Of course, the elephant in the room is that people need to stop having so many meetings. Those of us who have been working remotely for a decade or more never had this problem - we use async communications, quick one-off calls when needed, and really never spent all our time in meetings. But when everyone moved to remote work a few years ago, this culture of meetings all day came up... and it still confuses me. It isn't effective.
Agreed it is the weirdest thing ever to me that people don't email anymore. Just send an email. In an email it's written down and I can search for it. In an email I can think at my own pace and respond without worrying about trampling others. In an email people can't ramble on and on and if they do you can just not read the email. And if it's work to be done, just make a ticket.
The amount of meeting time waste baffles me. And then you try to make them productive and include information in the invite and you show up and nobody read it. So now you have to waste more time when you could have just gone directly into brainstorming.
At this point I kind of just give up. I make my suggestions to make things more efficient and try to remember that even if the work gets done sooner I won't be working any less.
OK, which pipeline, what errors are you receiving, when did it last work, any changes since then, etc.? A lot of people aren't good at communication, period. It's like pulling teeth sometimes.
Slightly off-topic but using coworking spaces pre-Covid was also a different experience. They seem to have turned into call centres nowadays. I find it pretty hard to find a silent spot to work without having someone borderline scream at their screen next to me.
Same as the "you still use a desktop computer?" people. Yes, my dual 4k screens, ergonomic desk, wired Ethernet connection and powerful CPU do in fact make my life easier and my work faster than hunching over a butterfly keyboard and squinting at a 13" screen in a noisy coffee house.
Except it doesn't work like that. There is the expectation that you wake up and go and read all the messages in a Slack channel from when you stopped working yesterday until this morning.
And because it's Slack it's not organized in any way shape or form. You don't know what's important and what not.
I don’t use email at work anymore because it is siloed to the original participants. Someone on the inside needs to know to forward the whole thread to anyone who needs the information after the fact. This info is lost forever when participants leave the company. With Slack I can search through conversations where the participants are long gone. It is not the end all be all of communication, but the auto-documentation aspect is way improved over email.
> I don’t use email at work anymore because it is siloed to the original participants.
For many people that's a selling point. I practically beg my teammates to ask questions in the team slack channel instead of DMing me, but they never do. I think it's stage fright and wanting to reveal ignorance to as few people as possible amplified by various higher up people joining the channel. Also compounded by tons of people from other teams joining our channel and no one pushing back because "we want to have an inclusive conversation" or similar platitude.
> I practically beg my teammates to ask questions in the team slack channel instead of DMing me, but they never do.
I would probably be one of them (although I'd be more likely to email you if that's an option).
If I have to ask my stupid question in public, I'm more likely to simply not ask it at all -- especially if management or people who are not on my immediate team are in the Slack channel.
Some of the people who want constant meetings are poor communicators whose messages won't be read (or won't communicate effectively) without a captive audience.
Email means there's a paper trail. I've had conversations drastically change tone when the medium changed (eg, from text messages to phone call, or from video meeting to email thread).
Some people don't want to be held accountable for what they say.
This, thank you. I recently quit my corporate job and we started our own company with my wife... never been so productive. Meetings are truly productivity killers. Why hire smart people for a lot of money to then have them sit around in groups of 10+, half listening, half braindead?
> Why hire smart people for a lot of money to then have them sit around in groups of 10+, half listening, half braindead?
Fear Of Missing Out. People don't want to be told what to do, but rather invest in an idea from its birth to its execution. That means there are going to be a lot of meetings like "which feature requests should we do in Q3". People want to justify, negotiate, compromise, and bounce ideas off of each other. Presumably some refinement and understanding comes from this process, beyond what one person spending a day to write a design doc would accomplish. (Do people like writing design docs for things that never get prioritized? You want to spend your time on things that are going to be shipped, minimizing the time spent on proposals that don't go anywhere because they don't have wide agreement.)
