The problem is these meetings are so low information density even an AI summary is not worth my time. And it’s not some elitist mindset. It’s like the entire reason there are these regular meetings is to make some mid level person feel better. They like giving directions vocally because that authority is harder to question than if they wrote up a memo and all the receivers can poke holes in it. I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills.
> I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills.
That's not entirely it. Some people just won't say something unless put in a setting where they are explicity asked for it. I've had meetings where I ask for a status, and someone says they are stuck on X, and they've been stuck on X for two days.
And I'll ask why they didn't just ask for help. They weren't comfortable asking for help. They were only ok stating the problem when asked specifically for status.
So it also creates that environment were some people are more likely to share.
I predict that in "20 minutes in the future" we'll see the industry moving to AI based scrum-assistants with a scheduled daily trigger, that will reach out to each dev to have a check-in conversation and then automatically synthesize the input from everyone and update the project manager (possibly AI-based itself) with insight about how things are progressing and recommendations.
But you can share your daily status asynchronously as well.
This might not scale well to larger teams, but we simply write a short message in a dedicated channel each day. It contains a short status and a few bullet points to plan the next day.
Slack makes this conventient because you can write a top level message and then use the reply feature to add more details.
> But you can share your daily status asynchronously as well.
In practice, this is harder because people don't speak up unless prodded. And on Slack, I spend a lot of time and effort prodding people for that update, whereas a stand-up takes 15 minutes, tops.
Not attending stand-up is a lot more visible than silently ignoring an async update request on Slack.
As you said, async doesn’t go well with scale, and async comms is OK if statuses are all you’re gonna write there. But in meetings you get to have back-and-forth, and while you can also have that in async, you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. Which they might not do altogether.
Anyway, I’ve come to really dislike async comms. If something is being communicated to you over async, it’s something not important enough that you can ignore it, in many cases indefinitely. Meetings are still the best way to keep everyone in sync and it’s a structural strategy to keep everyone accountable for making progress at their jobs.
Sync is even worse at scale. I had the pleasure of attending standups in a 20-person team. It was a nightmare where I said two sentences and then wasted the next two hours of my life listening to things I either know or are unrelevant to me.
>you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read
Great, because skipping three pages of unimportant conversation is faster than skipping 30 minutes of banter between two extrovert UI developers as a backend specialist.
>structural strategy to keep everyone accountable
Sounds exactly like something mid level managers say to themselves. Structural synergy? Keeping people accountable? I just want to work, damnit.
> you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read.
What? Instead you are punishing everyone to sit on a meeting, hearing two people discuss something that could have been a dm.
I get that some people prefer meetings but to me every meeting with more than 3 people is a massive waste of time
When you get to that point, those two people should take the discussion outside of the sync call. The purpose of a sync is to figure out whether your current work is on track and, if not, who and what is needed to fix that.
It's usually possible for the person running a small project to ask everyone for status and know what everyone's going to say in the meeting before the meeting.
Then the meeting is pointless. But not all projects allow for that.
> It's usually possible for the person running a small project to ask everyone for status
Perhaps, for efficiency, they could ask everyone simultaneously in parallel, or at least roughly around the same time?
To maximize creativity and opportunity, perhaps we could then figure out some way to share each person's status update with every other person on the team?
Why do you think a larger meeting is a remedy for this? Quite the opposite, if you can't get a personal status from a large group, doing the meeting is completely pointless because it demonstrate lack of preparation.
It's not. That's not what I meant or said. I said not all projects allow for getting status ahead of time.
This is a nice way of saying that some people just won't tell you what they're up to async, you have to wring information out of them synchronously. They're just bad at communicating.
On a well functioning team I can rely on people just reporting status themselves when something relevant happens and reaching out for help. But some people just don't do that, especially people from other teams, departments, etc.
I have employed a massive hack for the past two decades--whenever asked to do any random task or assist someone, and in particular where the asker is just lazy trying to get someone else to do their job, eagerly and pleasantly agree, but ask the requestor to write up a sentence or two describing said request and email it to you. It's such a small request that no one can't argue it, but so many people (lazy ones especially) are astonishingly bad at this and 90% of the time that request will never come. The next time you see the person, take the initiative and remind them about the email you never received and ask if they could send it. You've now turned the tables on the asker, they may even start to avoid you.
You are talking about juniors mixed with severe introvert persona. Most juniors in dev are a variant of that. Its part of seniority to overcome these self-inflicted mental barriers (reverse doesn't obviously work - an extroverted dev can still be as green as spring lawn, even if loaded with yet-undeserved confidence).
If you need to babysit bunch of juniors thats fine, but it should be clear from one's role in team/project that this needs to be a continuous effort (at least till they grok how to step up, but it takes years if at all for some).
I also used to think that work meetings are low information density.
Then I attended our first parent-teacher conference at kindergarten. It was incredible: 2.5 hours of discussions and ridiculous complaints ("why does my child has to put on splash pants on rainy autumn days, putting them on is just such an ordeal!!"), and not a single bit of relevant information was transmitted. Not a single decision was made. I went home in utter disbelief.
Currently, our parents' council is trying to organize a party for the children who will be going to school after summer. What should've been a TODO list where parents can write down what food they will bring and who will help with what escalated into 2 evenings of discussions, a Skype meeting, and a Whatsapp group where several fractions of parents have been fighting over whether T-Shirts should be printed to celebrate the end of kindergarten for over a week now.
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 to management and certainly not climb the management hierarchy if you do not at least implicitly feel this.
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.
This is why people focussed on 'doing the actual work' hate meetings, while carreer focussed people love them.
Now I have exaggerated all the above, but only to make the point more clear. As always it is not black and white.
And sometimes, it is worse. There are realy situations with managers that schedule meetings and calls because they are simply bored at work. These are the types that when the step into the car to go to a meeting, will always have to get on the phone with some rapportee to have a quick 'update' that might just last the lenght of the drive.
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.
There's this huge difference in quality between execs who work in writing and execs who NEVER write _anything_ down, which is surprisingly common. In my experience it correlates closely with toxic behaviour and I don't know why it's common for senior management in many orgs to allow people to operate in this style.
Most modern companies drift toward the non-written style (effectively managing by the seat of the pants) because it has the appearance of being more effective, even when it is in fact the opposite. Business myth makes the guy who is always having meetings to appear more dynamic and effective, and is consequently rewarded by upper management.
An exec writing down minutes can also come back to bite them in the ass if there's a lawsuit or criminal investigation. Email can have retention policies. That's harder to enforce with paper, especially when it's someone's personal notes.
It's not even that, they do the meeting to appear personally leading something. Modern companies confuse leading meetings with true leadership, because hardly anyone knows how to do the later. It is a fast, effective way to give an appearance of leadership and say they're doing something, while doing close to nothing.
> They like giving directions vocally because that authority is harder to question than if they wrote up a memo
Authority is also much harder to deliver in an asynchronous format. If someone can just _not read_ the memo, it functionally has no power. The risk isn't that your memo might be questioned, it's that your memo might never be read.
I have to disagree since I can also just not listen/pay any attention to what is vocally delivered in the meeting, which I find to be an abhorrent waste of my time in the first place. If the directive is in writing such as an email I (or the person who issued it) can't point to that and say "you did not read this" which shifts the onus entirely on the person receiving the directive.
About a year ago, I nearly quit my job over this, going so far as to put my two weeks notice in as a way to hold a gun to their head, repeating my frequent request that all directives handed down from on high _must_ be in writing if they are expected to be followed. My company had (still does, to some degree, but we are still working on it) a cancerous culture of he said/she said that was being abused to avoid any accountability from upper management, which was both impeding the actual work being done as well as demoralizing to th workers. We even ended up losing some talent over it before I used my own value and authority to put my foot down, making me wish I'd done it sooner.
Verbal directives only stroke the ego of the person delivering them and their meaning either evaporates or gets twisted as soon as everyone walks out of that conference room or logs off that video call. If the person issuing them is not willing to have their directives questioned when they are in writing, then they should not hold the position they do. It's not about questioning someone's authority, it's about ensuring the directive makes sense with the work being done and adds value or guidance to the existing processes. Screw the fragile ego nonsense.
Fair point in your case, but my experience across companies and industries is that people just don't read. It's true in any customer facing experience where tutorials etc are routinely unread and ignored, it's true for execs who are always short on time and want the exec summary in order no to read a whole memo (however misguided this may be in certain instances), it's true for seasoned professionals who prioritize and decide to ignore certain requests until they are clear enough / repeated enough, the list goes on.
Even people getting @mentionned on slack or in emails seem to find it acceptable to say routinely they didn't see/read whatever it was they were specifically asked to look at.
> It’s like the entire reason there are these regular meetings is to make some mid level person feel better.
Higher ups like meetings too, everyone likes feeling better about themselves by showing status. Perhaps A.I will be able to relieve us of that eventually ...
But if you do not hold the engineers accountable for reading the memo, that's on you (or whomever has the authority to do that). This is why having things in writing is important and verbal directives have about as much value as a fart in the wind.
COVID opened a whole new field of "work" for a particular group of people. Previously, you had to have some task and the necessary skills to be occupied at work. Now, you can fill a whole workday with meetings, giving the false sense that you actually do stuff. Its a not-so secret cult. At least that is how I observe it currently.
I don't know about anyone else, but contrary to my general disdain for meetings* I have found product owners/process managers to be useful in the regard of having one central person to funnel things through on a particular project. The bottleneck also creates a nice buffer of accountability in both directions and they typically offer either new or refined SOPs after solving the same problems over and over again. Plus, they can sit in on the meeting while I go do something useful.
I may just have been lucky with the few I've had to work with though, so your mileage may vary.
*or as the song says, a little less conversation, a little more action please
The last sentence is it - most people can't communicate much less write well, hell, I don't write well, but I hope my ideas are at least clearly communicated.
