4 ms·

>I was once in a meeting, with four people, plus the CTO. The CTO forbade us to take notes: it seems the fad of the week was that note taking is what makes meet

>I was once in a meeting, with four people, plus the CTO. The CTO forbade us to take notes: it seems the fad of the week was that note taking is what makes meetings a waste of time. The meeting took two hours. Afterwards, the four of us had about eight different opinions of what had been decided. No follow-up actions were ever taken. This is still the case in many companies I (founder of a small troubleshooting company; we search out problematic large, cash rich companies like these; they all have failing processes and IT all over the place) meet with; sometimes it's frowned upon, but often simply no one takes notes. Which shows these meetings (almost all meetings I go into) are a complete charade of managers wanting to show they have 'something important to do, really!' (somehow there are often 10+ people there). I am in meetings (including Zoom etc and irl) where i'm sure no-one really heard or understood what anyone else said (different accents of English from different countries and background and of course, no one can say anything because we all have to respect people etc); no notes, no recordings (and of course, the captions of the video chat or my phone didn't understand anything that was said either), while someone was explaining quite difficult, in depth stuff, for 2-3 hours. Afterwards, the stuff is rehashed in a 15 minute text chat with the person who explained the difficult stuff; why didn't they write it down in the first place and forgo the meeting? Because half(that's generous, it's more like 80%) of the room should have no (high paying) job; they are just there for being there. Ah, the enterprise world, such joys; I enjoy it as I threat it like a cosmic joke; it's a comedy show, not unlike The Office including the main characters high pay.