HN's way of avoiding these issues tends to center around not involving any sort of multi-player action in their work. One person can do a lot in tech, so that can be a viable approach, but it's not the sort of business that people are hiring for. To do big things, you need a big team. It's always been that way. We didn't land on the moon through one individual contributor making a rocket and riding it there. Rather, thousands of individual contributors were coordinated through, gasp, managers, and collectively they accomplished something no one person could do on their own. If you want to go to space, you probably need to have a couple meetings. If you want to rewrite `cat` in Rust, you can probably skip them.
In the coming years, it will be interesting to see how AI organizes coordination. If AI 1 has 2 A100s attached to a robot arm and AI 2 has 2 A100s attached to Amazon Prime, it will be interesting to see if one of them says "hey what if we combined our resources and made X..." I also look forward to the first AI agent chilling in a $3000/month rack complaining about having to go to sprint planning meetings. So like us!
I think the problem is further compounded by team size and insistence on 40 hour work weeks. As soon as you have people on “manager schedule” that feel the need to look busy the number of meetings starts growing exponentially. I’m all for having enabling people on the team, just don’t expect them or anyone else to meet an arbitrary amount of hours per week quota.
Exactly. Parkinson's Law states it best: work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. A manager whose main function is to hold meetings will fill their 40 hours with meetings.
I fully agree and had a snide comment to add. However, I had a bit of a brainwave. Is it possible that this is being driven more by anxious employees? “How can I show that I am doing something when no one is watching over my shoulder? I know, dial into meetings all day so I can be watched again”. It is of course even worse for managers as they aren’t expected to do a lot of concrete work. However, I can empirically state that simply being in meetings all day does not guarantee employment (not me, fortunately).
Yes, I was working remotely for a decade, we were hyper-effective, and I'd only met 2 of the people in person once. Most communication was email, and there was the occasional phone call. So productive.
At another place, we used a text chat SaaS to be super-effective, and usually the only internal routine videoconf was for whole-company sync-up and personalizing. Text chat for effective async/real-time (in addition to docs), and occasional videoconf as needed. So productive.
I've also seen places where people did meetings because they didn't know how to collaborate effectively, and there were barriers to learning that. One of the places, it seemed meetings were approached much like they approached coding or documenting: being able to say you performed that proof-of-work was the end goal itself, rather than the meeting being costs invested smartly towards some actual shared goal.
Thanks for saying this. I’m strongly considering leaving a job primarily due to the meeting culture. It’s just incredibly wasteful. We can spend weeks talking about things I would have knocked out in days in a previous role.
Robustly challenge what you think are unwarranted meetings. Preface your input in meetings that are silly but still exist with "Hi, I'll keep this concise because I know everyone has a lot of work to do ...", make a habit of reconfirming the value and purpose of the remaining meetings. Make it normal for meetings to whither quickly when not vital.
I go further and simply don't attend meetings that lack an agenda or at the very least point out when there isn't one when the meeting starts.
I was complaining about this to my manager, he said attending meetings doesn't affect my perf and I just shouldn't go if I think it's pointless. So I stopped going to a couple. No one has made a peep. I need to start voicing for the smaller meetings tho. I've starting asking the groups "any agenda for today?" A couple hours before but I feel like the meeting organizer should really be on top of this.
But when everyone moved to remote work a few years ago, this culture of meetings all day came up... and it still confuses me.
My pet theory (that in all likelihood isn’t unique to me, but derived from things I’ve read in many other places) is that this is due to an existential crisis among the management class. Many managers who were previously used to managing people very directly, by looking over shoulders and such, realized that their jobs are unnecessary when they saw how productive people became during the pandemic’s forced remote work regime.
As a way of coping with the cognitive dissonance they began to schedule huge numbers of online meetings so that they could continue to feel engaged and “useful.” This has turned into a very large “emperor’s new clothes” situation, played out across thousands of companies. Hence the desperate moves by many companies to try to force workers to come back into the office.