When you can't write well, you "resort" to using a lot of body language and facial nuances in face-to-face communication, which works acceptably. Unfortunately, this doesn't translate well on zoom.
This "writing well" as a form of good communication is needed, but while in school, those same people who cannot write well also likely were complaining about learning how to write essays and such. Over time, this sort of lack of learning has resulted in poor written communication into adulthood i reckon.
And with the advent of LLM and all these chatGPT-esque bots writing for them, esp. in school, the level of literacy skill is only going to continue to drop!
In the past, companies had people specialized in translating conversations into written documents: secretaries. And executives took seriously the task of reading these documents. All this seems to be gone.
In software, you have the privilege of writing succinctly to communicate facts. In every other industry, the message needs to be packaged with courtesies like a greeting, cushioned delivery, and salutations. It’s a big waste of time and people stop reading your messages. But don’t put a bow on it and you get labeled as an asshole. At least the AI note taker can make me sound more palatable.
I wish I had that privilege. I've had a manager make a paragraph-long question about if I had any training courses that I'd want to take, and when I answered with a "No", I got chewed out for not being communicative or something.
Personally I don't mind spending several hours solving a problem over "async communication" if that means I'm free to work on other stuff while the other party is formulating a response. Then I also get the benefit of having something in their writing to refer back to.
The kind of person who takes hours to explain something in written form are unlikely to explain it in 3 minutes in person. More likely, they set up a meeting where they waffle on about an issue, expecting the receiving end to distill some valuable information from their ramblings, and then inevitably end up complaining when the solution doesn't match their expectations (which of course were never formalized anywhere).
I bet there are a bunch of people in upper management who hear about this phenomenon and think that employees are skipping meetings to slack off (appearing to do work but they're actually playing Mario Kart).
In reality, it's more likely that they're being judged on their attendance of BS meetings, but if they attend the BS meetings, they won't be able to make the BS deadlines they're responsible for hitting.
So they're likely buying themselves time to do the actually important work, while still attempting to meet unrealistic expectations around meeting attendance.
Even if the final nod of agreement happens in real time the actual decision making process for critical product features should involve planning, thinking, research, etc. There should be a strong paper trail such that everyone knows what the decision is going to be prior to the "everyone gets together and declares this is how things are going to be" step.
If them missing some meetings means they're in the dark as to how those features were decided on then I can't see that as a defence of attending every meeting so much as a statement of BS meetings being so predominant in the company that all decisions are made through a BS process.
This might not be quite what the previous poster meant, but in my experience it's often not that the developer missed a meeting and now doesn't know some critical piece of information. Rather, it's often that the developer has some knowledge about the code that changes how something should be implemented. Because they weren't at the meeting, nobody else knew about this, and it's only later, when the developer sits down to write the code, that everyone finds out.
In this case, there's nothing to document from the meeting because the information wasn't shared in the first place. The information could only have been shared if the developer had been in the meeting.
(FWIW, I've rarely seen this from a developer not being in a meeting entirely, but I've seen it a few times where a developer has treated the meeting as a "read-only" event, i.e. expected that other people provide all the requirements and not used their own expertise or experience of the code to push back on decisions.)
The point in the parent comment still stands. There should be a paper trail so that the developer would have to confront the need to add such a detail. If the decision was made in the meeting alone, then it was lost in time as not all developers can be expected to be in every meeting.
I realize introverts don't work that way, I know, I am one. But I've had some of the most brilliant ideas come through purely on a discussion nay sometimes an emotionally charged argument.
Important decisions are almost never 2+2=4, if they were, they wouldn't be important and yes you wouldn't need a meeting (like I admitted, there's definitely a lot of unimportant meetings).
But important decisions are almost always an exercise in coaxing, cajoling and persuasion, which is just extremely low fidelity on paper.
Most engineers will look at their team leads and say "I don't believe in this strategy on paper", and all their team leads can say is "I was at the meeting. You had to be there"
I'm an introvert, too. I have no troubles participating in, or leading, or even fighting in group activities. Does it exhaust me? Yes, it does. I literally feel physical pain if I have to stay in company for more than maybe an hour. But value is created through interaction, not some process, paper stacks, or a lone wolf hiding in the closet, so I learned a long time ago how to communicate effectively, give and take feedback, organize tight meetings, and facilitate decision making.
I'm actually a bit tired of introverts hiding behind their disposition. You can do something about it, and it's more than complaining.
EDIT: Sorry, that was more rantish than I wanted. But I'll leave it here anyway.
Most people in meetings don’t type very fast, and find it easier to talk than to write.
This means that prior to AI transcription/summary bots, there wasn’t much written documentation about the decisions and conclusions from meetings. Now hopefully that will change.
I wasn't so much saying that there should be plenty of documentation generated during a meeting as saying that there should be plenty of documentation prior to the meeting. That the meeting is based on.
100% this. As some who’s regularly derided by his colleagues for “hating meetings”: I don’t “keep meetings to a minimum”, I “keep meetings to a benefit”.
If I’ve called a meeting it’s because there’s a benefit to the instant vocal communication. If you’re not there, you’ve not attended the meeting, no matter which tools you use to record, transcribe or translate.
Conversely, if I thought I didn’t need to be in a meeting, then I wouldn’t send a tool to gather stuff for me to then just ignore the tool output - because I don’t need it.
These tools are a sign of cultural rot from both participants and the fact people are even making them shows deep flaws in how we communicate in the modern workplace.
No matter how they're used, AI companies will create the artificial need for every company and essentially every worker to use these tools, even if they're not needed.
I had an engineer once show up to the re-scheduled "lets get the engineers ideas meeting before the yearly plan ships" meeting that we scheduled so they could be there who then proceeded to spent 15 minutes complaining how they didn't get any input before finally asking what the meeting was for, and finding out they had 45 minutes remaining to give feedback (they had skipped the meeting the previous day, and I wanted to make sure they gave their impact). (I tried to interject earlier but was asked "please let me talk" so I did).
It is helpful to communicate in advance what is the specific agenda of each meeting, so that people can make an informed decision on whether to attend.
Also, it may be helpful to have the meeting organizer send meeting notes after every meeting, including action items assigned to specific people. The notes don't need to be extensive, but there better be an executive summary of what decisions were made, if any, and any unexpected roadblocks that were found.
That's how things were done at one of the mega corps where I was employed and it worked great.
Not OP but yes and those meeting notes are turned into tasks with callbacks to the meeting they came from. Yet we still get the “where do these priorities come from” questions.
You’re not asking for meeting notes you’re asking for a transcription which has the same problem as an email - people don’t read rhem
> and I don't know how to tell them its because they skipped some meetings where they could've been part of that discussion.
That there was a meeting where that decision was made between 55 minutes of crud doesn’t really mean anything to me though. I’m not wasting an hour of my day every day on the off chance today’s meeting will contain anything of importance.
We had an internal RFC comment/discussion meeting on a proposed engineering standard. In that exact meeting, a dev flipped out and expressed exasperation that they weren’t asked to comment on the proposal. In the exact meeting that was one in a series of opportunities to comment on the proposal…
Yes, this is pretty universal I think. Some people think software engineering in a team is writing code as much as possible, and doing anything else is bad.
Did they get to read the RFC before the meeting? If they had access but didn’t use it, then this is out of line. But if they only got the RFC during the meeting when they were asked to comment, then flipping out is overboard but the feeling is understandable.
I'd tell them directly.. "You were invited to the meeting on 2025-MM-DD to discuss this, but you did not show up, nor did you follow up with organizers later. Sorry, you've missed your opportunity to comment"
Seems direct and uncontroversial, and IMHO most people react well at this.
That's the thing, these meetings are B.S. Engineers need a task, time to think, and write about the solution and its cost. Period. Talking in a room full of people who love to hear their own voices and love to stroke their egos does not actually help engineers do their job. When engineers need to communicate, they communicate with their colleagues. There are tools for such communications that do not require talking and immediate responses. Being reactive (which is what meetings enforce you to do) costs more, as reactive and forced responses will be far more technically unsound.
Feature development is rarely so cut and dry that you can hand a developer a task and let them run with it.
To get there, you need a confluence of context and expertise from several domains:
- what problem needs to be solved (user story)
- what options are available (interaction design, technical capabilities)
- what the cost of implementing each option is, and the opportunity cost of each level of implementation / each option (technical capability, resource management, sales, user research)
- managing group consensus on the path forward (communication to technical and non-technical audiences)
- break down of any large chunks of work into smaller tasks that can be done and planning the work to be done in series or parallel (resource management, technical capabilities)
Finally, after all of that, you have a task (or several) that can be handed off.
There's really no way to get here without at least some thought into the implementation details, as the business can't make the decision on which options without knowing rough timelines.
> Engineers need a task, time to think, and write about the solution and its cost. Period. Talking in a room full of people who love to hear their own voices and love to stroke their egos does not actually help engineers do their job. When engineers need to communicate, they communicate with their colleagues.
Seems like when you say "engineers", you mean "people with my exact personality"
> while still attempting to meet unrealistic expectations around meeting attendance
I've routinely seen people attending a meeting from the office on Zoom camera, all gathered in a single big conference room, all looking and typing on their laptops for the entirety of the meeting, saying something maybe once or twice. I suppose they were simply working on their assigned tasks, listening to others in the background. How effective is that - I don't know.
These days I don't care. I'm 100% "at work" when I'm in the office, so whatever. I just pull up my phone and plan my next vacation trip or whatever. When I'm remotely I take my laptop to the kitchen and start preparing stuff for dinner. Life is too short for this mess.
Many meetings I've been on only require my attention for a small part. So I've been doing my work and listening in background; once they start talking about part I care about I stop my work and start to actually participate.
> bet there are a bunch of people in upper management who hear about this phenomenon and think that employees are skipping meetings to slack off
Everyone I know in senior leadership sees this as a plus. It’s known that middle managers waste time with performative meetings. Their value add is just seen to outweigh that drag. So if they can perform and employees can work, that’s sort of a win-win for shareholders.
