decisions often work better through docs + feedback than big meetings SO, ah, asynchronous communication doesn't require transcripting for the "Leader Assistant" that does the Mando quarterly minutes from the team chat logs, at least 6 Patterns of Collaboration: GRCOEB: Generate, Reduce, Clarify, Organize, Evaluate, Build Consensus [Six Patterns]; voting on specific Issues, and ideally Chat - [x] lineitems, and https://schema.org/SocialMediaPosting https://schema.org/SocialMediaPosting with emoji reactions [Six Patterns]: http://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/team-building#six-patterns-of-collaboration http://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/team-building#six-pat... , Text Templates, Collaboration Checklist: Weighted Criteria, Ranked-choice Voting. Docs and posts with URLs and in-text pull-quotes do better than another list of citations at the end. > - you don't need frequent contact with the team if the goals and constraints are communicated very clearly Metrics: OKRs, KPIs, #GlobalGoals Goals Targets and Indicators Tools / Methods; Data / Information / Knowledge / Experience / Wisdom: - Issues: Title, - [ ] Description, Labels, Assignee, - [ ] Comments, Emoji Reactions; - Pull Requests, - [ ] [Optional] [Formal] Reviews, Labels & "Codelabels", label:SkipPreflight, CI Build Logs, and Signed Deployed Documented Applications; code talks, the tests win again, docs sell - Find and Choose - with Consensus - a sufficiently mature Component that already testably does: unified Email notifications (with inbound replies,) and notifications on each and every Chat API and the web standard thing finally, thanks: W3C Web Notifications. - Contribute Tests for [open source] Components. - [ ] Create a workflow document with URLs and Text Templates - [ ] Create a daily running document with my 3 questions and headings and indented markdown checkbox lists; possibly also with todotxt/todo.txt / TaskWarrior & BugWarrior -style lineitem markup. What does an engineering manager do all day? A polite answer would be, continuously reevaluate the tests of the product and probably also the business model if anyone knew what they were up to in there
nojito 5y ago
>So if your work is 90% meetings I am sorry but you have a bullshit job, nothing more, nothing less. Do CEOs have a bullshit job?
- stephc_int13 5y ago
  I you have meetings outside of the company to raise money or win contracts, this is real work. If you have meetings with seniors to make strategic decisions this is real work. If you are recruiting people, again this is real work. I do think that CEOs have very few incentives to waste time, contrary to middle-management.
ravenstine 5y ago
> So if your work is 90% meetings I am sorry but you have a bullshit job, nothing more, nothing less. It's not a personal failing, though. The modern world necessitates bullshit and inevitably people will fall into those roles out of either advancement or utility. In noticing that percentage of meetings is a measure of bullshit, we have to be honest and question how roles that require fewer meetings, such as engineering roles, can be bullshit. I don't think such people think about this enough because the bullshit is masked by more measurable levels of "productivity". To be honest, at least 80% of the work that I've done as a software engineer did nothing to improve the product or improve the world. Most of it is caused by a lack of inertia-control which creates "technical debt" (aka shitty code) that makes even the simplest of changes into huge undertakings. But there's not enough time to make anything right because we need to get this other thing done by this deadline. In other cases where that isn't a problem, what I'm being asked to do may not be particularly valuable to the user/customer. As a web developer, the problem is further exacerbated by the perceived need for tools that weren't needed for nearly the same job not so long ago. We've turned JavaScript into Java because the field believes that every webpage should be capable of everything Google accomplishes with their products. We can't see the forest for the trees; the vast majority of internet users don't care about page reloads. In fact, I would be much happier if my bank website, for example, ditched all of the JavaScript and assets that slow down the page and went with simple HTML forms. All of these doo-dads, if you will, are just extra bullshit that costs the world millions, perhaps billions, and for what? Management, in my eyes, isn't in so much of a different position than anyone else. Meetings are their form of spending time fiddling with build toolchains and debuggers.
stephc_int13 5y ago
I think some managers would think twice if they saw the cost of meetings. I mean (meeting duration + interruption duration) * hourly wage of everyone involved. Even a so-called five minutes stand-up easily cost more than a coffee machine.

