6 ms·

They are "low information density" because that is not the point of the meeting. Meetings are first and foremost about relationship management. You do not get

• mft_ 1y ago
  I've led cross-functional teams in multiple organisations (albeit not in tech) and I'd argue it's a bit more complex than that. Regular team meetings can cover multiple needs, e.g.: * Keeping everyone working on a complex project updated on progress * Keeping everyone 'aligned' - (horrible corporate word but) essentially all working together effectively towards the same goals (be they short or long term) * Providing a forum for catching and discussing issues as they arise * A degree of project management - essentially, making sure that people are doing as they said they would * Information sharing (note I prefer to cancel meetings if this is the only regular purpose) * Some form of shared decision-making (depending on the model you have for this) and thus shared ownership If a meeting 'owner' is sensitive to not wasting people's time and regularly shortens or cancels meetings, it can be done well, I believe.
  • brador 1y ago
    This could be an email/slack chain
    • lghh 1y ago
      Yeah, it could be. But why would I want 5+ small 5 minute interruptions when I could have a single 20 minute interruption? Assuming all interruptions have a minimum of a 5+ minute context-switching time, the 20 minute meeting is 25 minutes whereas the 55 ends up being 510=50 minutes.
  • v3ss0n 1y ago
    - 1 . Use jira or any other porject managment tools instead. - 2 . Use Zulip - and integrate them with project management tools. - 3 . Zulip is good for this also - 4 . Unless you need to share screen and explain things , you don't need meetings for that. - 5 - Chat please - 6 - Brainstroming is only place where meetings are needed.
    • rafaelmn 1y ago
      I stick to IC roles but personally I prefer meetings over your alternatives. Project management tools are there for the long view and tracking, I don't want to juggle priorities of a JIRA backlog, it basically pushes the burden of PM to me. With a meeting if someone has a blocker thats on me I prefer if they raise it in front of the team and we agree if it should get done now or later. Other than that I share what I am currently focusing on and ignore the rest until I have to deal with it. Multitasking and context switching is a PITA and I will gladly delegate that to PM and hop on a meeting to sync with everyone. I don't want to be spammed with JIRA updates on dozens of tickets I might be needed on, only to forget about them in 15 mins when something more important comes up. And written communication takes more effort, it's a tradeoff for sure.
      • yellow_postit 1y ago
        A bad culture can emerge with tooling first or meeting first cultures.
  • stoneyhrm1 1y ago
    Spoken like a true project manager that every engineer hates.
    • HelloMcFly 1y ago
      Spoken like the stereotypical antisocial engineer that always thinks they've got all the answers, no matter the question. Reductionism is easy, and cheap.
    • freshpots 1y ago
      Are you an actual engineer with a degree and subsequent accreditation through a professional body? or an "engineer" by role? Those mean very different things depending on country, quality of education and skills or...how many Microsoft Points you have.
      • philwelch 1y ago
        So many people calling themselves “engineers” these days don’t even know the first thing about siege warfare.
      • spauldo 1y ago
        This drives me up the wall so much. I had a boss that used to introduce me to customers as an engineer, and I'd correct him on the spot. And now that I'm looking for another job (not because I pissed off the boss), I keep having to search through "engineer" roles because people can't get their terms right. I work with engineers - actual electrical and chemical engineers that design processes and controls - and I make the software side of their ideas happen. They can't do their job without me, and vice-versa. But I'm a SCADA integrator, not an engineer, dammit.
        • gunsle 1y ago
          Weird hill to die on
  • wkat4242 1y ago
    Yeah I hate those team calls too though. I don't give a shit what others in the team are doing. I'm not a team player at all. As such I always manoeuver myself into owning a particular topic which works well because I'm not slowed down by others. But these calls are something I just tune out on. I wouldn't even read the summary because I just don't care.
    • Angostura 1y ago
      You’re going to be missing out on some really interesting problems, because the interesting ones are frequently cross-disciplinary, in my experience. Still if you want to stick to what you know, that’s fine too.
      • wkat4242 1y ago
        Well I'm on a team now managing a cloud SaaS package. Meaning most problems just involve finding workarounds for their incompetence. I tend to grab the more interesting issues, which is easy because nobody else wants them. But in general I hate my job and I can't learn much from it. I have to admit that if I was in a more fulfilling position I'd be happier to collaborate. But I'll never be a "team player". I just don't have this in me.
        • apsurd 1y ago
          you hating your job puts all of this in context.
  • insane_dreamer 1y ago
    Almost all of this can be accomplished without meetings
  • ajmurmann 1y ago
    Excellent list! I want to add a point about keeping people aligned. One thing that becomes very apparent when you lead a group of more than one small team is how you need to communicate everything multiple times, phrase it in multiple ways and blast it through multiple channels. As a former boss of mine once said "if nobody is rolling their eyes you need to say it more often". Even though I intellectually know this I've still had cases that blew my mind where is repeat something I've been saying for weeks and one person is genuinely surprised and calls out how helpful it was to hear this (one might think this was a prank but the person was definitely the opposite personality type for that and sometimes struggled a little with English). This makes that portion of the meeting or email boring and a waste of time for many attendees but there is no getting past it. Similarly I've had so much feedback that people wanted to have a better idea of what everyone else in the department was working on. So various things were tried. Summary emails, brief section in monthly all-hands, yet many of the same people who asked for it didn't pay attention in the meeting and didn't read the email.
