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.
Yeah that's true to an extent. I've also had many occasions where someone asks for an update on x and I respond with a two line email asking a yes/no question and the person just says "let's hop on a quick call" etc. That's so frustrating because they're turning 30 seconds into 30 minutes.
Not the person you're responding to but just needed to vent that. It's been happening a lot lately in my world
Some people only really think things through by talking. Reading doesn’t do it for them. Even if they’re just talking to themselves, they don’t really process the information until it actually comes out of their own mouths.
You need to figure out which people are which type. You seem to be a “this could have been an e-mail” type of person. So am I. But my wife is a talker.
For some of those talkers, they actually need to see your face and not just hear your voice. Otherwise, they feel like they’re not getting any information from you.
And for some of those people, it has to be in-person, a video call won’t do — they can’t see your entire environment around you and all the things you can see which they cannot.
To be fair, over 90% of all human communication is not verbalized — it’s in the expression on their face, the way they look around the room, what they’re looking at while they’re talking to you, your body language, the faces you’re making when they are the one talking, etc….
Of the remainder, over 90% is not the actual text of the words being spoken, it’s in the delivery of the words, your tone of voice, are you speaking quickly or slowly, etc….
So, those of us who are on the “this could have been an e-mail” spectrum, we are depending solely on the text in front of us, which is about 1% of the total information that could have been conveyed through non-textual and non-audio parts of the process.
If you’re okay with that, then that’s great! But that only works with other people who are on that end of the spectrum.
So, to get back to my earlier point — you need to know what type of person you are, and you need to know what type of person the other person/people is/are. And you need to adapt your communication style to suit them. Or, make sure that they understand where your limits are and how far you can adapt, and then it’s up to them to try to adapt the rest of that distance.
My wife and I are about to celebrate our 27th anniversary. We are still very much a “work in process” on this topic. I am no expert, but I do have decades of experience with hard lessons that I’ve learned over the years.
ornthey think they have a lot of questions and think they will be less disruptive by having a call. You also didnt give them the response they wanted to hear, which is that you own the problem and they can tell somebody else that its being handled
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.".
My theory is that it’s an intuitive rate limiting scheme devised to cope with the corporate fire hose. There’s no limit on the amount of text coming into an office worker’s inbox in a unit of time. But if one focuses on verbal communication, there’s always going to be a single stream.
Personally, I don’t do this; instead I deal with the stress of the fire hose by grinding my teeth to stubs at night. And for the messages I don’t get to, instead of “let’s discuss”, the sender gets nothing at all.
The kind of person willing to work into the night will also be rewarded with even more requests. Over time your colleagues figure out who works with urgency and who doesn't, and that informs who they ask when they need something.
Yep, this was me most of my career. Started a new job a couple of years ago, except this time I dialled down the effort to like 80% and enforced strict separation between work hours and home hours, and it's been wonderful
My gut based on what you're describing is that there is some degree of "strategic neglect" happening here, where people the people doing this are effectively allowing the things being asked of them to self-prioritize: the proposals/emails/PRs/etc that get attention are the ones where the person who sent it follows up or schedules a meeting to discuss it, meaning they're likely higher priority than things where the person doesn't make that extra effort. This is a longstanding if exasperating strategy many people use, but I think it's getting more popular now that lobbing out a long proposal is easier than ever (because of AI).
I mentioned elsewhere that I was once coached to do this. In that situation it honestly wasn’t lazy at all. At the time I was fielding such a high load of incoming requests that even reading and responding to them was eating up a huge chunk of my time and preventing me from getting anything else (i.e., actually doing any of the requested work) done.
I realize that this looked to the people requesting my attention like deliberate stonewalling. That’s because it was. And it wasn’t cool. But, “This quarter I didn’t ship any software because I was too busy answering email,” would not have earned me a satisfactory performance review. And I certainly was not going to openly admit to anyone but my immediate manager that I was using persistence as a prioritization signal. I saw what happened to the poor schmuck who made that mistake.
Are LLMs are going to neutralize this as a tactic? Or reinforce it? They will happily bombard you with text, and you can set up an agent to fire back. More text than ever will be transmitted, with less and less of it ever coming to the attention of a human.