ipaddr 5y ago

I hate how meeting people need to meet over everything. You start typing on slack something simply and they have to throw a zoom meeting at you. Seems overly hostile.

akerl_ 5y ago
Ah yes, damn those people who would rather have a 5 minute Zoom call instead of getting carpal tunnel bike shedding over Slack. I bet they’re the same people that talk in the cafeteria instead of texting across the table. I get that it’s fun to bash excessive meetings, but trying to hash out a complex topic by lobbing Slack message grenades back and forth over the wall is often the worst idea.
- zzt123 5y ago
  I prefer typing over slack because it’s easier to be rigorous and concise in exposition in writing than it is when speaking (you can’t erase what you already said without breaking a train of thought). Writing can be consumed at the consumer’s pace rather than the producer’s. Additionally, writing can be searched later, so there’s no fog of memory. But, typing can be a bottleneck for people I suppose, both in speed and pain as you say. I wonder if there’s a WPM inflection point for chat vs call preference.
  - jstimpfle 5y ago
    I value zoom for 1 to 1 or small group interactions. It's very suited for work on something specific where you need live interaction and where a shared screen tells more than a 1000 words. For general coordination, a written medium is better, especially since one can take the time to be precise, and the content is searchable later as you say.
  - jld89 5y ago
    I mean you can always have the best of both worlds. Do the zoom meeting by all means but never forget to send a meeting summary to all parties with an agreed statement about the objectives and assignments. This way there are no ambiguities and no one can evade responsibility. This avoids a he-said vs she-said situation as well.
    - zzt123 5y ago
      Until you have disagreement on the summary because it turns out not everyone came to the same understanding verbally - they erroneously thought they did. I’ve come to prefer having as much as possible of the common, written reference come before, not after the meeting - with time to consume and digest prior. A meeting has value beyond just the words themselves, which is where writing meets its limit.
      - jld89 5y ago
        > Until you have disagreement on the summary because it turns out not everyone came to the same understanding verbally This itself is a victory. This means the subject needs more discussion or is too complex for a 5 minute meeting. I prefer to spend 2 hours to make a subject clear to all parties rather than developing under a false interpretation and having to fix the issue through a grueling 5 day back and forth. I think writing before and after the meeting is both desirable. Before to specify the object of the meeting and to limit its scope, afterwards to conclude and archive the decisions made.
        OJFord 5y ago
        Or that if you wrote it in the first place you wouldn't have agreed?
        jld89 5y ago
        Sure, it really depends on the subject. I have a slight preference for the quick meeting (5 minutes) -with a followup email- rather than a long come and go in slack.
- the_gipsy 5y ago
  Incapable of synthesising ideas. Decision by exhaustion.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  As you see at this person's calendar, they all take 30 minutes at least.
- gatlin 5y ago
  You inserted detail here not present originally. I know anything said in a zoom worth remembering will be written down. Why not save some steps?
- bennysomething 5y ago
  Agreed, I switched to call this morning and quickly realised I was banging my head against a brick wall, I gave up the fight we were having (the guy didn't understand something very basic) and switched to doing some actual work. This would have gone on for hours in a text chat. face to face can be much quicker at times.
ls15 5y ago
> Seems overly hostile. I find that invasive too. For me, this often turns a 5 minute interaction that fits in the middle of a task into a 30 minute interaction with the same outcome, but with a huge interruption of my workflow, which may mean that I lost an hour or more.
fnord77 5y ago
set some boundaries. say "no".
coding123 5y ago
Why would someone use Zoom all of a sudden when they're already using a calling app (slack). I don't get this.
- rendall 5y ago
  Slack video meetings aren't as mature yet as Meet (for instance), in my experience.
- clintonb 5y ago
  Habit. It's quite easy for me to type, "/zoom" and click a button. I'm used to Zoom. I rarely use Slack's audio/video features.
hudsonjr 5y ago
I don't mind if it's something that does actually require more discussion. However, pre-slack there used to be a certain type that would never read e-mail, but instead would call 5 seconds after the e-mail and want to be walked through the e-mail rather than read it themselves. Also had one time about 15 years ago where someone literally tried to break through a secure door to ask about an e-mail I had sent 3 minutes ago. I was on VPN @ home, and they got pissed off thinking I was just ignoring the call to my desk.