I skip meetings in order to play Mario Kart. Why? Two reasons:
1. My company offers no promotion path. I asked for a raise, and my manager gave me a project that is impossible to complete. Recently he admitted that the project is indeed impossible, but the upper management expected him to spend a year trying anyway.
2. I am often given very vague task descriptions, and when I come up with a solution, we keep having meetings until my solution is remolded into whatever my manager wants but didn't say explicitly.
It's very difficult to stay motivated in such an environment, but I'm afraid to change jobs because what if I end up with a similar manager except I'll be expected to actually attend the meetings instead of playing Mario Kart.
> it's more likely that they're being judged on their attendance of BS meetings
Some middle manager types in my company track emoji reactions to their messages in slack. I got written up for it, no joke.
That was easy to automate though.
In my experience, at least, it's because a lot of "meetings" aren't actually meetings, they're presentations that are actually better consumed async after the fact, but historical precedent demands that everyone be invited to attend the live taping and emote and cheer politely.
At my previous company, one I started, I would try to organise a meeting with only the most essential people and then people would forward the invite as people would be upset they were not invited (normally because it is a prelim meeting to a wider meeting), the meeting would go from 4 people to 15, people would attend the meeting find it was irrelevant to them or too early to them, which is why they were not invited in the first place, and then complain about too many meetings. Ugh.
This is my experience too. My meetings tend to be presentations of results. I invite the bare minimum of people who are likely to be interested, and like you, end up with a full meeting room plus others connecting online, often all over the world.
I figure, they're consenting adults, they're responsible for managing their time.
A lot of mine at the time were workshops. I find workshops work best when there is an agenda and small teams, then you present to the wider group when ideas are more developed. A lot of the time, when additional people attended they would be seeing too early of a concept or idea and too many people would debate little details. I believe the best productivity is in small teams.
It is historical precedent. Having everyone sit slackjawed through twenty minutes of droning is no more proof that they received the relevant information than emailing them would be - that’s why schools have exams and other assessment on the knowledge they intend to impart.
I'm sympathetic to this knowing how few people actually read their emails (and slacks etc.). If you've ever sent out a 30 second survey to your coworkers, you know what I'm talking about. But I also know people don't really pay attention in these meetings either.
I feel async communication could work this way with the right cultural hygiene (e.g. consistent labeling, brevity, novelty, and relevancy), and some places I've worked were better about this than others, but they all tend to suffer from tragedy of the commons. If anyone works somewhere where you and all your coworkers actually count on each other to read emails, please tell me where!
The reason people don't read email is that companies have poisoned their communication channels. If an important email is right beside a practically junk message, it will be lost.
However, it's a lot more socially acceptable to say "I missed the email" than "I sat there for 30min while you were talking but didn't actually listen"...
I would have agreed, but the reporter shares multiple anecdotes where that's not the case. Most crazily, the person she was meant to be interviewing sent an AI note taker in his place, very much not a presentation and she just sat alone with the AI until it became clear he was a no-show. I don't get the thought process there, just cancel the interview if you're not going to show up.
In general I think people need to be more comfortable both calling out useless meetings, and calling out people who are making meetings useless by not being engaged or "multi-tasking" (a.k.a. not paying attention). When I facilitate meetings if I see people aren't paying attention or it's very low engagement, I call it out and ask honestly if people think the meeting is worth their time. The first time people hear that they think I'm just being passive-aggressive, but colleagues who know me well know they can be honest and if the meeting isn't valuable we can stop and in the future we'll either have a better agenda/facilitation, do it async, or not do it at all. Even if the meeting would have value if people were engaged, if I fail to get people's attention then it becomes useless and I would rather not waste my or anyone else's time.
As well as those standups which are just micro-presentations where each person talks in turn about their respective card but there's no discussion. The teams that moved to async standups where they just post status updates in Slack and amigo only when needed seem happier.
Text-only stand-ups also have a tendency to devolve into just posting text into the void than nobody reads, so you may as well move to the even simpler "I need to discuss" flags which reduces communication even more. But then some people don't like that.
I am afraid there's no perfect solution, and it just boils down to people's preferences and the skills of people involved. And the chemistry between them.
I've been in teams which flip flopped over time between "communication worsened" and "wasting everyone's time". Being remote for 15+ years I enjoy the "convivial" side of stand-ups but I hate when they devolve into rote status reports.
The worst part about the standup ritual is that no one talks outside standups.
With async text communication channels you'll post when an issue shows up. With the standups you'll wait until the next standup and maybe forget the details until then, or forget about the issue entirely and that will lead to technical debt.
> when an issue shows up
Advanced usage: post proactively before you reach the task/issue. This way people have time to comment on it and when you do get to it it's been clear what to do for 1-2 days.
> With async text communication channels you'll post when an issue shows up
You clearly work with excellent teams who don’t need this then. My experience is that a large number of people, even competent people will not post when an issue shows up and will wait for however long until an update is asked of them and then say they couldn’t do it because they’re blocked.
I recently became an active user of some AI note-taking tools, and I've noticed that they are really great. As long as I set up the account, they send a robot to the meeting and write down almost everything, especially when there are people from different backgrounds and ACCENTS! God, they saved my life a thousand times, I would say. And reading summaries or even transcripts are so much more efficient than attending the meeting in person.
I feel this is a symptom of poor meetings, where they are used for information exchange (which I think should come before the meeting) instead of collaboration and problem solving. You could save your time and a bunch of AI-generated notes you'll never read with the simple rule of "no agenda, no attenda". Remote has allowed us to adopt meeting policies that would never exist in-person: giant, long, back-to-back sessions with no purpose, plan or opportunity to pee.
> Remote has allowed us to adopt meeting policies that would never exist in-person: giant, long, back-to-back sessions with no purpose, plan or opportunity to pee.
I'm genuinely confused by this. Those sort of meetings have existed in the entire 20-something years I've been working corporate jobs.
I've been using this mentality for the last three years. Some responds with hostility and some see the benefits, but most are just indifferent to it sadly.
I've also been observing people just throw in a short sentence or some AI generated shit list which is then not followed during the meeting.
But those who take this seriously usually have pretty darn good meetings (e.g not book the full hour, force people to stay on topic, shares notes after the meeting etc)
Lol I've seen this happen, people feeling they're too important to attend meetings and then complaining when something happens in them.
Skipping meetings because they aren't organized the way you like is pretty passive aggressive. I agree with all the criticism about poorly organized meetings, but I think the non prima Donna thing to do is push back on their existence or format, not just skip them. That's part of why a job is a job.
It's "the boy who called important meeting" - if the first 9 meetings in a series provided zero value, you shouldn't be surprised that someone refuses to attend #10.
It's not about being a prima Donna. It's about business value. Too many meetings over the years should either be better planned, not taken place at all or could have been an email/chat message.
Meetings with an agenda are generally better, but that doesn't mean meetings without one can't have any business value. If you skip it, you make sure you at least don't contribute to anything decided in it.
> Remote has allowed us to adopt meeting policies that would never exist in-person: giant, long, back-to-back sessions with no purpose, plan or opportunity to pee.
This is absolutely not new and was as bad if not worse before remote work.
>Remote has allowed us to adopt meeting policies that would never exist in-person: giant, long, back-to-back sessions with no purpose, plan or opportunity to pee.
Oh, if only that had been true, but pointless, aimless meetings have been a plague forever. Maybe less so the no-peeing.
But "no agenda, no attenda" only works if you're in a position to refuse. Often attending meetings is seen as part of the job, either formally or in the managers' eyes, so ignoring them without good reason isn't allowed without repercussions.
After working for a company where every meeting had a clear agenda and meeting notes with action items were sent afterwards, I would never want to work in a place that didn't follow the same pattern.
It's not a new problem. In a previous job long before remote, we had a 1.5 hour long biweekly meeting named "Team Meeting". No agenda, no goals, never went less than the full alloted time.
If I have back-to-back meetings, I'll leave a few minutes early (with apologies) and also apologise to the next meeting if I'm late. If anyone calls me out, I'll apologetically claim "biological imperative". If they don't understand, I tell them that my bowels wait for no one. That is enough to get everyone to move on. No one wants to talk about someone else's bowels.
In my opinion, sending an AI note taker to a meeting basically means that for the attendee, a recap email written by the meeting organizer would be enough - except that in my experience at least, most meeting organizers aren't writing these.
Best would be the meeting organizers to leverage their AI attendee to write a draft meeting recap and sending it out after review.
What a nightmare. First a week full of useless undefined meetings, largely so that everyone can cover their asses, and now most don’t even bother turning up because they can automate covering their asses. I can see the prompt now… “let me know if there is something that affects me or which I need to know or take action on in order to cover my ass”.
I’m pretty strict. Meetings are for decisions and only parties to the decision are invited and attend. The agenda and decision required is circulated beforehand. Only the time to make the decision is scheduled. Need 10 minutes? Then the meeting is 10 minutes.
Catch-ups, get-togethers, presentations, status updates, and brainstorming sessions are labelled as such explicitly and are treated differently. The event and attendance needs to be justified.
Such a system works quite well. Perhaps worth mentioning that I also refuse to be CC’d on emails that do not require a response, just as I do not CC anyone if no response is required. I also require that people be left alone to work without interruption - how contrarian.
It just sucks if you have incompetent management that doesn’t allow or implement such things.
I'd prefer to reduce meetings as much as the next guy but when I am in one, I take notes. Detailed notes. It helps make sense of what's being said and gives me a deeper understanding. I park the notes when done and can refresh my memory if I need a follow up.
The fact that I thought and wrote the notes is a very important part of this. Sure, an AI transcript might be useful to refer to but writing things down as the meeting goes is a great way to aid understanding.
> [EU regulations] gives people a degree of control over their personal data, including the right to ask for it to be deleted.