This sounds like the tragedy of commons. If someone arranges a meeting with you, it is more likely that you will work on their project afterwards, because you have already been thinking about it during the meeting, you already have the context in your mind, and probably a few ideas about what to do next...
Therefore, everyone starts demanding meetings from you, because they have nothing to gain by not doing so -- you wouldn't use the extra time to work on their projects, but on the projects of those who insisted on meetings.
If you have so many meetings that you can't get actual work done, that sucks for everyone, but again, they have nothing to gain by canceling their meeting, unless everyone else does the same thing. But the others won't do the same thing, because now you have time to work on some projects, and they prefer those to be their projects.
What I learned managing high performers is a disproportionate number of them had very hard childhoods and carry permanent scars that make this behavior destructive. These are the people that generally get ignored in every aspect of their life because their brain is operating much faster than the rest of society and get mistaken for being insane in every facet of their life. So when they experience this kind of behavior in an environment that's supposed to reward them for their ideas, it's stultifying. Those high performers are not going to continue putting effort and energy into novel ideas if they're being ignored.
The solution is pretty simple: just fire the manager.
a high performer will push through that to get what they want done though. the obvious case for a higher performer in this is to develop strong back channels and trust with whoever usually blows off unnecessary work
To be clear, I'm not saying a one sentence Slack message can't be ignored. I've coached these folks about how they might need to make multiple attempts to get someone's attention and they're always receptive.
But that's very different than when an engineer stays up all night investigating a very serious issue, writing it up completely, and offering multiple solutions in a wall of text that can't be brushed off in Slack. The engineer makes multiple attempts across multiple weeks and communication platforms to get their attention, and it's ignored. Not "we're busy but will get back to you when we can." Just completely ignored.
A high performer (and really anyone) should not have to resign themselves to office politics to workaround this kind of dysfunction. It's imperative to fire such managers so that you don't lose the trust of the people doing the work.
You know, there are a lot of things I hated about working at Amazon/AWS. But one thing that worked really well for me was how they handled meetings.
First off, you have to have an agenda. And the agenda has to point to a document that lays out all the things you’re going to talk about. Depending on the nature of the meeting and what you are there to discuss, that might be a simple “one pager” or a more in-depth “two pager”, or a very in-depth “six pager”. But the expectation is that everyone will sit there at the beginning of the meeting and read through the document. If you want to read it in advance, you can do that. But the expectation is that everyone will read it for the first time at the meeting.
Once you’ve all read the document, then you can discuss it.
This method addresses both ends of the “this could have been an e-mail” spectrum. But it requires a lot of rigor, and you have to get good at writing proper documents. Otherwise, you’re going to get destroyed at every meeting where you are the person writing the document. Fortunately, they have a lot of examples you can crib from, so you can get good at this quickly.
They also delegate a lot of responsibility for making decisions to the edge. You can ask around to see if a meeting needs to be held on certain subjects, and the answer is usually “no”. You can make the decision yourself and justify it, and document that justification. Then you move on.
If you’re having a disagreement with someone on a topic, you really need to work hard to come to a consensus or agreement with the other person on that subject. You don’t want to have to write a document and have a meeting with a senior person, and then have them ask “why the fuck didn’t you two guys settle this yourselves instead of bringing this problem to me?” Bring solutions, not problems.
Or, if you have a problem that really is insurmountable, then at least bring along a couple of potential solutions or paths towards potential solutions, and then the meeting becomes a discussion of which path to which solution will be chosen and why.
Totally fair. I don’t know your actual situation and I also find these kinds of interactions to be infinitely frustrating.
But it took me a long time to realize there can be a sort of “double empathy” problem across communication styles that makes it difficult for people to accurately infer each other’s intent. They might even be operating from two slightly etiquette norms, such that the same behavior is considered polite by one person and dismissive or hostile by the other. Not saying that’s your particular situation, just talking generalities since that’s all I reasonably can speak to on a pseudonymous forum like this.
This is similar to me asking some basic questions to the LLM instead of reading the text it wants me to read and review. The difference is that it’s a robot and you’re not.