feoren 5y ago

Thank you! The overwhelming feeling I got when reading this was "wow, this person really does virtually nothing!". I went in expecting a challenge to my view that mid-level managers are mostly worthless, but instead that view was reinforced.

dustymcp 5y ago

this was exactly what i was thinkink..

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

>I’ve been in those meetings, we’ve all been with different responsibility levels, we know that people are slacking at least 80% of the time meetings are so much fun that of course people go to them all day long in an effort to slack off.

stephc_int13 5y ago
I get the sarcasm but this is not about fun, this is about faking work in a convincing way by doing the minimum amount. I used to sip coffee and daydream during most meetings when I was a junior dev.
Jensson 5y ago
Developers doesn't hate meetings, like lets say they had a meeting where they discuss the latest frameworks or technologies, they'd love it! The thing people don't like about meetings is the power dynamics, you can't speak freely with your manager in the room. Also if you have deadlines and people will get angry if you don't do the work and the meeting is wasting your time then you will feel frustrated since you know you will get shit for this that wasn't your fault. But what happens once developers gets the power? Just look at architects, scheduling meetings where he talks about the latest tech blogs he read. Or managers, scheduling meetings where they talk about the latest linkedin blog he read. Or even CEO who schedules a company all-hands where he talks about the latest team-building blog he read on HBR. In those cases meetings aren't work, it is you forcing people you have power over to listen to your hobbies and thoughts. Of course the participants wont like it.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >like lets say they had a meeting where they discuss the latest frameworks or technologies, they'd love it! I hate those meetings.
- benelvin 5y ago
  > The thing people don't like about meetings is the power dynamics, you can't speak freely with your manager in the room Why not? There may be a toxic management culture in some places, but in a well functioning organisation the manager wants people to challenge things.

agd 5y ago

I kind of agree. In my last role I ended up in a fantastic place where the teams under me could operate fairly autonomously and were happy. My only recurring meetings were: - 1-1s fortnightly and only with senior members - My 1-1 with my boss, again fortnightly - Senior leadership team, once a week I kept 1-1s to 30mins unless someone had an important issue, in which case I was completely flexible. Most of my time went on planning/strategy, customer research, and acting as an ad-hoc coach for the teams beneath me. The key things I found were: - many meetings can be replaced by an update email - decisions often work better through docs + feedback than big meetings - you don't need frequent contact with the team if the goals and constraints are communicated very clearly I realise none of this is groundbreaking. But it seems quite rare, and also hard to achieve in practice.