The reason I think all-party consent laws are bad is the same reason I find the above sentence silly: If you say something out loud that is no longer your exclusive “data.” If you want to keep it secret either don’t say it, or say it under NDA or in a customary fashion such as telling a reporter off the record.
If you speak to me, I ought to have the right to memorialize it however I see fit (including note-taking with pencil, recording, and AI transcription) unless you and I agree otherwise (I do believe one should be bound to honor those commitments though).
Note: I live in an all-party consent state so I don’t record anything in actuality. But one should be free to — especially when dealing with corporate entities, who all force this recording unilaterally on everyone as a condition of ever speaking to them!
Finally, the meetings that should have been emails are being turned into emails for the organizers of such meetings. The only meetings that will survive are those where genuine discussion is warranted. If it’s simply an “all hands” address to your reports, it can be transcribed, summarized, and read in a fraction of the time.
These comments are creating exactly the feeling that troubled me about in-person engineering meetings and I still can't quite express it. It's like we all know we don't want to discuss this topic and can't help but do so. I get the same feeling whenever I see a bot introduce itself and then someone immediately replies "read stop". It's pretty close to a mixture of regret and disappointment.
I completely understand sending a note taker to a bloated meeting where no participation is really expected of you anyways, but the anecdotes about AIs being sent to small meetings (even a 2 person interview the reporter scheduled for this very article!) in your stead is crazy.
Personally I don't mind a meeting that's either:
1) Informal, and short with up to 3ish close coworkers (as long as it doesn't start by someone sending the dreaded "hey, can you jump on a call?" message with no other context)
2) Published agenda well ahead of time, only relevant people are invited, some level of participation is required from all attendees, people are actually paying attention, and maybe most critically it's _well facilated_. Nothing more draining than meeting going off-topic and over-time because the facilitator doesn't feel comfortable telling that one guy to shut up.
Considering that most meeting software have built-in call record and transcription features, it is less wasteful and less distracting to automatically send the artefacts to all participants.
Last year, after many years working remote, I joined a company with heavy in-office culture. I grumbled about all the commute, but now I am really really happy.
My take on this... a small meeting among close people can have big payoffs. Much of the payoff is fast transfer due to total communication (body language, casual, back and forth) and then that loses it's power as the meeting gets less intimate. The unexpected face to face conversations and the overall environment are what makes in-office work well. Big meetings lose much of that power. Zoom meetings lose much more of that power. AI note taking sessions... might as well not even bother. Just send docs that of course nobody will read. This is just cargo-culting.
Brutal truth: we invited AI into meetings for efficiency, and now we’re discovering just how much of us it captures. What hit me is how quickly “AI assistant” can become “silent witness.” If organizations don’t set clear guardrails, convenience turns into compliance liability. We need transparency protocols—who sees what, why, and when.
I use AI to take meeting notes too, and it really makes things easier. I can focus more on listening. But sometimes it changes the vibe a bit, like we’re all just talking to a bunch of bots. Now I only use it when I’m leading the meeting, and I always ask if others are okay with it. The tool is helpful, but real human connection still matters.
On the other hand, I have great difficulty following who speaks what during an online meeting. I think that most people speech arent clearly transmitted, well as a justification looking the live caption, it also contains a lot of mistake
I use live captions for this a lot and find that it's pretty accurate. It's helpful if someone says something that I don't catch and I can just scroll up the captions to make sure I understand.
Also helps if someone tries to interrupts and the live caption can notate who was the breaker so I can call on them without a dumb-sounding "uh who was that?"
I'm going to buck the trend I see in this thread and say that the AI notetaker we've used has been helpful. After the meeting it sends a list of action items and meeting highlights that links to the timestamp in the meeting where we were talking about it in case we need to refer back. I've found it nice to have.
At my last company my manager never knew how to end a meeting. After we finished the topic of discussion he would start to ramble and ask people about their day, tell bad jokes, it was horrible. You could tell the guy was just desperate for social interaction and his subordinates were the only social interaction he had.
These apps are cancer. Otter.ai for example, by default, will scrape the call's contacts, and email every single one, saying they can access the notes if they sign-up. A 300 person meeting, their spam bot sends out 300 emails. Totally captive audience, and the person who installed the notetaker is often none the wiser that it happened.
Even if just one person installs it, it resets the iteration and can begin again.
Wow looks like I'm only one who is happy not talking to bots at my job. I go to meetings to ask questions (maybe answer too). I guarantee if I don't care about the topic I won't read your AI notes email even harder than I won't attend or listen in the meeting. But in case of the meeting you could tell I didn't!
> He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The 10 others attending were note-taking apps powered by artificial intelligence that had joined to record, transcribe and summarize the meeting.
It’s occurred to me that scrum masters are not long for this world at all. It would only take one engineer to suck up their entire organization’s meetings and then train an AI scrum master on them. Surprised we haven’t seen a Y-combinator company do it yet.
I hope this finally ends meetings. Pretty much nothing ever needs to be a meeting. Everything can be decided async. Extroverts are the only ones demanding a meeting to hear themselves talk. I have yet to experience a single compelling remote meeting.
How can anyone be sure this story is at all true? Is it taken from an anecdotal story told to a WaPo reporter by a large investor in AI seeking to hype up the ability of AI to take good notes in a meeting, to create a marketing buzz around AI and draw in more investors? The naive credence given to this story in the comment section is probably not justified.
I haven't had an useful meeting in years. All the important collaboration and decision making has happened organically in text chat, which is great because it's all searchable and dated, and I do refer to that a lot. In fact they recently moved my main collaborator from another building into the next desk and we agreed to keep the work stuff in chat as much as possible so it isn't lost. So we chitchat about our kids but still type out our debate about the best version launch date.
Every meeting in person or via Zoom I have been in has been either an useless sales pitch, grandstanding by some manager, brown-nosing by some upstart or some other form of toxic socialization, scheming or conspiracy. I detest all those and avoid them, which is probably why I've become kind of an unpromotable pariah, which is ok, as a promotion would mean attending more of them.
https://archive.ph/ejC53
The problem is these meetings are so low information density even an AI summary is not worth my time. And it’s not some elitist mindset. It’s like the entire reason there are these regular meetings is to make some mid level person feel better. They like giving directions vocally because that authority is harder to question than if they wrote up a memo and all the receivers can poke holes in it. I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills.
> I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills.
That's not entirely it. Some people just won't say something unless put in a setting where they are explicity asked for it. I've had meetings where I ask for a status, and someone says they are stuck on X, and they've been stuck on X for two days.
And I'll ask why they didn't just ask for help. They weren't comfortable asking for help. They were only ok stating the problem when asked specifically for status.
So it also creates that environment were some people are more likely to share.
I predict that in "20 minutes in the future" we'll see the industry moving to AI based scrum-assistants with a scheduled daily trigger, that will reach out to each dev to have a check-in conversation and then automatically synthesize the input from everyone and update the project manager (possibly AI-based itself) with insight about how things are progressing and recommendations.
But you can share your daily status asynchronously as well.
This might not scale well to larger teams, but we simply write a short message in a dedicated channel each day. It contains a short status and a few bullet points to plan the next day.
Slack makes this conventient because you can write a top level message and then use the reply feature to add more details.
> But you can share your daily status asynchronously as well.
In practice, this is harder because people don't speak up unless prodded. And on Slack, I spend a lot of time and effort prodding people for that update, whereas a stand-up takes 15 minutes, tops.
Not attending stand-up is a lot more visible than silently ignoring an async update request on Slack.
As you said, async doesn’t go well with scale, and async comms is OK if statuses are all you’re gonna write there. But in meetings you get to have back-and-forth, and while you can also have that in async, you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. Which they might not do altogether.
Anyway, I’ve come to really dislike async comms. If something is being communicated to you over async, it’s something not important enough that you can ignore it, in many cases indefinitely. Meetings are still the best way to keep everyone in sync and it’s a structural strategy to keep everyone accountable for making progress at their jobs.
>async doesn’t go well with scale,
Sync is even worse at scale. I had the pleasure of attending standups in a 20-person team. It was a nightmare where I said two sentences and then wasted the next two hours of my life listening to things I either know or are unrelevant to me.
>you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read
Great, because skipping three pages of unimportant conversation is faster than skipping 30 minutes of banter between two extrovert UI developers as a backend specialist.
>structural strategy to keep everyone accountable
Sounds exactly like something mid level managers say to themselves. Structural synergy? Keeping people accountable? I just want to work, damnit.
> you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read.
What? Instead you are punishing everyone to sit on a meeting, hearing two people discuss something that could have been a dm. I get that some people prefer meetings but to me every meeting with more than 3 people is a massive waste of time
When you get to that point, those two people should take the discussion outside of the sync call. The purpose of a sync is to figure out whether your current work is on track and, if not, who and what is needed to fix that.
async scales better than sync in this context as on larger teams you might need a queue.
It's usually possible for the person running a small project to ask everyone for status and know what everyone's going to say in the meeting before the meeting.
Then the meeting is pointless. But not all projects allow for that.
> It's usually possible for the person running a small project to ask everyone for status
Perhaps, for efficiency, they could ask everyone simultaneously in parallel, or at least roughly around the same time?
To maximize creativity and opportunity, perhaps we could then figure out some way to share each person's status update with every other person on the team?
Are you intentionally describing having a Slack chat for a project and asking for status updates there?
You still don't need a meeting for that if everyone actually does it.
Why do you think a larger meeting is a remedy for this? Quite the opposite, if you can't get a personal status from a large group, doing the meeting is completely pointless because it demonstrate lack of preparation.
It's not. That's not what I meant or said. I said not all projects allow for getting status ahead of time.
This is a nice way of saying that some people just won't tell you what they're up to async, you have to wring information out of them synchronously. They're just bad at communicating.
On a well functioning team I can rely on people just reporting status themselves when something relevant happens and reaching out for help. But some people just don't do that, especially people from other teams, departments, etc.