LLMs are a good case study, and I'd argue it's exactly the same phenomenon - just with LLMs, people feel allowed to just say "I don't have time to read this wall of text, 90% of that is noise anyway", because LLMs won't get offended.
Also GP is presuming the person on the other end should automatically care about request being sent to them. They don't.
Most people just have no practice or experience writing. Asking them to respond to or write a large response to an email is a total non-starter for them. That's the default culture in the corporate world unless you have a strong company culture otherwise.
You know how popular grammarly and 2023-24 era chatgpt were? The prospect of writing an email actually makes most people quite anxious. They are not in the comments of hacker news, as a rule - they're watching YouTube and TV and don't read blogs. Just the way most people prefer to live.
It blew my mind to enter college and peer review other people's papers. Up until that point I understood that there was a range of capability with writing, but I figured that in college courses the floor would be pushed up. I was dead wrong, and it was shocking to me that these folks had managed to get all the way through high school writing like 8th graders.
ETA: This is over 20 years ago, btw. I hear it's gotten materially worse. That terrifies me.
The TOEFL is a joke. Several years ago (before LLMs) I proofread group project papers for my wife's coursework at a large US state university. The sections written by foreign students were usually even worse than what I would expect from a native 8th grader. I assume they had found some way to cheat.
TOEFL will grade people on how good they are at writing, but it does not approve or reject candidates. Maybe the threshold for acceptance was set too low?
Sure, that's probably a factor in addition to cheating. Most US colleges accept too many foreign students just to get their tuition, which leaves fewer spaces for more qualified US citizens.
Well, its meant as an exam for foreign students whose first language is not English. Its important to understand that they probably write much better in their first language.
There is somebody that I am having to work with right now that will not respond to a single thing I ask unless it is on a live phone call.
I will ask a relatively simple question via email, and then he will call me back an hour later and leave a voicemail just saying "Sorry I missed you, call me back" instead of even answering my simple question. I'm almost never at my desk, always running around out on the production floor (manufacturing engineer). I'll get his voicemail, call him back and leave HIM a voicemail re-iterating my question, and then I will also send an email again re-iterating my question.
We will go back and forth like this until EVENTUALLY we catch each other at the right time, then it's a quick 2-minute call. It takes days and days, sometimes over a week, to get one single answer that takes 2 minutes to talk over.
He is an external consultant I am working with, so I can't even just walk over to his desk. Absolutely infuriating. As soon as this project is done I am never asking him another question again, I'll find someone else. (I inherited the project and don't have the resources to find another consultant right now)
It’s about to get a lot worse too. Gen Z has had noticeably worse reading comprehension scores over the last 5-10 years and they are starting to enter the workforce now. Many prefer video over text and firmly believe that written text is “the harder medium”.
>There is no good excuse for ignoring requests repeatedly besides laziness or self importance.
Not necessarily, there are also plenty of cases where a person's KPIs don't match their responsibilities or the actual needs of the team. This is frequently a management problem where resources haven't been properly assigned and the employee will always prioritize what they are evaluated on to minimize friction. Far too often managers collect responsibilities for their team (or are told to take on something), yet have zero plans other than "it will work itself out" and they don't bother to formalize how the requests will be dealt with.
There are certainly a lot of people out there that refuse to do their jobs, but it is common enough that there is something else wrong that a discussion with the manager about where the process is failing is the first step.
It’s not necessarily laziness. They just don’t care about your request. “This thing you’re asking for is not important compared to the other things I need do.”
I used to run build call and this was the bane of my existence. People who just never engage (but pretend they are to get you to go away).
Fair question. It might be internal jargon. Refers to making a go/no-go “call” on the quality/readiness of a new build.
e.g. A new release candidate is built and tested from a commit. Some tests fail and each test failure is blocking unless the product area owner (or test owner) attests that the issue is not a blocker (test flakiness, test environment specific issue, extremely low priority bug, etc). The build can release only when all test blockers are closed out.
Most build call processes I’ve seen burn more time investigating flaky tests than real issues and the person running build call (often the “release driver”) typically wastes significant time flogging people to close out the same flaky bugs from the last build. I strongly recommend not building one if you can avoid it.
> The real solution is to simply fire these people.
I don't think that firing people is an intelligent solution to a problem that boils down to your personal inconvenience.
