One reason is that there are a lot of people that refuse to do anything unless there is a meeting.
I work with people that...
* When faced with some well-written, succinct email/text explaining both a problem and supposed solution, will "respond" with "let's discuss this" instead of an intelligent response, taking action as proposed, or even mentioning any particular concerns to be discussed / researched ahead of the meeting. They just need it to be spoon fed to them, and need to be "heard", before anything can happen.
* Will ignore requests to review PRs, or look into problems, for weeks on end. When I ask "what would be a good day next week to block off time to review this?", they'll suddenly spring into action, or say that a meeting is not necessary, but prove that in fact it is by refusing to do anything before the prospect of a meeting is raised.
I believe that some of this is differences in communication style. I like written communication because I don't process verbal communication as well. But I've also had plenty of colleagues who are more comfortable with verbal communication, and may not process prose as well. Many of them seemed hesitant to believe they'd fully understood something until they'd had a chance to talk through it to confirm. And, yes, needed verbal prompting in the same way that I tend to need written prompting.
The most functional workplaces understand and respect these differences and make room for everyone's communication style.
I am sympathetic to the "different communication style" line of reasoning, but I don't really buy it in the example I used / people I work with at present.
As far as I'm concerned, responding to some well-prepared prose with "lets discuss this", is just a non-response, and a refusal to engage. If one wanted to have a useful discussion, but preferred something verbal, actually picking up the phone, or responding with something like "I'm curuous about X/Y/Z. Let's discuss this at 2pm, I'll send you an invitation", or "please find some time in my calendar for us to look at this."
That would keep the matter progressing, and provide the opportunity to prepare for a useful discussion. "lets discuss this" is just saying "I need you to spoon-feed this to me, but I'm not going to make arrangements for that, so you'll need to figure out how to deal with that.".
I can see where this can be abused. (The PR review example is pretty rough!) I can also see where it's a strategy for triaging which tasks are a priority.
I've had projects presented to me over email that sounded great and seemed like they would have good traction, but then fizzled out once I asked if we could discuss it further in person. Blocking off face-to-face time is a signal that the work is important enough to get done.
I’ve even been explicitly coached to use this strategy as a sort of pre-triage. Because when you’re truly swamped with incoming requests even prioritizing starts to eat up a lot of time.
100% agree. Most of the time, when I hear "this could have been an email," it's from someone with a track record of not reading (or writing and responding to) emails meaningfully.
Totally... I've been through this cycle more times than I'd care to count:
"What would be a good day next week to block off time to review this?"
"We don't need a meeting for this, I can get to it <whenever>"
"That's an excellent point, and I tend to agree. Nevertheless, this has been hanging out there for several weeks now. We can schedule the meeting now, and if it ends up getting done before then, it can be canceled.".
Profitable companies are often very, very poorly run. The best run companies, in an absolute sense, are ones that are extremely close to breakeven on margin and thus have to shave every penny - my prototype for this would be Costco, for example.
Companies in industries where you can print money (for a while...) usually haven't actually been put under any duress, so any fool can manage them and look like a genius. It's in hard times that you discover whether you're a good manager or not, when the decisions made in good times come home to roost.
I've faced this same PR problem. Something is very wrong with a software development process when one developer can halt forward progress on the repo by simply ignoring PRs. One solution I've thought about is to automatically accept any PR that sits idle for 48 hours without comments or modification. After that, the reviewers lose the right to complain. If some nasty bug is later discovered, that's what git bisect is for.
I have recently learned that meetings help with one thing we're really bad at, which is deadline and estimations.
Not meetings about deadline, or meetings about estimation, but the shared experience of having timed events associated with stakeholders and involved parties.
It's like an invisible cue system the brain adapts to and starts reacting/responding to in the form of scheduling and resource allocation. (Which can be a double edged sword for some people: e.g. when they wait until the meeting to ask a question)
It's a joke, but taking it at face value, many informational emails are not written in a way that suggests a reply is wanted or necessary, in as much as many meetings are just something you sit through as a listener and not as an active participant.