> Many managers...realized that their jobs are unnecessary
I hear this a lot in forums, but to me it rings out as something that perhaps-disgruntled workers want to be true about managers, but isn't really grounded in measurable fact. It's true that as a manager I don't produce a lot of code, but at the end of the day my job is to know who the experts on different topics are and to know what the zeitgeist (and maybe even plan of record) of the org is so I can get the right people in a room together to solve problems. If we left that up to each individual contributor, especially the more junior ones, we'd never be able to achieve a large scale goal. Imagine if you were trying to build the Golden Gate bridge but you eliminated management and just turned a bunch of workers out on the site to do whatever their skills and experience led them to.
I said many managers, not all managers. There are some highly skilled managers (likely promoted engineers) who know exactly what their teams need to be successful and also understand the big picture and where their team’s project fits in. These are not the managers I was referring to.
The ones I’m talking about are from “the management class”, likely went to business school, and have no technical background at all, and occupy most of their days “walking a beat” around the office to look over people’s shoulders and make sure they’re busy. These are the Michael Scotts of the world, and they are the ones in crisis, not the skilled managers.
> And now maybe the "original remote workers" are affected, too.
I think there’s a lot to this. Those of us who worked remote for many years before COVID probably developed more efficient ways of working over time. Then the pandemic hit and we were suddenly vastly outnumbered by newly remote folks who didn’t actually know how to work remotely.
agreed. dont know who needs to hear this but if you're having more than 1 scrum a week its not devops, its micromanagement, and if youve got more than 2-3 meetings a week youre effectively doing your managers work.
if it can be summarized in 2-3 lines in an email, dont accept the meeting.
Worse are meeting with just a vague title and not a well defined agenda. So many times I have to ask the organizer to add bullet points of the items to cover so I can at least join already prepared, can tell the organizer if I am not really the right person to join for the meeting and/or if someone from another team would be necessary.
So many time is wasted on meeting because of off topic stuff or because the rights persons haven't been invited.
Sadly a lot of people don’t produce directly but do so indirectly. When they could been seen sitting at their desk clicking on something by everyone, everyone knew they were doing “something,” even though it was immeasurable (because it was often nothing). Without that ability to signal productivity they need to be seen in meetings on zoom. This isn’t fair of course, most jobs probably don’t legitimately have 8 hours of busy work attached but yet we expect them to work 8 hours. The jobs still important for the hours of actual work they put in. That’s not their fault, but they’re still left with figuring out how to seem like they’re working 8 hours when they are not and never were. The buying of their body in a chair was a proxy for that, and now they need to figure out how to make people see them sitting in a chair.
One thing I found worked, and Zoom has apparently added as a real feature, was to have a standing meeting room that was just always open. We had a conference room in the office signed in. People could just hang there. Usually you just heard typing and occasional questions. People usually had their camera off but not always. But it seemed to appease the need to be seen without inducing anxiety provoked meeting proliferation.
Problem emerges when there is at least one influential team/individual which is allergic to written communication. I work with one such team that avoids a written paper trail in order to avoid difficult questions. Once one such team exists, people start losing the time to thoughtfully perform async communication.
Funny, just read an article on WSJ complaining how people take breaks during working time and then it is hard to schedule even more meetings on short notice ("is why so many managers hate hybrid work"):
there are synchronized and non-synchronized tasks.
if its something where we need to synchronize with other team members, then schedule it ahead of time, or else let me know asap / hit my cell / etc.
One of the givens of remote work is that you have "synchronous hours" where the expectation is that you're within 5-15 min of your computer, and that you put status messages if you're away / out.
e.g. "OUT LUNCH" at 12:41pm means I can reasonably guess where you are (lunch) and roughly when you're going to be back (1-130ish).
non-synchronized or non-time-sensitive tasks can be done whenever so long as deadlines are met
The culture at our company is Slack + meetings. Slack drives me crazy because there's SO MUCH in there that it's hard to navigate and search. I'm probably a member of 250 channels. Meetings are ephemeral; I prefer written communication for future reference.
Im not sure it came up in 2020. I’ve been at work since the late 90s and the same complaints were made then. The difference now is that everybody is also responding on Slack throughout, so it’s like having double-density meetings.