I have employed a massive hack for the past two decades--whenever asked to do any random task or assist someone, and in particular where the asker is just lazy trying to get someone else to do their job, eagerly and pleasantly agree, but ask the requestor to write up a sentence or two describing said request and email it to you. It's such a small request that no one can't argue it, but so many people (lazy ones especially) are astonishingly bad at this and 90% of the time that request will never come. The next time you see the person, take the initiative and remind them about the email you never received and ask if they could send it. You've now turned the tables on the asker, they may even start to avoid you.
You are talking about juniors mixed with severe introvert persona. Most juniors in dev are a variant of that. Its part of seniority to overcome these self-inflicted mental barriers (reverse doesn't obviously work - an extroverted dev can still be as green as spring lawn, even if loaded with yet-undeserved confidence).
If you need to babysit bunch of juniors thats fine, but it should be clear from one's role in team/project that this needs to be a continuous effort (at least till they grok how to step up, but it takes years if at all for some).
I also used to think that work meetings are low information density.
Then I attended our first parent-teacher conference at kindergarten. It was incredible: 2.5 hours of discussions and ridiculous complaints ("why does my child has to put on splash pants on rainy autumn days, putting them on is just such an ordeal!!"), and not a single bit of relevant information was transmitted. Not a single decision was made. I went home in utter disbelief.
Currently, our parents' council is trying to organize a party for the children who will be going to school after summer. What should've been a TODO list where parents can write down what food they will bring and who will help with what escalated into 2 evenings of discussions, a Skype meeting, and a Whatsapp group where several fractions of parents have been fighting over whether T-Shirts should be printed to celebrate the end of kindergarten for over a week now.
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 to management and certainly not climb the management hierarchy if you do not at least implicitly feel this.
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.
This is why people focussed on 'doing the actual work' hate meetings, while carreer focussed people love them.
Now I have exaggerated all the above, but only to make the point more clear. As always it is not black and white.
And sometimes, it is worse. There are realy situations with managers that schedule meetings and calls because they are simply bored at work. These are the types that when the step into the car to go to a meeting, will always have to get on the phone with some rapportee to have a quick 'update' that might just last the lenght of the drive.
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.
There's this huge difference in quality between execs who work in writing and execs who NEVER write _anything_ down, which is surprisingly common. In my experience it correlates closely with toxic behaviour and I don't know why it's common for senior management in many orgs to allow people to operate in this style.
Most modern companies drift toward the non-written style (effectively managing by the seat of the pants) because it has the appearance of being more effective, even when it is in fact the opposite. Business myth makes the guy who is always having meetings to appear more dynamic and effective, and is consequently rewarded by upper management.
Ye there are multiple such fallacies. E.g. making brittle systems and later save the day makes you seem competent and important.
Also the opposite effect, where the most productive and important engineers seem to cause most problems and seem incompetent.
As parent already hinted at, writing down stuff makes you vulnerable to criticism. Just stay vague, and you have a lot of wiggle room left...
An exec writing down minutes can also come back to bite them in the ass if there's a lawsuit or criminal investigation. Email can have retention policies. That's harder to enforce with paper, especially when it's someone's personal notes.
Ya, it quite simply boils down to Plausible deniability.
Totally agree with this. Took me a while to realise my manager who never writes anything down was doing it on purpose.
> because that authority is harder to question
It's not even that, they do the meeting to appear personally leading something. Modern companies confuse leading meetings with true leadership, because hardly anyone knows how to do the later. It is a fast, effective way to give an appearance of leadership and say they're doing something, while doing close to nothing.
> They like giving directions vocally because that authority is harder to question than if they wrote up a memo
Authority is also much harder to deliver in an asynchronous format. If someone can just _not read_ the memo, it functionally has no power. The risk isn't that your memo might be questioned, it's that your memo might never be read.
I have to disagree since I can also just not listen/pay any attention to what is vocally delivered in the meeting, which I find to be an abhorrent waste of my time in the first place. If the directive is in writing such as an email I (or the person who issued it) can't point to that and say "you did not read this" which shifts the onus entirely on the person receiving the directive.
About a year ago, I nearly quit my job over this, going so far as to put my two weeks notice in as a way to hold a gun to their head, repeating my frequent request that all directives handed down from on high _must_ be in writing if they are expected to be followed. My company had (still does, to some degree, but we are still working on it) a cancerous culture of he said/she said that was being abused to avoid any accountability from upper management, which was both impeding the actual work being done as well as demoralizing to th workers. We even ended up losing some talent over it before I used my own value and authority to put my foot down, making me wish I'd done it sooner.
Verbal directives only stroke the ego of the person delivering them and their meaning either evaporates or gets twisted as soon as everyone walks out of that conference room or logs off that video call. If the person issuing them is not willing to have their directives questioned when they are in writing, then they should not hold the position they do. It's not about questioning someone's authority, it's about ensuring the directive makes sense with the work being done and adds value or guidance to the existing processes. Screw the fragile ego nonsense.
Fair point in your case, but my experience across companies and industries is that people just don't read. It's true in any customer facing experience where tutorials etc are routinely unread and ignored, it's true for execs who are always short on time and want the exec summary in order no to read a whole memo (however misguided this may be in certain instances), it's true for seasoned professionals who prioritize and decide to ignore certain requests until they are clear enough / repeated enough, the list goes on.
Even people getting @mentionned on slack or in emails seem to find it acceptable to say routinely they didn't see/read whatever it was they were specifically asked to look at.
> It’s like the entire reason there are these regular meetings is to make some mid level person feel better.
Higher ups like meetings too, everyone likes feeling better about themselves by showing status. Perhaps A.I will be able to relieve us of that eventually ...
> I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills
by people with low verbal IQ
sigh You have engineers that read memos? Must be nice.
That's on them, though.
But if you do not hold the engineers accountable for reading the memo, that's on you (or whomever has the authority to do that). This is why having things in writing is important and verbal directives have about as much value as a fart in the wind.
COVID opened a whole new field of "work" for a particular group of people. Previously, you had to have some task and the necessary skills to be occupied at work. Now, you can fill a whole workday with meetings, giving the false sense that you actually do stuff. Its a not-so secret cult. At least that is how I observe it currently.
Trust me, the 80% meeting workday became prevalent loooooong before the 2020s.
I trust you thats the case for your environment. Where I work, useless meetings started to explode March 2020, and never went away.
Were you born in 1997? If so, it’s possible you just weren’t senior enough to see the 80% meeting workday prior to COVID.
Weird guess. No, you're off by 18 years. However, I am not working in a software shop.
> Weird guess.
The guess probably stems from the number in your user name: 97.
Ahh, right! That is actually a reference to Terminator... 29, August 1997...
Isn't this just called "being a Product Owner"? I've never seen those people do anything but sit in meetings.
I don't know about anyone else, but contrary to my general disdain for meetings* I have found product owners/process managers to be useful in the regard of having one central person to funnel things through on a particular project. The bottleneck also creates a nice buffer of accountability in both directions and they typically offer either new or refined SOPs after solving the same problems over and over again. Plus, they can sit in on the meeting while I go do something useful.
I may just have been lucky with the few I've had to work with though, so your mileage may vary.
*or as the song says, a little less conversation, a little more action please
[dead]
Can double confirm.
I'm 51, have been working in software my whole professional career, this isn't something that started with COVID.
The massive increase in tech hiring might have made more of these people exist in absolute terms, but they have always existed.
"These meetings?" Which ones, exactly?
The last sentence is it - most people can't communicate much less write well, hell, I don't write well, but I hope my ideas are at least clearly communicated.
When you can't write well, you "resort" to using a lot of body language and facial nuances in face-to-face communication, which works acceptably. Unfortunately, this doesn't translate well on zoom.
This "writing well" as a form of good communication is needed, but while in school, those same people who cannot write well also likely were complaining about learning how to write essays and such. Over time, this sort of lack of learning has resulted in poor written communication into adulthood i reckon.
And with the advent of LLM and all these chatGPT-esque bots writing for them, esp. in school, the level of literacy skill is only going to continue to drop!
In the past, companies had people specialized in translating conversations into written documents: secretaries. And executives took seriously the task of reading these documents. All this seems to be gone.
In software, you have the privilege of writing succinctly to communicate facts. In every other industry, the message needs to be packaged with courtesies like a greeting, cushioned delivery, and salutations. It’s a big waste of time and people stop reading your messages. But don’t put a bow on it and you get labeled as an asshole. At least the AI note taker can make me sound more palatable.
I wish I had that privilege. I've had a manager make a paragraph-long question about if I had any training courses that I'd want to take, and when I answered with a "No", I got chewed out for not being communicative or something.
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Personally I don't mind spending several hours solving a problem over "async communication" if that means I'm free to work on other stuff while the other party is formulating a response. Then I also get the benefit of having something in their writing to refer back to.
The kind of person who takes hours to explain something in written form are unlikely to explain it in 3 minutes in person. More likely, they set up a meeting where they waffle on about an issue, expecting the receiving end to distill some valuable information from their ramblings, and then inevitably end up complaining when the solution doesn't match their expectations (which of course were never formalized anywhere).
Taking time to develop cogent responses is the opposite of poor communication skills
I'm of the opinion that those who want "it" now are short-sighted and impulsive.
I'm inclined to believe you're closer to management than actual execution: when you say "resolved" I hear "owned".
Nobody is complaining about 3 minute meetings... Try 30+
> Issues that can be resolved in a three minute meeting
Why is every meeting 1h+ then?
I bet there are a bunch of people in upper management who hear about this phenomenon and think that employees are skipping meetings to slack off (appearing to do work but they're actually playing Mario Kart).
In reality, it's more likely that they're being judged on their attendance of BS meetings, but if they attend the BS meetings, they won't be able to make the BS deadlines they're responsible for hitting.