If an email presents some new plan or policy as a "done deal" then what is the point of spending time replying to it?
My dad used to joke that a meeting is where minutes are kept and hours are lost.
Buried in the pdf in different sections
> Managers attend meetings far more frequently and spend substantially more time in them than non-managerial employees.
> Separately, interactions with senior colleagues are associated with stronger wage growth
A meeting is called to coordinate or communicate. Wadge's law of meetings tell you which one is which.
But not all coordination is top down, sometimes you need your manager to go negotiate a point with another division.
And neither is all communication, most often you can impress on others the potential of a new approach or the problems with the existing one.
The only trouble for the neurodivergent among us is that "appearing to pay attention" is also communication, same goes for eye-contact or not stuttering.
Corolllary is that skip meetings at your own risk, decisions will be made and you won't be in the room where it happens. And don't be the person who is not welcome in meetings, that too eventually makes your pay suffer.
I am one of today's Ten Thousand (https://xkcd.com/1053/) to just now learn of this law.
"Wadge’s Law (of Meetings).
Before every formal meeting there’s a smaller, more exclusive, less formal meeting where all the important decisions are made.
This is based on decades of experience in academia and friends’ experience in industry and government. Sometimes there’s an even smaller, more exclusive, less formal pre pre meeting where all the decisions of the pre meeting are made. Maybe even a pre pre pre meeting … until you reach some guy deciding everything in the shower."
They help people with email jobs to feel important and show everyone else that they're doing something, while simultaneously reducing time available to the people with real work to do, which can then be used by the former group to apply pressure on them.
Because we're social creatures. We're desperate to foster and measure social consensus. That's why we have so many meetings. We want to see the agreement / concession / enthusiasm / disagreement on people's faces, and then use the social forum to cow them into assenting.
Because this is a base intuition and inclination, we employ this clumsily even in cases where it's not really the right tool for the job.
This is the core of it. So much of business, engineering and product design is about navigating a network graph of people to discover requirements, coordinate expertise and make things happen in the real world.
I know many engineers would prefer to just focus on engineering, but creating something meaningful for people means working with and through people. Even the most hands-off, self-service SaaS products depend on this.
Take an extreme case like Minecraft, where a single person behind a computer created a billion-dollar company. I'd argue that even here a significant part of that success came from Notch's very active involvement in the community.
In my view meetings are the most powerful channel for social signaling which unfortunately is at least half the revealed job in software engineering. That was (and still is) the hardest thing for me to accept as the child of blue collar parents.
Because companies are too big, there is a lot of dead weight, overlapping responsibilities, and differing opinions. It's a hiring, management, and culture issue. Smaller companies have it better, and AI helps with that.
pre wfh times the meetings were restricted by the capacity of the meeting rooms in the office. It also required more effort to coordinate, schedule, preparation, etc.
WFH and COVID accelerated meeting usage. I had a manager who claimed people also flocked to meetings during COVID and WFH because they were 'lonely.' But that same manager would kick people out of meetings if they weren't actively participating, too, so who knows.
Figure 3 is interesting. After manager vs non-manager, the strongest predictor of meeting load is whether the work is in-office or remote, with remote & hybrid workers having both more and (much) longer meetings on average. That lines up with my experience, and is one of the big reasons I dislike hybrid work in particular.
I doubt their data would have supported this, but I do wish they had distinguished hybrid from fully distributed. Anecdotally, the one time I worked at a 100% distributed organization the meetings were efficient and the meeting load was low. Not quite as low as the fully in-office companies, but I think some of that was that we deliberately padded meetings with some social time as a stand-in for the water cooler.
One reason is that there are a lot of people that refuse to do anything unless there is a meeting.
I work with people that...
* When faced with some well-written, succinct email/text explaining both a problem and supposed solution, will "respond" with "let's discuss this" instead of an intelligent response, taking action as proposed, or even mentioning any particular concerns to be discussed / researched ahead of the meeting. They just need it to be spoon fed to them, and need to be "heard", before anything can happen.
