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>Amazon meetings start with the presenter passing out copies... of a prose document... The meeting starts with everyone sitting in silence, reading the document

>Amazon meetings start with the presenter passing out copies... of a prose document... The meeting starts with everyone sitting in silence, reading the document, and adding notes and questions in the margins with red pen. I've never worked at Amazon, but I've heard this a lot, and it always strikes me as an odd practice. Odder still is that it apparently works and everyone I hear talk about it seems to love it. You're squandering precious meeting time by having everyone sit and read a document together. They could easily do the same thing ahead of the meeting, and you'd have much shorter meetings. And doing it synchronously means everyone either sits idle until the slowest reader is ready or not everyone gets to finish in time. And "slowest reader" isn't even just about reading speed. Presumably, some people can understand the document more quickly because they have more context. In design reviews at Google, it was obvious that the majority of attendees came unprepared and were reading the docs for the first time while their teammates were discussing the doc. I suspect that the reason was that Google just didn't have a strong docs culture, and leads/managers quietly tolerated people coming unprepared (and sometimes, they themselves were unprepared). I've never seen it done in practice, but I don't think it would be hard to have the best of both worlds where people review docs ahead of the review meeting, but there are strong cultural norms around reading docs ahead of time so the meeting is just for discussion, not just for reading or pretending that you've read.

prpl 1y ago
you squander sooo much more time whenever people are not on the same page, or if people are worried you didn’t cover their corner case.
c-linkage 1y ago
In my experience if it doesn't happen in a meeting it doesn't happen.
Uehreka 1y ago
> They could easily do the same thing ahead of the meeting, and you'd have much shorter meetings. Amazon’s practice is a reaction to the fact that nobody actually does this. According to the article I read about this years ago, they realized that “creating a strong culture around reading before the meeting” also isn’t possible because many attendees had a meeting before this one, and couldn’t prepare for that meeting because they had a meeting before that, etc. On paper you could punch a ton of holes in this: Why not reduce the number of meetings people have to attend? Doesn’t the reading reduce the amount of time available in the meeting to actually make decisions? But it would seem that in practice they found that the meetings people were attending did in fact have value, and that even with the reading time a lot of decisions got made. So this may just be one of those things where you have to look at the results instead of worrying about what could theoretically be done differently. And it sounds like people really like the results and that the benefits of this approach outweigh the drawbacks, at least at Amazon.
- mtlynch 1y ago
  >Amazon’s practice is a reaction to the fact that nobody actually does this. But isn't that bizarre? I can't think of anything else where we need engineers to do something by a deadline, and we just resign to the fact that they won't do it unless we sit them in a room and babysit them while they do it.
  - melagonster 1y ago
    They just do not allocate time to read documents for engineers.
  - nlawalker 1y ago
    > I can't think of anything else where we need engineers to do something by a deadline, and we just resign to the fact that they won't do it unless we sit them in a room and babysit them while they do it Pretty much anything, unless you're in the engineer's management chain, or you've given them a direct incentive. It's always been my experience in bigco that people can ignore almost anything that doesn't come from their management chain up until scheduled meetings get involved. Being uncooperative with meetings (declining invites without alternatives; not attending; not participating) are when escalations and complaints start occurring, and there seems to be a silent consensus that this is the standard - as in, if you complain that someone hasn't answered your emails, the standard response you should expect from anyone, including their manager, is "then schedule a meeting." So, if you need someone to do something, you schedule a "meeting" to block time on their calendar in which they will pay attention to your thing. That includes anything they need to do to prepare, because anything you don't include in that time block isn't part of the meeting and therefore isn't going to get done.