Brajeshwar 3y ago
In almost all the meetings I attend, I'm always the note-taker by choice unless I have earmarked someone to take notes. My notes usually ends up being the go-to and shared document after the meetings. I'm still learning, and I love taking pictorial/visual notes. Try it; it is fun. If one is interested, I suggest the books by Dan Roam[1]. They are quick to read/browse, and I keep re-reading them. If you are starting with just one book, start with “Draw to Win”. https://www.danroam.com https://www.danroam.com
- Terr_ 3y ago
  > Vetinari was very good at committees, especially when Drumknott took the minutes. What the Iron Maiden was to stupid tyrants, the committee was to Lord Vetinari; it was only slightly more expensive,* far less messy, considerably more efficient and, best of all, you had to force people to climb inside the Iron Maiden. > * The only real expense was tea and biscuits halfway through, which seldom happened with the Iron Maiden. -- Making Money, by Terry Pratchett
- mingusrude 3y ago
  The superpower is to write the notes before the meeting. It may sound cynical but sometimes it's worth trying.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    Automate that, train an LLM on past notes and then you can skip the meeting entirely, just generate meeting notes!!
anoopelias 3y ago
What worked for me well is if I share my screen and capture the common notes / mural for everyone to see. You might not catch the spellings etc., need to ask, but that's probably the question everyone has. That way there are less misunderstandings, everyone is aligned, and I can send the notes right after the meeting.
bee_rider 3y ago
Useless meetings have always felt like a strong argument for Basic Income to me. These have negative value, in the sense that they destroy time for the competent workers. As a society we have to make sure a bunch of people don’t become unemployed and then homeless, but we should have done it in a way that doesn’t incentivize pretending to have a necessary job.
- dboreham 3y ago
  See: B-Arc
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  That's the bullshit jobs argument of David Graber. I know Andrew Yang talked a lot about it as well. The concept makes sense to a degree, but I don't know how it could be implemented in mass without issues. In scifi like Star Trek, they have a post scarcity society and everyone wants to work towards self betterment. I'd assume in modern society that everyone would just want to sleep, eat, and watch Netflix to a degree. I'm being a little over pessimistic here of course. Perhaps the "basic" aspect of it that is just enough for food, clothing, shelter, and health, helps incent those taking more risks for things like entrepreneurship that they'd be too scared to do normally? How did the UBI study in (I think it was Sweden) go?
  - chownie 3y ago
    People eat, sleep and watch Netflix in their spare time because they're dedicating their thoughtful useful hours to work. A friend of mine is on long term disability support payments, when he was doing full time work he was a couch potato in his spare time and I couldn't ever get him to join in on hobbies with me. Now that he doesn't work he's producing music and painting and he picked both up eagerly from casual interest and to escape surplus free time.
    - 7thaccount 3y ago
      A fair point. It's hard to do school work when I'm already doing 40+ hours at work each week. The brain needs rest.
edpichler 3y ago
Interesting business model. Can you share more about your company?
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  After about 30 years of programming and seeing mostly everything getting worse, I figured every company must be making absolute garbage and they will eventually get them into issues that cost real and serious money. This turned out to be true everywhere; small and big; I started with smaller companies that have software a few years old rotting away and leaving them vulnerable without able to do anything except hire (hard to find) people to replace or update it (mostly the same proposition because it’s all so bad) or using services that are broken (not maintained or removed features), shut down or getting too expensive for them. Then we moved to bigger and bigger and it’s indeed everywhere. I always wanted and recommended to use tried and tested old and boring software: Apache mature products, Postgres, MySql, SQLite, Java (not the latest), Common Lisp, HTML/CSS with minimal js, QT etc but companies are far and wide not listening or doing that and adopting the latest burning piles of poop which guarantees our business millions of clients for decades to come. It’s a simple business model; you must like (love) even poking around in horrible stuff that might not work after restart and no one dares to touch. We offer services that a) secure that software so it can keep running, be restarted and reinstalled b) make performance improvements c) do vital fixes or features/integrations d) emergency fix downtimes (we have 247 service for that). We only do things that need to happen now and are thus most urgent; we never offer rewrites, as, for our current even smaller clients, that would tie the team up for years on one client. Boring and dangerous. But there is more than enough money in rewrites too: but if you are planning that; please use the latest and greatest frameworks, dbs, microservices, paas, saas and definitely never any versions over 0.9 please; anything that might not survive 3 years without continues poking, upgrading and fixing! We want to be around to clean it up! /s
  - edpichler 3y ago
    Man, we share a lot of thoughts in common. I would like to drop you a line by email.
  - 3y ago
firstplacelast 3y ago
Yep, and the kicker is these are the types that put “good communication skills” on their job requisitions. Upper management can’t communicate anything worthwhile, mid-levels have varying levels of English from varying first-languages and never develop good short-hand ways to communicate. Seeing “good communication” on a job req is a red flag at this point, might as well say can do basic math or use a computer.
resonious 3y ago
> why didn't they write it down in the first place and forgo the meeting? To play devil's advocate for a sec, I wonder if the above could be used to argue that if you're using writing, why have a meeting at all? I guess maybe the combination of voice and text might be better than just one of the two. But I'll be honest I'm not much of a meeting note taker. It feels actually harder to remember stuff with my face stuffed in a notebook while other people are talking.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  > if you're using writing, why have a meeting at all? Most communication is waste, written or spoken; the writing is not to write down everything discussed, but to summarise and archive it for future reference. Don't write everything down, just the important parts. And if the conversation continues while you need to focus on writing, ask them to pause.

Brajeshwar 3y ago

In almost all the meetings I attend, I'm always the note-taker by choice unless I have earmarked someone to take notes. My notes usually ends up being the go-to and shared document after the meetings. I'm still learning, and I love taking pictorial/visual notes. Try it; it is fun. If one is interested, I suggest the books by Dan Roam[1]. They are quick to read/browse, and I keep re-reading them. If you are starting with just one book, start with “Draw to Win”. https://www.danroam.com https://www.danroam.com

Terr_ 3y ago
> Vetinari was very good at committees, especially when Drumknott took the minutes. What the Iron Maiden was to stupid tyrants, the committee was to Lord Vetinari; it was only slightly more expensive,* far less messy, considerably more efficient and, best of all, you had to force people to climb inside the Iron Maiden. > * The only real expense was tea and biscuits halfway through, which seldom happened with the Iron Maiden. -- Making Money, by Terry Pratchett
mingusrude 3y ago
The superpower is to write the notes before the meeting. It may sound cynical but sometimes it's worth trying.
- Jensson 3y ago
  Automate that, train an LLM on past notes and then you can skip the meeting entirely, just generate meeting notes!!

anoopelias 3y ago

What worked for me well is if I share my screen and capture the common notes / mural for everyone to see. You might not catch the spellings etc., need to ask, but that's probably the question everyone has. That way there are less misunderstandings, everyone is aligned, and I can send the notes right after the meeting.