* Will ignore requests to review PRs, or look into problems, for weeks on end. When I ask "what would be a good day next week to block off time to review this?", they'll suddenly spring into action, or say that a meeting is not necessary, but prove that in fact it is by refusing to do anything before the prospect of a meeting is raised.
I believe that some of this is differences in communication style. I like written communication because I don't process verbal communication as well. But I've also had plenty of colleagues who are more comfortable with verbal communication, and may not process prose as well. Many of them seemed hesitant to believe they'd fully understood something until they'd had a chance to talk through it to confirm. And, yes, needed verbal prompting in the same way that I tend to need written prompting.
The most functional workplaces understand and respect these differences and make room for everyone's communication style.
I am sympathetic to the "different communication style" line of reasoning, but I don't really buy it in the example I used / people I work with at present.
As far as I'm concerned, responding to some well-prepared prose with "lets discuss this", is just a non-response, and a refusal to engage. If one wanted to have a useful discussion, but preferred something verbal, actually picking up the phone, or responding with something like "I'm curuous about X/Y/Z. Let's discuss this at 2pm, I'll send you an invitation", or "please find some time in my calendar for us to look at this."
That would keep the matter progressing, and provide the opportunity to prepare for a useful discussion. "lets discuss this" is just saying "I need you to spoon-feed this to me, but I'm not going to make arrangements for that, so you'll need to figure out how to deal with that.".
I can see where this can be abused. (The PR review example is pretty rough!) I can also see where it's a strategy for triaging which tasks are a priority.
I've had projects presented to me over email that sounded great and seemed like they would have good traction, but then fizzled out once I asked if we could discuss it further in person. Blocking off face-to-face time is a signal that the work is important enough to get done.
I’ve even been explicitly coached to use this strategy as a sort of pre-triage. Because when you’re truly swamped with incoming requests even prioritizing starts to eat up a lot of time.
100% agree. Most of the time, when I hear "this could have been an email," it's from someone with a track record of not reading (or writing and responding to) emails meaningfully.
Totally... I've been through this cycle more times than I'd care to count:
"What would be a good day next week to block off time to review this?"
"We don't need a meeting for this, I can get to it <whenever>"
"That's an excellent point, and I tend to agree. Nevertheless, this has been hanging out there for several weeks now. We can schedule the meeting now, and if it ends up getting done before then, it can be canceled.".
They sound like poorly run companies, management should be aware and dealing with both of these problems.
They're annoying companies to work at, yes. They're also highly profitable, so it's difficult to make the case that they're poorly run.
Profitable companies are often very, very poorly run. The best run companies, in an absolute sense, are ones that are extremely close to breakeven on margin and thus have to shave every penny - my prototype for this would be Costco, for example.
Companies in industries where you can print money (for a while...) usually haven't actually been put under any duress, so any fool can manage them and look like a genius. It's in hard times that you discover whether you're a good manager or not, when the decisions made in good times come home to roost.
I've faced this same PR problem. Something is very wrong with a software development process when one developer can halt forward progress on the repo by simply ignoring PRs. One solution I've thought about is to automatically accept any PR that sits idle for 48 hours without comments or modification. After that, the reviewers lose the right to complain. If some nasty bug is later discovered, that's what git bisect is for.
I have recently learned that meetings help with one thing we're really bad at, which is deadline and estimations.
Not meetings about deadline, or meetings about estimation, but the shared experience of having timed events associated with stakeholders and involved parties.
It's like an invisible cue system the brain adapts to and starts reacting/responding to in the form of scheduling and resource allocation. (Which can be a double edged sword for some people: e.g. when they wait until the meeting to ask a question)
A tweet I saw a few days ago: "This meeting could have been an email. In fact, it was. But no one replied. That's why it's a meeting now."
What bothers me most about meetings is their duration. There's no need to schedule hour-long meetings.
It's a joke, but taking it at face value, many informational emails are not written in a way that suggests a reply is wanted or necessary, in as much as many meetings are just something you sit through as a listener and not as an active participant.