    - rixed 1y ago
      Then you should schedule two meetings: one in a reading room, at any time that fits each individual calendar, and then later the real one in a meeting room with everyone's involved, at the same time.
      - 1y ago
zeroCalories 1y ago
Why does it matter when they read it? If they need more time for the meeting they can schedule more time. Only downside is that finding meeting slots becomes more difficult, but the total time spent doesn't change.
- rixed 1y ago
  In addition to the reasons already listed (slowest reader etc) it's also good, at leasdt for some, to let new information sink in before discussing it.
  - zeroCalories 1y ago
    I suspect these are not real issues. Most people smart enough to be an engineer read fast enough to finish 6 pages in 15 minutes(and your doc is bad if they can't), and discussing it fresh is probably better since you forget less.
SatvikBeri 1y ago
I've been in companies that do this. I like it more than alternatives. The default for most meetings everywhere I've seen is to present information during the meeting, verbally or in powerpoint. For example, standups often devolve to people sharing their updates. This is much worse than having people write down updates and taking a few minutes to read them at the beginning. Also note that these documents usually take about 5 minutes to read, even for slow readers. Meetings with much longer documents are pretty rare in my experience - feedback on long documents is usually done separately. It would theoretically be better for people to read the documents ahead of time. But the benefit is pretty small IMO, and the cost is large – it fails if even a single person hasn't read the document.
prasoon2211 1y ago
I worked at a company where we copied this from Amazon for a specific type of meeting (bi-weekly review). But we also had the other "normal" type of meeting. People never read the documents before the meeting in those "normal" meetings. The challenge with your suggestion is that people will half-ass the doc reading before the meeting - we tried doing this for the "normal" meetings. It was obvious the people skimmed the doc before the meeting. You're also now relying on the manager (if there even IS one for everyone in the meeting!) to care about this. So, in practice, giving people dedicated 10 minutes at the start of the meeting works far better. Besides, in most "normal" meetings, the main presenter often ends up discussing background / context for 10 minutes interspersed throughout the meeting anyway. In the "pre-read" meetings, you're just compress that to the first 10 minutes while increasing the amount of information transferred.
18172828286177 1y ago
> You're squandering precious meeting time by having everyone sit and read a document together. They could easily do the same thing ahead of the meeting, and you'd have much shorter meetings. People don’t read ahead of meetings, and that results in wasting time discussing things already covered by docs.
stronglikedan 1y ago
> They could easily do the same thing ahead of the meeting, and you'd have much shorter meetings. There's no difference in the amount of time spent whether it's read in or out of the meeting. At least spending the time in the meeting to read it, people are more focused on the topic at hand and the time will be better spent. Besides, I'd bet the fraction of those docs that are ready sufficiently ahead of the meeting are in the single digits.
- mtlynch 1y ago
  >There's no difference in the amount of time spent whether it's read in or out of the meeting. I address this point directly in the comment you're responding to.
dfxm12 1y ago
They could easily do the same thing ahead of the meeting, and you'd have much shorter meetings. To highlight two ways to go about this, we can assign homework, or assign, for lack of a better word, meetingwork. We don't always know how much free time our colleagues have outside of the time we've scheduled for a meeting. At least by enforcing meetingwork org-wide, it is ensured that everyone has at least some time to read the docs and they're fresh in their mind, even on short notice. You're right about "reading speed", but I think the common alternatives are no one knows how prepared anyone is vs a few people might not be fully prepared.