So they're likely buying themselves time to do the actually important work, while still attempting to meet unrealistic expectations around meeting attendance.
Having had been on both sides of this coin, I agree a lot of managers mis-manage meetings.
But then there's those engineers who don't show up to meetings and then a month later come to you with a
"I don't know how we're deciding on some of these critical product features"
and I don't know how to tell them its because they skipped some meetings where they could've been part of that discussion.
Even if the final nod of agreement happens in real time the actual decision making process for critical product features should involve planning, thinking, research, etc. There should be a strong paper trail such that everyone knows what the decision is going to be prior to the "everyone gets together and declares this is how things are going to be" step.
If them missing some meetings means they're in the dark as to how those features were decided on then I can't see that as a defence of attending every meeting so much as a statement of BS meetings being so predominant in the company that all decisions are made through a BS process.
This might not be quite what the previous poster meant, but in my experience it's often not that the developer missed a meeting and now doesn't know some critical piece of information. Rather, it's often that the developer has some knowledge about the code that changes how something should be implemented. Because they weren't at the meeting, nobody else knew about this, and it's only later, when the developer sits down to write the code, that everyone finds out.
In this case, there's nothing to document from the meeting because the information wasn't shared in the first place. The information could only have been shared if the developer had been in the meeting.
(FWIW, I've rarely seen this from a developer not being in a meeting entirely, but I've seen it a few times where a developer has treated the meeting as a "read-only" event, i.e. expected that other people provide all the requirements and not used their own expertise or experience of the code to push back on decisions.)
The point in the parent comment still stands. There should be a paper trail so that the developer would have to confront the need to add such a detail. If the decision was made in the meeting alone, then it was lost in time as not all developers can be expected to be in every meeting.
I realize introverts don't work that way, I know, I am one. But I've had some of the most brilliant ideas come through purely on a discussion nay sometimes an emotionally charged argument.
Important decisions are almost never 2+2=4, if they were, they wouldn't be important and yes you wouldn't need a meeting (like I admitted, there's definitely a lot of unimportant meetings).
But important decisions are almost always an exercise in coaxing, cajoling and persuasion, which is just extremely low fidelity on paper.
Most engineers will look at their team leads and say "I don't believe in this strategy on paper", and all their team leads can say is "I was at the meeting. You had to be there"
I'm an introvert, too. I have no troubles participating in, or leading, or even fighting in group activities. Does it exhaust me? Yes, it does. I literally feel physical pain if I have to stay in company for more than maybe an hour. But value is created through interaction, not some process, paper stacks, or a lone wolf hiding in the closet, so I learned a long time ago how to communicate effectively, give and take feedback, organize tight meetings, and facilitate decision making.
I'm actually a bit tired of introverts hiding behind their disposition. You can do something about it, and it's more than complaining.
EDIT: Sorry, that was more rantish than I wanted. But I'll leave it here anyway.
Most people in meetings don’t type very fast, and find it easier to talk than to write.
This means that prior to AI transcription/summary bots, there wasn’t much written documentation about the decisions and conclusions from meetings. Now hopefully that will change.
I wasn't so much saying that there should be plenty of documentation generated during a meeting as saying that there should be plenty of documentation prior to the meeting. That the meeting is based on.
100% this. As some who’s regularly derided by his colleagues for “hating meetings”: I don’t “keep meetings to a minimum”, I “keep meetings to a benefit”.
If I’ve called a meeting it’s because there’s a benefit to the instant vocal communication. If you’re not there, you’ve not attended the meeting, no matter which tools you use to record, transcribe or translate.
Conversely, if I thought I didn’t need to be in a meeting, then I wouldn’t send a tool to gather stuff for me to then just ignore the tool output - because I don’t need it.
These tools are a sign of cultural rot from both participants and the fact people are even making them shows deep flaws in how we communicate in the modern workplace.
No matter how they're used, AI companies will create the artificial need for every company and essentially every worker to use these tools, even if they're not needed.
I had an engineer once show up to the re-scheduled "lets get the engineers ideas meeting before the yearly plan ships" meeting that we scheduled so they could be there who then proceeded to spent 15 minutes complaining how they didn't get any input before finally asking what the meeting was for, and finding out they had 45 minutes remaining to give feedback (they had skipped the meeting the previous day, and I wanted to make sure they gave their impact). (I tried to interject earlier but was asked "please let me talk" so I did).
It is helpful to communicate in advance what is the specific agenda of each meeting, so that people can make an informed decision on whether to attend.
Also, it may be helpful to have the meeting organizer send meeting notes after every meeting, including action items assigned to specific people. The notes don't need to be extensive, but there better be an executive summary of what decisions were made, if any, and any unexpected roadblocks that were found.
That's how things were done at one of the mega corps where I was employed and it worked great.
> But then there's those engineers who don't show up to meetings and then a month later come to you with a
>"I don't know how we're deciding on some of these critical product features"
You write up meeting notes, tasks, etc right?
If you've got engineers who are unaware of functionality because of a verbal meeting being missed you've got deeper problems to address.
Not OP but yes and those meeting notes are turned into tasks with callbacks to the meeting they came from. Yet we still get the “where do these priorities come from” questions.
You’re not asking for meeting notes you’re asking for a transcription which has the same problem as an email - people don’t read rhem
> and I don't know how to tell them its because they skipped some meetings where they could've been part of that discussion.
That there was a meeting where that decision was made between 55 minutes of crud doesn’t really mean anything to me though. I’m not wasting an hour of my day every day on the off chance today’s meeting will contain anything of importance.
Then just implement it I guess
Just tell ‘em that!
We had an internal RFC comment/discussion meeting on a proposed engineering standard. In that exact meeting, a dev flipped out and expressed exasperation that they weren’t asked to comment on the proposal. In the exact meeting that was one in a series of opportunities to comment on the proposal…
Yes, this is pretty universal I think. Some people think software engineering in a team is writing code as much as possible, and doing anything else is bad.
Did they get to read the RFC before the meeting? If they had access but didn’t use it, then this is out of line. But if they only got the RFC during the meeting when they were asked to comment, then flipping out is overboard but the feeling is understandable.
I'd tell them directly.. "You were invited to the meeting on 2025-MM-DD to discuss this, but you did not show up, nor did you follow up with organizers later. Sorry, you've missed your opportunity to comment"
Seems direct and uncontroversial, and IMHO most people react well at this.
but i didnt get invited to the meeting in the first place! and i dont think my management chain was either!
That's the thing, these meetings are B.S. Engineers need a task, time to think, and write about the solution and its cost. Period. Talking in a room full of people who love to hear their own voices and love to stroke their egos does not actually help engineers do their job. When engineers need to communicate, they communicate with their colleagues. There are tools for such communications that do not require talking and immediate responses. Being reactive (which is what meetings enforce you to do) costs more, as reactive and forced responses will be far more technically unsound.
Feature development is rarely so cut and dry that you can hand a developer a task and let them run with it.
To get there, you need a confluence of context and expertise from several domains:
- what problem needs to be solved (user story)
- what options are available (interaction design, technical capabilities)
- what the cost of implementing each option is, and the opportunity cost of each level of implementation / each option (technical capability, resource management, sales, user research)
- managing group consensus on the path forward (communication to technical and non-technical audiences)
- break down of any large chunks of work into smaller tasks that can be done and planning the work to be done in series or parallel (resource management, technical capabilities)
Finally, after all of that, you have a task (or several) that can be handed off.
There's really no way to get here without at least some thought into the implementation details, as the business can't make the decision on which options without knowing rough timelines.
Excellent, this all can be written, thought over and discussed in written form. I do not see how this all requires a meeting.
> Engineers need a task, time to think, and write about the solution and its cost. Period. Talking in a room full of people who love to hear their own voices and love to stroke their egos does not actually help engineers do their job. When engineers need to communicate, they communicate with their colleagues.
Seems like when you say "engineers", you mean "people with my exact personality"
You might be right.
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> while still attempting to meet unrealistic expectations around meeting attendance
I've routinely seen people attending a meeting from the office on Zoom camera, all gathered in a single big conference room, all looking and typing on their laptops for the entirety of the meeting, saying something maybe once or twice. I suppose they were simply working on their assigned tasks, listening to others in the background. How effective is that - I don't know.
These days I don't care. I'm 100% "at work" when I'm in the office, so whatever. I just pull up my phone and plan my next vacation trip or whatever. When I'm remotely I take my laptop to the kitchen and start preparing stuff for dinner. Life is too short for this mess.
Many meetings I've been on only require my attention for a small part. So I've been doing my work and listening in background; once they start talking about part I care about I stop my work and start to actually participate.
> I suppose they were simply working on their assigned tasks, listening to others in the background. How effective is that - I don't know.
If I’m doing that, I’m taking notes on the meeting. As long as the agenda items are at all relevant.
> bet there are a bunch of people in upper management who hear about this phenomenon and think that employees are skipping meetings to slack off
Everyone I know in senior leadership sees this as a plus. It’s known that middle managers waste time with performative meetings. Their value add is just seen to outweigh that drag. So if they can perform and employees can work, that’s sort of a win-win for shareholders.
I skip meetings in order to play Mario Kart. Why? Two reasons:
1. My company offers no promotion path. I asked for a raise, and my manager gave me a project that is impossible to complete. Recently he admitted that the project is indeed impossible, but the upper management expected him to spend a year trying anyway.
2. I am often given very vague task descriptions, and when I come up with a solution, we keep having meetings until my solution is remolded into whatever my manager wants but didn't say explicitly.
It's very difficult to stay motivated in such an environment, but I'm afraid to change jobs because what if I end up with a similar manager except I'll be expected to actually attend the meetings instead of playing Mario Kart.
These are the same executives/managers who lost their minds at the idea of butts not being in the physical seats at the office, so yeah.
> it's more likely that they're being judged on their attendance of BS meetings
Some middle manager types in my company track emoji reactions to their messages in slack. I got written up for it, no joke. That was easy to automate though.