If an email presents some new plan or policy as a "done deal" then what is the point of spending time replying to it?
My dad used to joke that a meeting is where minutes are kept and hours are lost.
Buried in the pdf in different sections
> Managers attend meetings far more frequently and spend substantially more time in them than non-managerial employees.
> Separately, interactions with senior colleagues are associated with stronger wage growth
A meeting is called to coordinate or communicate. Wadge's law of meetings tell you which one is which.
But not all coordination is top down, sometimes you need your manager to go negotiate a point with another division.
And neither is all communication, most often you can impress on others the potential of a new approach or the problems with the existing one.
The only trouble for the neurodivergent among us is that "appearing to pay attention" is also communication, same goes for eye-contact or not stuttering.
Corolllary is that skip meetings at your own risk, decisions will be made and you won't be in the room where it happens. And don't be the person who is not welcome in meetings, that too eventually makes your pay suffer.
I am one of today's Ten Thousand (https://xkcd.com/1053/) to just now learn of this law.
"Wadge’s Law (of Meetings).
Before every formal meeting there’s a smaller, more exclusive, less formal meeting where all the important decisions are made.
This is based on decades of experience in academia and friends’ experience in industry and government. Sometimes there’s an even smaller, more exclusive, less formal pre pre meeting where all the decisions of the pre meeting are made. Maybe even a pre pre pre meeting … until you reach some guy deciding everything in the shower."
https://billwadge.com/2015/10/28/wadges-laws/
(pretty fun read, thanks)
> Why do we have so many meetings?
They help people with email jobs to feel important and show everyone else that they're doing something, while simultaneously reducing time available to the people with real work to do, which can then be used by the former group to apply pressure on them.
So lets extrapolate to the very near future.
Getting work done will require combination of biological and silicon agents working together.
Will our silicon counterparts also want as many meetings as biological equivalent to get the same work done?
Because we're social creatures. We're desperate to foster and measure social consensus. That's why we have so many meetings. We want to see the agreement / concession / enthusiasm / disagreement on people's faces, and then use the social forum to cow them into assenting.
Because this is a base intuition and inclination, we employ this clumsily even in cases where it's not really the right tool for the job.
This is the core of it. So much of business, engineering and product design is about navigating a network graph of people to discover requirements, coordinate expertise and make things happen in the real world.
I know many engineers would prefer to just focus on engineering, but creating something meaningful for people means working with and through people. Even the most hands-off, self-service SaaS products depend on this.
Take an extreme case like Minecraft, where a single person behind a computer created a billion-dollar company. I'd argue that even here a significant part of that success came from Notch's very active involvement in the community.
In my view meetings are the most powerful channel for social signaling which unfortunately is at least half the revealed job in software engineering. That was (and still is) the hardest thing for me to accept as the child of blue collar parents.
Every time a meeting is canceled, an angel gets its wings
Because companies are too big, there is a lot of dead weight, overlapping responsibilities, and differing opinions. It's a hiring, management, and culture issue. Smaller companies have it better, and AI helps with that.
[delayed]
pre wfh times the meetings were restricted by the capacity of the meeting rooms in the office. It also required more effort to coordinate, schedule, preparation, etc.
Now just a click and summon people.
WFH and COVID accelerated meeting usage. I had a manager who claimed people also flocked to meetings during COVID and WFH because they were 'lonely.' But that same manager would kick people out of meetings if they weren't actively participating, too, so who knows.
Figure 3 is interesting. After manager vs non-manager, the strongest predictor of meeting load is whether the work is in-office or remote, with remote & hybrid workers having both more and (much) longer meetings on average. That lines up with my experience, and is one of the big reasons I dislike hybrid work in particular.
I doubt their data would have supported this, but I do wish they had distinguished hybrid from fully distributed. Anecdotally, the one time I worked at a 100% distributed organization the meetings were efficient and the meeting load was low. Not quite as low as the fully in-office companies, but I think some of that was that we deliberately padded meetings with some social time as a stand-in for the water cooler.
Most people are unimpressive and mediocre.