prpl 1y ago

you squander sooo much more time whenever people are not on the same page, or if people are worried you didn’t cover their corner case.

c-linkage 1y ago

In my experience if it doesn't happen in a meeting it doesn't happen.

Uehreka 1y ago

> They could easily do the same thing ahead of the meeting, and you'd have much shorter meetings. Amazon’s practice is a reaction to the fact that nobody actually does this. According to the article I read about this years ago, they realized that “creating a strong culture around reading before the meeting” also isn’t possible because many attendees had a meeting before this one, and couldn’t prepare for that meeting because they had a meeting before that, etc. On paper you could punch a ton of holes in this: Why not reduce the number of meetings people have to attend? Doesn’t the reading reduce the amount of time available in the meeting to actually make decisions? But it would seem that in practice they found that the meetings people were attending did in fact have value, and that even with the reading time a lot of decisions got made. So this may just be one of those things where you have to look at the results instead of worrying about what could theoretically be done differently. And it sounds like people really like the results and that the benefits of this approach outweigh the drawbacks, at least at Amazon.

mtlynch 1y ago
>Amazon’s practice is a reaction to the fact that nobody actually does this. But isn't that bizarre? I can't think of anything else where we need engineers to do something by a deadline, and we just resign to the fact that they won't do it unless we sit them in a room and babysit them while they do it.
- melagonster 1y ago
  They just do not allocate time to read documents for engineers.
- nlawalker 1y ago
  > I can't think of anything else where we need engineers to do something by a deadline, and we just resign to the fact that they won't do it unless we sit them in a room and babysit them while they do it Pretty much anything, unless you're in the engineer's management chain, or you've given them a direct incentive. It's always been my experience in bigco that people can ignore almost anything that doesn't come from their management chain up until scheduled meetings get involved. Being uncooperative with meetings (declining invites without alternatives; not attending; not participating) are when escalations and complaints start occurring, and there seems to be a silent consensus that this is the standard - as in, if you complain that someone hasn't answered your emails, the standard response you should expect from anyone, including their manager, is "then schedule a meeting." So, if you need someone to do something, you schedule a "meeting" to block time on their calendar in which they will pay attention to your thing. That includes anything they need to do to prepare, because anything you don't include in that time block isn't part of the meeting and therefore isn't going to get done.
  - rixed 1y ago
    Then you should schedule two meetings: one in a reading room, at any time that fits each individual calendar, and then later the real one in a meeting room with everyone's involved, at the same time.
    - 1y ago

zeroCalories 1y ago

Why does it matter when they read it? If they need more time for the meeting they can schedule more time. Only downside is that finding meeting slots becomes more difficult, but the total time spent doesn't change.

rixed 1y ago
In addition to the reasons already listed (slowest reader etc) it's also good, at leasdt for some, to let new information sink in before discussing it.
- zeroCalories 1y ago
  I suspect these are not real issues. Most people smart enough to be an engineer read fast enough to finish 6 pages in 15 minutes(and your doc is bad if they can't), and discussing it fresh is probably better since you forget less.

SatvikBeri 1y ago

I've been in companies that do this. I like it more than alternatives. The default for most meetings everywhere I've seen is to present information during the meeting, verbally or in powerpoint. For example, standups often devolve to people sharing their updates. This is much worse than having people write down updates and taking a few minutes to read them at the beginning. Also note that these documents usually take about 5 minutes to read, even for slow readers. Meetings with much longer documents are pretty rare in my experience - feedback on long documents is usually done separately. It would theoretically be better for people to read the documents ahead of time. But the benefit is pretty small IMO, and the cost is large – it fails if even a single person hasn't read the document.

prasoon2211 1y ago

I worked at a company where we copied this from Amazon for a specific type of meeting (bi-weekly review). But we also had the other "normal" type of meeting. People never read the documents before the meeting in those "normal" meetings. The challenge with your suggestion is that people will half-ass the doc reading before the meeting - we tried doing this for the "normal" meetings. It was obvious the people skimmed the doc before the meeting. You're also now relying on the manager (if there even IS one for everyone in the meeting!) to care about this. So, in practice, giving people dedicated 10 minutes at the start of the meeting works far better. Besides, in most "normal" meetings, the main presenter often ends up discussing background / context for 10 minutes interspersed throughout the meeting anyway. In the "pre-read" meetings, you're just compress that to the first 10 minutes while increasing the amount of information transferred.

18172828286177 1y ago

> You're squandering precious meeting time by having everyone sit and read a document together. They could easily do the same thing ahead of the meeting, and you'd have much shorter meetings. People don’t read ahead of meetings, and that results in wasting time discussing things already covered by docs.

stronglikedan 1y ago

> They could easily do the same thing ahead of the meeting, and you'd have much shorter meetings. There's no difference in the amount of time spent whether it's read in or out of the meeting. At least spending the time in the meeting to read it, people are more focused on the topic at hand and the time will be better spent. Besides, I'd bet the fraction of those docs that are ready sufficiently ahead of the meeting are in the single digits.

mtlynch 1y ago
>There's no difference in the amount of time spent whether it's read in or out of the meeting. I address this point directly in the comment you're responding to.

dfxm12 1y ago

They could easily do the same thing ahead of the meeting, and you'd have much shorter meetings. To highlight two ways to go about this, we can assign homework, or assign, for lack of a better word, meetingwork. We don't always know how much free time our colleagues have outside of the time we've scheduled for a meeting. At least by enforcing meetingwork org-wide, it is ensured that everyone has at least some time to read the docs and they're fresh in their mind, even on short notice. You're right about "reading speed", but I think the common alternatives are no one knows how prepared anyone is vs a few people might not be fully prepared.