If you posted a PR and it's awaiting review, it is no longer your problem. You are literally blocked by others. Who knows what they are dealing with? Perhaps they have higher priority items than reviewing your work? I mean, would you stop making this complain after they review your 3rd or 30th PR? Everyone around you also has work to do.
If PR reviews are slow, escalate the issue with your manager.
This is why I said "repeatedly" i.e. a pattern has already emerged.
And in most companies I've worked at you are the one being held responsible for a PR/feature not being merged or finished on time - at least in my experience. You're often working on a different team from the people doing reviews, so in a large enough company they are just a faceless/nameless person from the perspective of your PM.
> And in most companies I've worked at you are the one being held responsible for a PR/feature not being merged or finished on time - at least in my experience. L
You are responsible for delivering tasks, but if you are blocked by the process then it's not you who is preventing the task from being delivered. Whether it's the scrum master or sdm or project manager, someone else is responsible for keeping the tasks moving. Once you mark a task as pending review, you are blocked. From that point onward all you have to do is raise awareness of reviewers to the task pending review, and raise visibility with stakeholders that your deliverable is being blocked by the review. As long as you don't slack in raising awareness, it's not your problem anymore.
you are describing a work cultural issue - putting merges on the person that is writing, as a personal failing of people focusing on getting their own code merged, and probably having similar difficulty with that.
why are you working on teams where you are always touching somebody else's code without also making friends with them?
If I told my manager it was his problem to get my code reviewed, he would tell me to do my job.
Offloading responsibility for getting code through review to a manager or scrum master sounds at least as dysfunctional as people avoiding doing the reviews.
> If I told my manager it was his problem to get my code reviewed, he would tell me to do my job.
If that's how you interact with your team members, no wonder they refuse working with you.
What any competent developer does is a) update ticket to move it to review, b) call out the PR in whatever system you guys use, c) after a reasonable amount or time inform your scrum master/manager that your task is code-complete and is blocked by the review, d) update ticket with a notice that PR is still pending review. Go back to step b) and repeat until the PR is merged.
Done.
Updating the ticket and making a best effort to get the ticket moving is all that's expected from you. By design. That's how things are supposed to work. If your manager doesn't care, it's nothing they want to push anyway, as proven by the ticket history.
> Updating the ticket and making a best effort to get the ticket moving is all that's expected from you.
I have never worked somewhere that ran things as you describe. But then everywhere I’ve ever worked has expected a high level of personal responsibility, not “best effort” that consists of a one time Slack
message and tagging work as blocked.
This may be small nuclear team vs sprawling org difference.
This process works so well in a team that are all pushing together.
Moving the ticket along and a slack to the effect of "this one is quick and easy" Vs "this one's a bit gnarly, happy to jump on it with someone" generally sees PRs reviewed very quickly.
A pleading cat gif is usually enough as a reminder.
A well oiled team is working to deliver customer value (internal or external). I've been lucky enough to have had a few teams of incredibly good engineers over the years. So much gets done.
I can see it not working so well in a team of "individuals" focused on their own performance and "personal responsibility" solely for their bit.
The kind of teams that throw everything over the wall to an individual making a build gate go/no-go decision perhaps.
> This may be small nuclear team vs sprawling org difference.
This is very likely a big part of the difference. Most of my career has been spent at very large companies. Smaller teams that can manage to be more inwardly focused with fewer cross, team dependencies, can doubtless operate differently.
> The kind of teams that throw everything over the wall to an individual making a build gate go/no-go decision perhaps.
That’s not really what I described. I ran the process, not the fundamental go/no go decision, which was a distributed responsibility. That was the exact friction, and it’s very similar to the code review friction in large organizations. A PR author has a responsibility for their PR but it may require sign off from numerous other teams.
Some of this is necessary complexity that arises from large teams building large products. Some of it is certainly dysfunction.
When a small team sits close to each other, you can simply say: "hey guys, anyone got time to check my PR?".
In a gigantic org, you can message them on Teams, but everyone keeps getting messages on Teams constantly so they are probably going to ignore you for an hour.
Dude, you're the one talking about talking down to people telling them they are not doing their job. Relax.