That’s next level.
I would be updating my resume and talking to old colleagues. What a load of BS you have to deal with, man.
In my experience, at least, it's because a lot of "meetings" aren't actually meetings, they're presentations that are actually better consumed async after the fact, but historical precedent demands that everyone be invited to attend the live taping and emote and cheer politely.
At my previous company, one I started, I would try to organise a meeting with only the most essential people and then people would forward the invite as people would be upset they were not invited (normally because it is a prelim meeting to a wider meeting), the meeting would go from 4 people to 15, people would attend the meeting find it was irrelevant to them or too early to them, which is why they were not invited in the first place, and then complain about too many meetings. Ugh.
This is my experience too. My meetings tend to be presentations of results. I invite the bare minimum of people who are likely to be interested, and like you, end up with a full meeting room plus others connecting online, often all over the world.
I figure, they're consenting adults, they're responsible for managing their time.
A lot of mine at the time were workshops. I find workshops work best when there is an agenda and small teams, then you present to the wider group when ideas are more developed. A lot of the time, when additional people attended they would be seeing too early of a concept or idea and too many people would debate little details. I believe the best productivity is in small teams.
It's not just historical precedent, it's about creating common knowledge that everybody has received the relevant information
It is historical precedent. Having everyone sit slackjawed through twenty minutes of droning is no more proof that they received the relevant information than emailing them would be - that’s why schools have exams and other assessment on the knowledge they intend to impart.
I'm sympathetic to this knowing how few people actually read their emails (and slacks etc.). If you've ever sent out a 30 second survey to your coworkers, you know what I'm talking about. But I also know people don't really pay attention in these meetings either.
I feel async communication could work this way with the right cultural hygiene (e.g. consistent labeling, brevity, novelty, and relevancy), and some places I've worked were better about this than others, but they all tend to suffer from tragedy of the commons. If anyone works somewhere where you and all your coworkers actually count on each other to read emails, please tell me where!
The reason people don't read email is that companies have poisoned their communication channels. If an important email is right beside a practically junk message, it will be lost.
An interesting aspect of this: Where I work, an email subject line including "important" or "urgent" is a 99% indication for junk...
So an email? You could not read the email, but I can just as easily not pay attention.
You have a way better chance of getting people to pay attention to a few paragraph email than that same information stretched to fill an hour.
However, it's a lot more socially acceptable to say "I missed the email" than "I sat there for 30min while you were talking but didn't actually listen"...
I would have agreed, but the reporter shares multiple anecdotes where that's not the case. Most crazily, the person she was meant to be interviewing sent an AI note taker in his place, very much not a presentation and she just sat alone with the AI until it became clear he was a no-show. I don't get the thought process there, just cancel the interview if you're not going to show up.
In general I think people need to be more comfortable both calling out useless meetings, and calling out people who are making meetings useless by not being engaged or "multi-tasking" (a.k.a. not paying attention). When I facilitate meetings if I see people aren't paying attention or it's very low engagement, I call it out and ask honestly if people think the meeting is worth their time. The first time people hear that they think I'm just being passive-aggressive, but colleagues who know me well know they can be honest and if the meeting isn't valuable we can stop and in the future we'll either have a better agenda/facilitation, do it async, or not do it at all. Even if the meeting would have value if people were engaged, if I fail to get people's attention then it becomes useless and I would rather not waste my or anyone else's time.
As well as those standups which are just micro-presentations where each person talks in turn about their respective card but there's no discussion. The teams that moved to async standups where they just post status updates in Slack and amigo only when needed seem happier.
Text-only stand-ups also have a tendency to devolve into just posting text into the void than nobody reads, so you may as well move to the even simpler "I need to discuss" flags which reduces communication even more. But then some people don't like that.
I am afraid there's no perfect solution, and it just boils down to people's preferences and the skills of people involved. And the chemistry between them.
I've been in teams which flip flopped over time between "communication worsened" and "wasting everyone's time". Being remote for 15+ years I enjoy the "convivial" side of stand-ups but I hate when they devolve into rote status reports.
The worst part about the standup ritual is that no one talks outside standups.
With async text communication channels you'll post when an issue shows up. With the standups you'll wait until the next standup and maybe forget the details until then, or forget about the issue entirely and that will lead to technical debt.
> when an issue shows up
Advanced usage: post proactively before you reach the task/issue. This way people have time to comment on it and when you do get to it it's been clear what to do for 1-2 days.
> With async text communication channels you'll post when an issue shows up
You clearly work with excellent teams who don’t need this then. My experience is that a large number of people, even competent people will not post when an issue shows up and will wait for however long until an update is asked of them and then say they couldn’t do it because they’re blocked.
I might be lucky. Or I might be avoiding large organizations on purpose. Most of the time at least.
I recently became an active user of some AI note-taking tools, and I've noticed that they are really great. As long as I set up the account, they send a robot to the meeting and write down almost everything, especially when there are people from different backgrounds and ACCENTS! God, they saved my life a thousand times, I would say. And reading summaries or even transcripts are so much more efficient than attending the meeting in person.
I feel this is a symptom of poor meetings, where they are used for information exchange (which I think should come before the meeting) instead of collaboration and problem solving. You could save your time and a bunch of AI-generated notes you'll never read with the simple rule of "no agenda, no attenda". Remote has allowed us to adopt meeting policies that would never exist in-person: giant, long, back-to-back sessions with no purpose, plan or opportunity to pee.
> Remote has allowed us to adopt meeting policies that would never exist in-person: giant, long, back-to-back sessions with no purpose, plan or opportunity to pee.
I'm genuinely confused by this. Those sort of meetings have existed in the entire 20-something years I've been working corporate jobs.
> no agenda, no attenda
I've been using this mentality for the last three years. Some responds with hostility and some see the benefits, but most are just indifferent to it sadly.
I've also been observing people just throw in a short sentence or some AI generated shit list which is then not followed during the meeting.
But those who take this seriously usually have pretty darn good meetings (e.g not book the full hour, force people to stay on topic, shares notes after the meeting etc)
I like my meeting where we don’t have a fixed agenda but anyone can bring something up. If there’s nothing, we just end the meeting.
What do you do if you skip such a meeting and a decision you don't like but that you can't weigh in on anymore is taken there?
If it's essential that I attend for such a meeting, the organizer usually reach out.
If not. Then I'll have to either live with the decision or at least give feedback on it.
Nothing is final until you build it (from a developer point of view).
That’s where you have stakeholders within a company and you require sign-off for decisions that affect them.
Maybe “make a decision about X” should be on the agenda? I bet he’d show up in that case, if he cared about X.
In this context, I don't see an incentive for meeting organizer to create an agenda. They don't care at all about op's opinion about X.
Yes, but that's too late now. If everybody else did show up and discussed X, it's only going to look bad for you.
Lol I've seen this happen, people feeling they're too important to attend meetings and then complaining when something happens in them.
Skipping meetings because they aren't organized the way you like is pretty passive aggressive. I agree with all the criticism about poorly organized meetings, but I think the non prima Donna thing to do is push back on their existence or format, not just skip them. That's part of why a job is a job.
It's "the boy who called important meeting" - if the first 9 meetings in a series provided zero value, you shouldn't be surprised that someone refuses to attend #10.
It's not about being a prima Donna. It's about business value. Too many meetings over the years should either be better planned, not taken place at all or could have been an email/chat message.
Business value first
You’re both in agreement that most meetings are unnecessary and that it would be better if meetings had a set agenda.
But the other poster was saying it’s prima donna behavior to skip a meeting without asking the organizer if they can add an agenda first.
Meetings with an agenda are generally better, but that doesn't mean meetings without one can't have any business value. If you skip it, you make sure you at least don't contribute to anything decided in it.
How do you deal with daily standups? or 3x a week standups?
> Remote has allowed us to adopt meeting policies that would never exist in-person: giant, long, back-to-back sessions with no purpose, plan or opportunity to pee.
This is absolutely not new and was as bad if not worse before remote work.
> "no agenda, no attenda"
I love this phrasing of the principle.
>Remote has allowed us to adopt meeting policies that would never exist in-person: giant, long, back-to-back sessions with no purpose, plan or opportunity to pee.
Oh, if only that had been true, but pointless, aimless meetings have been a plague forever. Maybe less so the no-peeing.
But "no agenda, no attenda" only works if you're in a position to refuse. Often attending meetings is seen as part of the job, either formally or in the managers' eyes, so ignoring them without good reason isn't allowed without repercussions.
After working for a company where every meeting had a clear agenda and meeting notes with action items were sent afterwards, I would never want to work in a place that didn't follow the same pattern.
It's not a new problem. In a previous job long before remote, we had a 1.5 hour long biweekly meeting named "Team Meeting". No agenda, no goals, never went less than the full alloted time.
> opportunity to pee
Social pressure is still a thing for some unfortunately. Or maybe memories from school creep in. Just go for a pee.
If I have back-to-back meetings, I'll leave a few minutes early (with apologies) and also apologise to the next meeting if I'm late. If anyone calls me out, I'll apologetically claim "biological imperative". If they don't understand, I tell them that my bowels wait for no one. That is enough to get everyone to move on. No one wants to talk about someone else's bowels.
“Time for a bio break.” I’ve heard that often.
Sometimes, when I need to pee, I say "I need to pee". I find this complex, advanced strategy works pretty well.
In my opinion, sending an AI note taker to a meeting basically means that for the attendee, a recap email written by the meeting organizer would be enough - except that in my experience at least, most meeting organizers aren't writing these.
Best would be the meeting organizers to leverage their AI attendee to write a draft meeting recap and sending it out after review.
What a nightmare. First a week full of useless undefined meetings, largely so that everyone can cover their asses, and now most don’t even bother turning up because they can automate covering their asses. I can see the prompt now… “let me know if there is something that affects me or which I need to know or take action on in order to cover my ass”.