bee_rider 3y ago

Useless meetings have always felt like a strong argument for Basic Income to me. These have negative value, in the sense that they destroy time for the competent workers. As a society we have to make sure a bunch of people don’t become unemployed and then homeless, but we should have done it in a way that doesn’t incentivize pretending to have a necessary job.

dboreham 3y ago
See: B-Arc
7thaccount 3y ago
That's the bullshit jobs argument of David Graber. I know Andrew Yang talked a lot about it as well. The concept makes sense to a degree, but I don't know how it could be implemented in mass without issues. In scifi like Star Trek, they have a post scarcity society and everyone wants to work towards self betterment. I'd assume in modern society that everyone would just want to sleep, eat, and watch Netflix to a degree. I'm being a little over pessimistic here of course. Perhaps the "basic" aspect of it that is just enough for food, clothing, shelter, and health, helps incent those taking more risks for things like entrepreneurship that they'd be too scared to do normally? How did the UBI study in (I think it was Sweden) go?
- chownie 3y ago
  People eat, sleep and watch Netflix in their spare time because they're dedicating their thoughtful useful hours to work. A friend of mine is on long term disability support payments, when he was doing full time work he was a couch potato in his spare time and I couldn't ever get him to join in on hobbies with me. Now that he doesn't work he's producing music and painting and he picked both up eagerly from casual interest and to escape surplus free time.
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    A fair point. It's hard to do school work when I'm already doing 40+ hours at work each week. The brain needs rest.

edpichler 3y ago

Interesting business model. Can you share more about your company?

anonzzzies 3y ago
After about 30 years of programming and seeing mostly everything getting worse, I figured every company must be making absolute garbage and they will eventually get them into issues that cost real and serious money. This turned out to be true everywhere; small and big; I started with smaller companies that have software a few years old rotting away and leaving them vulnerable without able to do anything except hire (hard to find) people to replace or update it (mostly the same proposition because it’s all so bad) or using services that are broken (not maintained or removed features), shut down or getting too expensive for them. Then we moved to bigger and bigger and it’s indeed everywhere. I always wanted and recommended to use tried and tested old and boring software: Apache mature products, Postgres, MySql, SQLite, Java (not the latest), Common Lisp, HTML/CSS with minimal js, QT etc but companies are far and wide not listening or doing that and adopting the latest burning piles of poop which guarantees our business millions of clients for decades to come. It’s a simple business model; you must like (love) even poking around in horrible stuff that might not work after restart and no one dares to touch. We offer services that a) secure that software so it can keep running, be restarted and reinstalled b) make performance improvements c) do vital fixes or features/integrations d) emergency fix downtimes (we have 247 service for that). We only do things that need to happen now and are thus most urgent; we never offer rewrites, as, for our current even smaller clients, that would tie the team up for years on one client. Boring and dangerous. But there is more than enough money in rewrites too: but if you are planning that; please use the latest and greatest frameworks, dbs, microservices, paas, saas and definitely never any versions over 0.9 please; anything that might not survive 3 years without continues poking, upgrading and fixing! We want to be around to clean it up! /s
- edpichler 3y ago
  Man, we share a lot of thoughts in common. I would like to drop you a line by email.
- 3y ago

firstplacelast 3y ago

Yep, and the kicker is these are the types that put “good communication skills” on their job requisitions. Upper management can’t communicate anything worthwhile, mid-levels have varying levels of English from varying first-languages and never develop good short-hand ways to communicate. Seeing “good communication” on a job req is a red flag at this point, might as well say can do basic math or use a computer.

resonious 3y ago

> why didn't they write it down in the first place and forgo the meeting? To play devil's advocate for a sec, I wonder if the above could be used to argue that if you're using writing, why have a meeting at all? I guess maybe the combination of voice and text might be better than just one of the two. But I'll be honest I'm not much of a meeting note taker. It feels actually harder to remember stuff with my face stuffed in a notebook while other people are talking.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
> if you're using writing, why have a meeting at all? Most communication is waste, written or spoken; the writing is not to write down everything discussed, but to summarise and archive it for future reference. Don't write everything down, just the important parts. And if the conversation continues while you need to focus on writing, ask them to pause.