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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 focu

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”
  - tauwauwau 1y ago
    I pray for souls who are considered to be management material.
    - bravetraveler 1y ago
      Promoted to their incompetence. The Peter Principle or as I prefer: "growth mindset meets reality" This thread is insane. Plenty of people have turned down managerial opportunities. The inevitable path for any IC is this offer. Countless have told stories of their regret for either path.
  - ElevenLathe 1y ago
    IMO management positions are mostly lobbied for/created by try-hard social climbers, at least initially. "We're taking a lot of X work, maybe I should lead a team to deal with that?" "Y has so many reports, maybe I can form a subgroup to help with that?" Creating new positions for people who want to be more important than they are right now is the main mechanism by which private orgs expand. Doing this is considered proof that this person is a natural leader who steps up to solve organizational problems and get things done. You can guess why this leads to many many layers of management mostly just having meetings with each other, and a confused bottom layer of people who have to use this deliberately broken human telephone to communicate with their real ultimate bosses, the owners.
    - Talanes 1y ago
      >and a confused bottom layer of people who have to use this deliberately broken human telephone to communicate with their real ultimate bosses, the owners. Which just feels like efficiency if you're the owner: less people reaching out to you with problems!
      - ElevenLathe 1y ago
        Exactly, the dysfunction comes from the top: the unelected investor class.
    - 1y ago
fnordpiglet 1y ago
Homework before hand is an anti pattern IMO. It assumes people aren’t busy in the rest of their day and the meeting scheduler is inflating the toll of the meeting with a hidden prep tax. This is how people end up with 12 hour days. Bezos forbade pre-meeting homework at Amazon for this reason. He was having a hard time keeping up with everything and the meetings were basically people recriminating each other for not being prepared then having to take up the first part of the meeting with catching everyone up anyways. So he structured meetings at Amazon as an introductory period of reading so everyone was always on the same page once discussion began. No slideshows, just reading a document of n pages where n is less than 6. I personally find the high level IC pseudomanager role sad. I went back to IC to be closer to the metal. But the expectation is I’ll be a product manager, program manager, and people manager all in one while the focused roles work in a self limited silo.
- bumby 1y ago
  I might disagree on this. For a meeting that covers any moderately complex situation to be productive, the attendees need to understand the context. That sounds like what Bezos was after. Doing “homework” beforehand ensures that people aren’t sitting idly while one person is reading the report for the first time or otherwise trying to bring themselves up to speed on the context everyone else already knows. I don’t think that’s the best use of everyone’s time, unless you expect meetings to be the primary objective of those attendees. It sounds to me that leadership should be delegating decisions to people who understand the context rather than spending time at every meeting going over background. Of course, that only works well in high-trust environments.
  - fnordpiglet 1y ago
    How do you ensure everyone does their homework? If they are busy, they won’t. If they’re managers they’re probably in back to back meetings all day. Do they prepare for every one of them? This implies they should be working 11 hours a day just to keep up with homework for their baseline meeting load? In my 35 years I’ve never seen a busy manager or even IC show up having read the material ahead of time. Especially a very senior person who gets scheduled in 16 x 30 minute sessions in a day. It’s impractical and they’ll just show up and tell the junior people to explain the material and do a presentation while they ask questions. Pointing out the inefficiency for everyone else who prepared is a nonstarter as they’re busy and more senior. It’s not about delegation. Everything that can be delegated should be but often there are decisions that need to be made that involve more capital or other outlay/risk than delegates are entitle to have discretion over. Further there are cross organizational decisions where the “join point” is a fairly senior person and they need to tie break between delegates. Amazon was pretty good about delegation and independent empowerment, at least at aws. But there were certain decisions that always went to Jassy or bezos. People moaned about how much work it was to prepare for those and what a friction it was but those frictions and efforts were throttles and high risk decisions to keep entropy from eating them alive due to the scaled and delegated nature of most processes.
ajmurmann 1y ago
In my experience the biggest issue with homework beforehand is that a substantial portion of the attendees won't do the homework. Frequently it's the people who you most needed to have done the homework. Now you need to rehash it for them anyways and everyone who did the homework has their time wasted. That's one area where the Amazon Silent Read shines. The other way I found it very useful is that people leave comments on the areas that need discussion and now you can spend the rest of the meeting just on those points. Would be great to have left the notes before the meeting but that's where reality sabotages things.
- bumby 1y ago
  I’ve admired meeting stewards who will adjourn the meeting if people aren’t prepared and reconvene it later. If that person has authority and is well respected, it only has to happen once or twice, but obviously it can’t be applied everywhere.
  - ajmurmann 1y ago
    It's nice when that works and sets a good cultural signal. Unfortunately, the more important the meeting the harder this is.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    Often, the purpose of the meeting is to get a busy VP to listen to some proposal and then say “yes.” That VP was booked solid for three weeks, and is booked solid for the next three weeks. This is his only 15 minute free time slot. Aint no way anyone’s going to adjourn this meeting just because someone isn’t prepared.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - bumby 1y ago
      Yes, the VP needs to lead by example.
burningChrome 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. Honest question, how many people have this happening at where they work? Most of the meetings where I work at now are on Teams, and are (for the most part) recorded so if people need to drop, or miss it because they can't make it for some reason. This also allows people to go back and watch at a faster speed or skip to presentations or important parts. The huge advantage is those meetings have a transcript so you can also read or scan the transcript instead. I'm just wondering if in 2025 people are still having meaningless meetings.