polskibus 5y ago
Are you still there or did you move? If you did move, what were the reasons? I'm honestly curious from career choices point of view.
- agd 5y ago
  Moved to start my own company. So not to do with the culture.
westurner 5y ago
> - many meetings can be replaced by an update email Highlights from the feed(s); GitLab has the better activity view IMHO but I haven't tried the new GitHub Issues beta yet. 3 questions from 5 minute Stand-Up Meetings (because everyone's actually standing there trying to leave) for Digital Stand Up Meetings: Since, Before, Obstacles: ## 2021-09-28 ### @teammembername #### Since #### Before #### Obstacles Since: What have you done since last reporting back? Before: What do you plan to do before our next meeting? Obstacles: What needs which other team resources in order to solve the obstacles? You can do cool video backgrounds for any video conferencing app with pipewire. You can ask team members to prep a .txt with their 3 questions and drop it in the chat such that the team can reply to individual #fragments of your brief status report / continued employment justification argument > - decisions often work better through docs + feedback than big meetings SO, ah, asynchronous communication doesn't require transcripting for the "Leader Assistant" that does the Mando quarterly minutes from the team chat logs, at least 6 Patterns of Collaboration: GRCOEB: Generate, Reduce, Clarify, Organize, Evaluate, Build Consensus [Six Patterns]; voting on specific Issues, and ideally Chat - [x] lineitems, and https://schema.org/SocialMediaPosting https://schema.org/SocialMediaPosting with emoji reactions [Six Patterns]: http://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/team-building#six-patterns-of-collaboration http://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/team-building#six-pat... , Text Templates, Collaboration Checklist: Weighted Criteria, Ranked-choice Voting. Docs and posts with URLs and in-text pull-quotes do better than another list of citations at the end. > - you don't need frequent contact with the team if the goals and constraints are communicated very clearly Metrics: OKRs, KPIs, #GlobalGoals Goals Targets and Indicators Tools / Methods; Data / Information / Knowledge / Experience / Wisdom: - Issues: Title, - [ ] Description, Labels, Assignee, - [ ] Comments, Emoji Reactions; - Pull Requests, - [ ] [Optional] [Formal] Reviews, Labels & "Codelabels", label:SkipPreflight, CI Build Logs, and Signed Deployed Documented Applications; code talks, the tests win again, docs sell - Find and Choose - with Consensus - a sufficiently mature Component that already testably does: unified Email notifications (with inbound replies,) and notifications on each and every Chat API and the web standard thing finally, thanks: W3C Web Notifications. - Contribute Tests for [open source] Components. - [ ] Create a workflow document with URLs and Text Templates - [ ] Create a daily running document with my 3 questions and headings and indented markdown checkbox lists; possibly also with todotxt/todo.txt / TaskWarrior & BugWarrior -style lineitem markup. What does an engineering manager do all day? A polite answer would be, continuously reevaluate the tests of the product and probably also the business model if anyone knew what they were up to in there

nojito 5y ago

>So if your work is 90% meetings I am sorry but you have a bullshit job, nothing more, nothing less. Do CEOs have a bullshit job?

stephc_int13 5y ago
I you have meetings outside of the company to raise money or win contracts, this is real work. If you have meetings with seniors to make strategic decisions this is real work. If you are recruiting people, again this is real work. I do think that CEOs have very few incentives to waste time, contrary to middle-management.

ravenstine 5y ago

> So if your work is 90% meetings I am sorry but you have a bullshit job, nothing more, nothing less. It's not a personal failing, though. The modern world necessitates bullshit and inevitably people will fall into those roles out of either advancement or utility. In noticing that percentage of meetings is a measure of bullshit, we have to be honest and question how roles that require fewer meetings, such as engineering roles, can be bullshit. I don't think such people think about this enough because the bullshit is masked by more measurable levels of "productivity". To be honest, at least 80% of the work that I've done as a software engineer did nothing to improve the product or improve the world. Most of it is caused by a lack of inertia-control which creates "technical debt" (aka shitty code) that makes even the simplest of changes into huge undertakings. But there's not enough time to make anything right because we need to get this other thing done by this deadline. In other cases where that isn't a problem, what I'm being asked to do may not be particularly valuable to the user/customer. As a web developer, the problem is further exacerbated by the perceived need for tools that weren't needed for nearly the same job not so long ago. We've turned JavaScript into Java because the field believes that every webpage should be capable of everything Google accomplishes with their products. We can't see the forest for the trees; the vast majority of internet users don't care about page reloads. In fact, I would be much happier if my bank website, for example, ditched all of the JavaScript and assets that slow down the page and went with simple HTML forms. All of these doo-dads, if you will, are just extra bullshit that costs the world millions, perhaps billions, and for what? Management, in my eyes, isn't in so much of a different position than anyone else. Meetings are their form of spending time fiddling with build toolchains and debuggers.

stephc_int13 5y ago

I think some managers would think twice if they saw the cost of meetings. I mean (meeting duration + interruption duration) * hourly wage of everyone involved. Even a so-called five minutes stand-up easily cost more than a coffee machine.