I’m pretty strict. Meetings are for decisions and only parties to the decision are invited and attend. The agenda and decision required is circulated beforehand. Only the time to make the decision is scheduled. Need 10 minutes? Then the meeting is 10 minutes.
Catch-ups, get-togethers, presentations, status updates, and brainstorming sessions are labelled as such explicitly and are treated differently. The event and attendance needs to be justified.
Such a system works quite well. Perhaps worth mentioning that I also refuse to be CC’d on emails that do not require a response, just as I do not CC anyone if no response is required. I also require that people be left alone to work without interruption - how contrarian.
It just sucks if you have incompetent management that doesn’t allow or implement such things.
If anyone is interested in running their own meeting bot (doubtful aha), check out our open source repositories: https://github.com/Meeting-Baas
Also we provide on-prem installation so meeting data doesn't leave your company :))
I'd prefer to reduce meetings as much as the next guy but when I am in one, I take notes. Detailed notes. It helps make sense of what's being said and gives me a deeper understanding. I park the notes when done and can refresh my memory if I need a follow up.
The fact that I thought and wrote the notes is a very important part of this. Sure, an AI transcript might be useful to refer to but writing things down as the meeting goes is a great way to aid understanding.
> [EU regulations] gives people a degree of control over their personal data, including the right to ask for it to be deleted.
The reason I think all-party consent laws are bad is the same reason I find the above sentence silly: If you say something out loud that is no longer your exclusive “data.” If you want to keep it secret either don’t say it, or say it under NDA or in a customary fashion such as telling a reporter off the record.
If you speak to me, I ought to have the right to memorialize it however I see fit (including note-taking with pencil, recording, and AI transcription) unless you and I agree otherwise (I do believe one should be bound to honor those commitments though).
Note: I live in an all-party consent state so I don’t record anything in actuality. But one should be free to — especially when dealing with corporate entities, who all force this recording unilaterally on everyone as a condition of ever speaking to them!
Finally, the meetings that should have been emails are being turned into emails for the organizers of such meetings. The only meetings that will survive are those where genuine discussion is warranted. If it’s simply an “all hands” address to your reports, it can be transcribed, summarized, and read in a fraction of the time.
These comments are creating exactly the feeling that troubled me about in-person engineering meetings and I still can't quite express it. It's like we all know we don't want to discuss this topic and can't help but do so. I get the same feeling whenever I see a bot introduce itself and then someone immediately replies "read stop". It's pretty close to a mixture of regret and disappointment.
I completely understand sending a note taker to a bloated meeting where no participation is really expected of you anyways, but the anecdotes about AIs being sent to small meetings (even a 2 person interview the reporter scheduled for this very article!) in your stead is crazy.
Personally I don't mind a meeting that's either:
1) Informal, and short with up to 3ish close coworkers (as long as it doesn't start by someone sending the dreaded "hey, can you jump on a call?" message with no other context)
2) Published agenda well ahead of time, only relevant people are invited, some level of participation is required from all attendees, people are actually paying attention, and maybe most critically it's _well facilated_. Nothing more draining than meeting going off-topic and over-time because the facilitator doesn't feel comfortable telling that one guy to shut up.
Reminds me of this scene from Real Genius: https://youtu.be/wB1X4o-MV6o
Yeah I thought of that scene too. But for some reason I thought it was from "Back to School"
Same, we're so close to the meeting organizer to be AI slop next.
Considering that most meeting software have built-in call record and transcription features, it is less wasteful and less distracting to automatically send the artefacts to all participants.
You don't even need AI. Just a bot that waits until the end of the meeting and then says, "Nothing from me. Thanks everyone."
Why wait until the end? Jus have it wait for the first three second lull after everyone joins.
Last year, after many years working remote, I joined a company with heavy in-office culture. I grumbled about all the commute, but now I am really really happy.
This is a complete non-issue if you use meetings to make gather feedback and make decisions. Send notes on the decision in an email after the meeting.
If you use meetings for something useful, then AI notes won’t be of any value anyway.
My take on this... a small meeting among close people can have big payoffs. Much of the payoff is fast transfer due to total communication (body language, casual, back and forth) and then that loses it's power as the meeting gets less intimate. The unexpected face to face conversations and the overall environment are what makes in-office work well. Big meetings lose much of that power. Zoom meetings lose much more of that power. AI note taking sessions... might as well not even bother. Just send docs that of course nobody will read. This is just cargo-culting.
I've always struggled with note keeping while actively absorbing information. Unfortunately, it is either/or for my brain.
I think with new crop of tools the product of my dreams, a vision-audio notekeeping app, will be possible.
Brutal truth: we invited AI into meetings for efficiency, and now we’re discovering just how much of us it captures. What hit me is how quickly “AI assistant” can become “silent witness.” If organizations don’t set clear guardrails, convenience turns into compliance liability. We need transparency protocols—who sees what, why, and when.
When the Zoom CEO gave that outlandish interview to TheVerge about the future of Zoom being agents attending meetings for you…
Naively assuming that everyone wouldn’t just have their agent attend all of their meetings. Turning Zoom into a 5 second diff over an api.
I was recently in a 1:1 meeting where the person I met with had 3 separate AI note takers join. What in tarnation?!?
which one gave the best results? can you share?
Not sure, they used them and I didn’t ask for any. I still take my notes manually.
I use AI to take meeting notes too, and it really makes things easier. I can focus more on listening. But sometimes it changes the vibe a bit, like we’re all just talking to a bunch of bots. Now I only use it when I’m leading the meeting, and I always ask if others are okay with it. The tool is helpful, but real human connection still matters.
I am average joe. But maybe if we can teach only AI to take notes from defined person only? saves times right?
So how long until the first meeting were all the attendees are AI and the presenter is also AI?
This will probably become commonplace for routine interactions between corporations that don’t involve sales.
Nothing says "this meeting should have been an email" like programmatically reducing it to plain text.
On the other hand, I have great difficulty following who speaks what during an online meeting. I think that most people speech arent clearly transmitted, well as a justification looking the live caption, it also contains a lot of mistake
I use live captions for this a lot and find that it's pretty accurate. It's helpful if someone says something that I don't catch and I can just scroll up the captions to make sure I understand.
Also helps if someone tries to interrupts and the live caption can notate who was the breaker so I can call on them without a dumb-sounding "uh who was that?"
More remote-work rage bait.
This allows folks who do not need actually contribute to a meeting to catch up on the content at a time that suits them later.
Sounds like a very efficient use of time to me.
I'm going to buck the trend I see in this thread and say that the AI notetaker we've used has been helpful. After the meeting it sends a list of action items and meeting highlights that links to the timestamp in the meeting where we were talking about it in case we need to refer back. I've found it nice to have.
Would you mind sharing what AI note taking app do you use?
At my last company my manager never knew how to end a meeting. After we finished the topic of discussion he would start to ramble and ask people about their day, tell bad jokes, it was horrible. You could tell the guy was just desperate for social interaction and his subordinates were the only social interaction he had.
These apps are cancer. Otter.ai for example, by default, will scrape the call's contacts, and email every single one, saying they can access the notes if they sign-up. A 300 person meeting, their spam bot sends out 300 emails. Totally captive audience, and the person who installed the notetaker is often none the wiser that it happened.
Even if just one person installs it, it resets the iteration and can begin again.
Just like malware.
I mean.. it's literally sending an audio stream of the meeting and it's contents to an external server? It's not even malware. This is a virus.
This is like the adversarial interoperability version of "this meeting could have been an email".
Wow looks like I'm only one who is happy not talking to bots at my job. I go to meetings to ask questions (maybe answer too). I guarantee if I don't care about the topic I won't read your AI notes email even harder than I won't attend or listen in the meeting. But in case of the meeting you could tell I didn't!
> He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The 10 others attending were note-taking apps powered by artificial intelligence that had joined to record, transcribe and summarize the meeting.
Why do you even have a call with 16 people in it?
The big question is why they need 10 apps to take notes of the same meeting? Wouldn't be better to have just one and send the summary at the end?
It’s occurred to me that scrum masters are not long for this world at all. It would only take one engineer to suck up their entire organization’s meetings and then train an AI scrum master on them. Surprised we haven’t seen a Y-combinator company do it yet.
That's just like asking to replace priests by AI...
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> “We’re moving into a world where nothing will be forgotten,” Allie K. Miller
I am constantly amazed by allie K miller positioning herself as leader and visionary in every hot trend.
That statement is anything but visionary.
she is a CEO and Fortune 500 AI advisor! says her self-asserted promotional material
I hope this finally ends meetings. Pretty much nothing ever needs to be a meeting. Everything can be decided async. Extroverts are the only ones demanding a meeting to hear themselves talk. I have yet to experience a single compelling remote meeting.
How can anyone be sure this story is at all true? Is it taken from an anecdotal story told to a WaPo reporter by a large investor in AI seeking to hype up the ability of AI to take good notes in a meeting, to create a marketing buzz around AI and draw in more investors? The naive credence given to this story in the comment section is probably not justified.
I haven't had an useful meeting in years. All the important collaboration and decision making has happened organically in text chat, which is great because it's all searchable and dated, and I do refer to that a lot. In fact they recently moved my main collaborator from another building into the next desk and we agreed to keep the work stuff in chat as much as possible so it isn't lost. So we chitchat about our kids but still type out our debate about the best version launch date.
Every meeting in person or via Zoom I have been in has been either an useless sales pitch, grandstanding by some manager, brown-nosing by some upstart or some other form of toxic socialization, scheming or conspiracy. I detest all those and avoid them, which is probably why I've become kind of an unpromotable pariah, which is ok, as a promotion would mean attending more of them.
Some people have multiple ones.
Similar like that saying with politics - if you don't proactively replace yourself with AI, then you will be replaced by AI.
popular news reported in the US "Zoom Meeting Participants are Sending AI bots Instead"
compare and contrast the two headlines