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”
- tauwauwau 1y ago
  I pray for souls who are considered to be management material.
  - bravetraveler 1y ago
    Promoted to their incompetence. The Peter Principle or as I prefer: "growth mindset meets reality" This thread is insane. Plenty of people have turned down managerial opportunities. The inevitable path for any IC is this offer. Countless have told stories of their regret for either path.
- ElevenLathe 1y ago
  IMO management positions are mostly lobbied for/created by try-hard social climbers, at least initially. "We're taking a lot of X work, maybe I should lead a team to deal with that?" "Y has so many reports, maybe I can form a subgroup to help with that?" Creating new positions for people who want to be more important than they are right now is the main mechanism by which private orgs expand. Doing this is considered proof that this person is a natural leader who steps up to solve organizational problems and get things done. You can guess why this leads to many many layers of management mostly just having meetings with each other, and a confused bottom layer of people who have to use this deliberately broken human telephone to communicate with their real ultimate bosses, the owners.
  - Talanes 1y ago
    >and a confused bottom layer of people who have to use this deliberately broken human telephone to communicate with their real ultimate bosses, the owners. Which just feels like efficiency if you're the owner: less people reaching out to you with problems!
    - ElevenLathe 1y ago
      Exactly, the dysfunction comes from the top: the unelected investor class.
  - 1y ago

fnordpiglet 1y ago

Homework before hand is an anti pattern IMO. It assumes people aren’t busy in the rest of their day and the meeting scheduler is inflating the toll of the meeting with a hidden prep tax. This is how people end up with 12 hour days. Bezos forbade pre-meeting homework at Amazon for this reason. He was having a hard time keeping up with everything and the meetings were basically people recriminating each other for not being prepared then having to take up the first part of the meeting with catching everyone up anyways. So he structured meetings at Amazon as an introductory period of reading so everyone was always on the same page once discussion began. No slideshows, just reading a document of n pages where n is less than 6. I personally find the high level IC pseudomanager role sad. I went back to IC to be closer to the metal. But the expectation is I’ll be a product manager, program manager, and people manager all in one while the focused roles work in a self limited silo.

bumby 1y ago
I might disagree on this. For a meeting that covers any moderately complex situation to be productive, the attendees need to understand the context. That sounds like what Bezos was after. Doing “homework” beforehand ensures that people aren’t sitting idly while one person is reading the report for the first time or otherwise trying to bring themselves up to speed on the context everyone else already knows. I don’t think that’s the best use of everyone’s time, unless you expect meetings to be the primary objective of those attendees. It sounds to me that leadership should be delegating decisions to people who understand the context rather than spending time at every meeting going over background. Of course, that only works well in high-trust environments.
- fnordpiglet 1y ago
  How do you ensure everyone does their homework? If they are busy, they won’t. If they’re managers they’re probably in back to back meetings all day. Do they prepare for every one of them? This implies they should be working 11 hours a day just to keep up with homework for their baseline meeting load? In my 35 years I’ve never seen a busy manager or even IC show up having read the material ahead of time. Especially a very senior person who gets scheduled in 16 x 30 minute sessions in a day. It’s impractical and they’ll just show up and tell the junior people to explain the material and do a presentation while they ask questions. Pointing out the inefficiency for everyone else who prepared is a nonstarter as they’re busy and more senior. It’s not about delegation. Everything that can be delegated should be but often there are decisions that need to be made that involve more capital or other outlay/risk than delegates are entitle to have discretion over. Further there are cross organizational decisions where the “join point” is a fairly senior person and they need to tie break between delegates. Amazon was pretty good about delegation and independent empowerment, at least at aws. But there were certain decisions that always went to Jassy or bezos. People moaned about how much work it was to prepare for those and what a friction it was but those frictions and efforts were throttles and high risk decisions to keep entropy from eating them alive due to the scaled and delegated nature of most processes.

ajmurmann 1y ago

In my experience the biggest issue with homework beforehand is that a substantial portion of the attendees won't do the homework. Frequently it's the people who you most needed to have done the homework. Now you need to rehash it for them anyways and everyone who did the homework has their time wasted. That's one area where the Amazon Silent Read shines. The other way I found it very useful is that people leave comments on the areas that need discussion and now you can spend the rest of the meeting just on those points. Would be great to have left the notes before the meeting but that's where reality sabotages things.

bumby 1y ago
I’ve admired meeting stewards who will adjourn the meeting if people aren’t prepared and reconvene it later. If that person has authority and is well respected, it only has to happen once or twice, but obviously it can’t be applied everywhere.
- ajmurmann 1y ago
  It's nice when that works and sets a good cultural signal. Unfortunately, the more important the meeting the harder this is.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  Often, the purpose of the meeting is to get a busy VP to listen to some proposal and then say “yes.” That VP was booked solid for three weeks, and is booked solid for the next three weeks. This is his only 15 minute free time slot. Aint no way anyone’s going to adjourn this meeting just because someone isn’t prepared.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - bumby 1y ago
    Yes, the VP needs to lead by example.

burningChrome 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. Honest question, how many people have this happening at where they work? Most of the meetings where I work at now are on Teams, and are (for the most part) recorded so if people need to drop, or miss it because they can't make it for some reason. This also allows people to go back and watch at a faster speed or skip to presentations or important parts. The huge advantage is those meetings have a transcript so you can also read or scan the transcript instead. I'm just wondering if in 2025 people are still having meaningless meetings.