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I agree with this, except that I think Page ignores two important meeting types: Q&As and Working Sessions. Maybe Page defines a meeting as having >3 members, b

I agree with this, except that I think Page ignores two important meeting types: Q&As and Working Sessions. Maybe Page defines a meeting as having >3 members, but many of my non-salesy meetings are these two types. Q&As: Today, I was working on a demo for a customer. I am a Data & AI person, and the demo concerned data processing for cybersecurity, so I got on a meeting with a cybersecurity expert working on the same demo. I asked him to walk me through his typical day working with a particular software product, asked a bunch of questions, and had everything I needed for the demo in 30 minutes. We could have done this through slack with a bunch of Looms, but it would have taken 4x as long and broken up his flow a lot more. Oftentimes, we will have one person on the team dive deep into a particular technology and give us a lecture + Q&A on what we need to know about it for our current project and the best resources to learn more. Working Sessions: Sometimes you need to build something that interacts with a separate component that someone else is currently working on. Sometimes several people are working on the same project. Sometimes a junior engineer at my mostly-remote company needs an opportunity to learn some SWE fundamentals. These are situations where, pre-remote work, I would camp out next to their desk or in a conference room and we would work through things together. Now, a meeting serves the same purpose.

godelski 2y ago
I don't think your example is at odds with the content of the article. The sentiment is to make sure meetings are meaningful and only with the people that need to be attending them. It's not that meetings are inherently bad, but that it's easy for them to become excessive and frequent. Meetings are necessary and useful, but they can also create a lot of unproductive time. To me when they do it's a sign that the business is being taken over by bureaucrats. Because they don't want to work to accomplish things, they want to work to work.
- mingus88 2y ago
  The problem with what CEOs like Page do here is that they are out of touch. It’s easy to say things like this when everyone is paid to listen to you and do whatever you want. You can make these bold statements that sound insightful but at the end of the day there are many reasons why I would like to talk to some teammates, or another team, that don’t have an action or a decision attached to it. After being fully remote for over five years now, I will say something unpopular and that is face time is valuable. Humans are complicated and empathetic and value is lost if we only ever interact in a slack thread or over a faceless Zoom call where I just stare at your name on a black box for 30 minutes. Meetings without an agenda are a waste of time? I guess you just don’t value human contact at all, so that tells me more about you than it does about the quality of your meetings. Me? I can learn a lot about how a project is going simply by listening and watching someone talk about it and that context will be completely stripped from an email, chat or zoom tile. But CEOs are widely considered to be overrepresented with dark triad psychological traits. We shouldn’t be surprised when they just don’t get people and want to throw away things they can’t immediately extract value from.
  - godelski 2y ago
    Yeah I don't disagree with you. I just think the example was not counter. Definitely agree that people are disillusioned by surrounding themselves with "yes men". Even if they think they don't. But that's a joke as old as time. Maybe even funnier that so many can't see that they're that person. And I do agree with you that face time matters. But a lot of things do. I'll come to the office, but it only makes sense if I have a door. If I'm in an open room then you don't need to schedule a meeting for me to be in one. Hell, I might even be an unwilling participant to the meeting of two people having a conversation behind my back or in front of me. There's a lot of cost saving measures and productivity enhancers that cost a lot of money and productivity.

godelski 2y ago

I don't think your example is at odds with the content of the article. The sentiment is to make sure meetings are meaningful and only with the people that need to be attending them. It's not that meetings are inherently bad, but that it's easy for them to become excessive and frequent. Meetings are necessary and useful, but they can also create a lot of unproductive time. To me when they do it's a sign that the business is being taken over by bureaucrats. Because they don't want to work to accomplish things, they want to work to work.

mingus88 2y ago
The problem with what CEOs like Page do here is that they are out of touch. It’s easy to say things like this when everyone is paid to listen to you and do whatever you want. You can make these bold statements that sound insightful but at the end of the day there are many reasons why I would like to talk to some teammates, or another team, that don’t have an action or a decision attached to it. After being fully remote for over five years now, I will say something unpopular and that is face time is valuable. Humans are complicated and empathetic and value is lost if we only ever interact in a slack thread or over a faceless Zoom call where I just stare at your name on a black box for 30 minutes. Meetings without an agenda are a waste of time? I guess you just don’t value human contact at all, so that tells me more about you than it does about the quality of your meetings. Me? I can learn a lot about how a project is going simply by listening and watching someone talk about it and that context will be completely stripped from an email, chat or zoom tile. But CEOs are widely considered to be overrepresented with dark triad psychological traits. We shouldn’t be surprised when they just don’t get people and want to throw away things they can’t immediately extract value from.
- godelski 2y ago
  Yeah I don't disagree with you. I just think the example was not counter. Definitely agree that people are disillusioned by surrounding themselves with "yes men". Even if they think they don't. But that's a joke as old as time. Maybe even funnier that so many can't see that they're that person. And I do agree with you that face time matters. But a lot of things do. I'll come to the office, but it only makes sense if I have a door. If I'm in an open room then you don't need to schedule a meeting for me to be in one. Hell, I might even be an unwilling participant to the meeting of two people having a conversation behind my back or in front of me. There's a lot of cost saving measures and productivity enhancers that cost a lot of money and productivity.