• Shorel 1y ago
  For me, they are the corporate parasite people. They add no value, except for themselves.
  • gunsle 1y ago
    They are in 95% of situations. Most managers and product people are just insecure about the fact that they know next to nothing technically about the products they manage, and instead of getting out of the way of the people who do, they feel the need to constantly insert themselves in the process, directly lowering project efficiency, to justify their roles existing at all. “Managing (internal) relationships” provides no value to the company’s clients whatsoever, it only exists to reinforce a company’s culture or prop up someone whose job is probably not that important in the grand scheme of things. A client buying your product couldn’t give two fucks whether your manager asked you an ice breaker that ate 10 minutes of a 30 minutes meeting. And managers that don’t understand this are self interested parasites, or just completely inept. Most of the management I’ve worked with have been a combination of the two.
• zamadatix 1y ago
  I think these types of descriptions are more about the type of environments one work in than meetings (or whatever communication or tool). Most of my meetings are from peers, by peers, for peers - and typically not ones on or interested in management track. They tend to be information dense and less common the more underway the topic is.
• toolslive 1y ago
  ".... the job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions." https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926
• snickerdoodle12 1y ago
  i.e. they're useless if you want to get stuff done and getting stuff done is what makes the company money, "establishing the pecking order" is just leeching from the company to fuel your own sense of importance
• CuriouslyC 1y ago
  No, meetings are low information density because people are too lazy to plan an agenda and assign homework to a meeting beforehand, so that the meeting can focus on solutioning and actually delivering value. I noped out of management track to focus on being a top level IC because I could informally do the actually valuable "management" stuff in that role anyhow (documentation, planning, mentoring, client consultation, etc) without the expectation that I'd get sucked into 5 hours of meetings a day. Leadership still knows who I am and what I do, now I just have someone else to relay a lot of the little shit, and when I communicate with them it's about really important shit that needs reiterating. I have a lot of informal relationships with people because I'm a go-to, so I can still play office politics if I want.
  • ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    Man people who talk like you must work in absolutely miserable companies. Meetings at my workplace are to the point, never longer than they need to be, and while yeah I weasel out of as many as I feel I can, I don't send an AI notetaker nor do I need it summarized. We meet for a topic, we discuss that topic, usually bullshit for a little in and around the topic, and then we get back to work. I would say most of our half-hour scheduled meetings are 10 minutes, and most of our hour scheduled ones are about 30-40 depending what it is. If we have a LOT to do, VERY occasionally, we actually use up the full time and then end things promptly because we all have more to do. We don't backstab or plot on one another, our work relationships are built on mutual respect for one another's contribution to our goals. Meetings (nor even being in leadership) are not about jockeying for power, they're about enabling the best of us to help push our goals forward. I'm getting whole new kinds of appreciation for my job and it's deliberately small, flattened structure because apparently the default state of business is to turn into high school with higher stakes, and I would genuinely rather run into traffic than work at some of these places.
    • dangus 1y ago
      The truth is that people who talk like that aren’t management material. “I noped out of the management track” = “nobody was considering me for the management track”
• wkat4242 1y ago
  > The actual meeting topic, while it can be relevant, is secondary. You establish and reinforce the pecking order, sense allegiance and subversion, or, feel out potential for reinforcing bonds or mitigating fallouts. In other words, a total waste of time for me. I don't care about pecking orders, I ignore them anyway. > This is why people focussed on 'doing the actual work' hate meetings, while carreer focussed people love them. Management isn't the only option to make a career in.
• bumby 1y ago
  >Meetings are first and foremost about relationship management. You might be hitting on a specific personality type, rather than a goal of meetings. In his book “Never Split the Difference”, Chris Voss relates three kinds of people differentiated by how they relate to time. One group thinks of time as a way to manage relationships. That’s the manager you allude to. But another type is the classic Type A personality who views “time as money.” If the meeting isn’t getting to brass tacks and outlining strategy and tasks, they will be frustrated. The last group thinks of time as a way to wrap their minds around a problem to reduce uncertainty. The authors point is that you need to understand how people view the time spent discussing a problem to really know how to manage the interaction. If you read many of the responses to your post in this context, it becomes clear which group each commenter belongs to in many cases.
• citizenpaul 1y ago
  I once worked at a job where an entry level person started crashing any meeting they were allowed in an not thrown out of. I mean people would literally say why is person X in this meeting? And they would just stay there. So how did this end? Well despite literally ignoring and not in any way doing their actual job because of this, they were promoted to management. So yeah, meetings are about reinforcing mgmt power above all else.