> I have never worked somewhere that ran things as you describe.
What do you think a PR reviews process is? It is literally "I will be prevented from merging my work so that all of you may have a say on what I'm doing".
This is precisely how and why it is designed to work.
In basic scrum, you know that part where the scrum master asks in daily meeting whether people are blocked? What do you think it is used for?
Pray tell, what do you think a PR is used for, and how does the process work?
> The place I currently work at operates quite differently.
If your place of work had no one responsible for setting work priorities of managing task delivery and then find yourself blocked by mundane things like a PR then it seems you are developing novel ways of being dysfunctional. Perhaps you PR process is indeed not the problem but a symptom.
It's pretty rare that I get blocked on something mundane like a PR, but if I do I just tend to message a colleague something along the lines of, "hey, can you please take a look at X when you next have a moment? blocking me for Y" and that resolves the issue promptly.
TBH I think micromanaging inter-team communication by turning it into a process that requires a responsible individual to run is far more dysfunctional.
It is managers responsibility to set priorities including those of other team members. Including priorities of code review. That is not offloading. It is also considerably less toxic then "I demand people to be fired because my code review was not done in 12 hours".
Your PR is not the importantest thing being worked on.
What I said is it’s not my manager’s job to wrangle people to do code reviews for me. It’s absurd that the immediate response to friction is to offload it to someone else. Certainly if there is a cultural problem, or misaligned priorities, discuss the general issue with your manager. But “I set the ticket to blocked so I’m done” is not an acceptable process anywhere I’ve ever worked.
Much of the time the person I’m waiting on doesn’t report to my manager anyway. My manager can’t change their priorities any more than I can.
This doesn’t change much though. If there is a general problem, it’s likely appropriate to pull in management to figure out the issue. But it’s probably not a management problem that my specific PR needs a review.
It's literally the most management problem imaginable.
Management decides the process, management decides who to hire, management assigns the roles and management decides how urgent the work is.
If the constellation is so that reviews are required, but the reviewer is not under the control by the manager and reviews do not happen, then some manager somewhere made a mistake.
Why? Because PRs are expected to be reviewed. Any process in which that does not work automatically is dysfunctional and needs to be fixed until PRs are being reviewed properly again.
If everything is working as intended, but it's the manager who created a false sense of urgency and pushed all of the responsibility onto the person who cannot do anything about that, then the only person who can fix the problem is the manager and the thing he has to do is something very easy: be more patient.
Edit: It might not be obvious, but all the things you claim that strengthen your position are already table stakes and assumed to happen regardless. The question is, who is responsible for making the invisible and automatic happen? And you're saying the manager can shirk his responsibility onto the blocked employee, which is hilarious because it means your entire operational strategy for fixing a broken process relies purely on being lucky.
Another thing that might not be obvious but if you write a bad pull request and the reviewer tells you it is bad and can't be merged that's on you as well, no shit Sherlock.
> What I said is it’s not my manager’s job to wrangle people to do code reviews for me.
I'm sorry to say, but it is. Is your manager responsible for managing workloads, task assignments, and priorities?
> It’s absurd that the immediate response to friction is to offload it to someone else.
That doesn't sound right. A PR review literally requires you to dump your workload onto someone else. Often times a PR requires significant amounts of time to review. Your team members need to set aside significant amounts of time out of their schedule to look at your work.
You cannot frame a problem that fundamentally revolves around dumping work onto someone else as being absurd to dump your work onto someone else. I mean, what do you think happens when you ask someone to review your work? Do you expect your team members to blindly sign off?
It's obviously about offloading work. And it's the Manager's job ro set those priorities.
It sounds way more dysfunctional to start doing the managers job to me.
If you think it is your responsibility to get a reviewer on the other side to prioritise reviewing your work then you basically made yourself responsible for hiring and firing people or reassigning their project responsibilities.
By the time you managed to have your review get through you might not even be a developer anymore.
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.
> Blocking off face-to-face time is a signal that the work is important enough to get done.
This.
I'd also add that not bothering to book a meeting means that people treat you like a low-value work queue that they use to dump low-visibility and low-accountability work. They invoke you to handle silly tasks that no one but you accept.
By requiring a meeting, you're increasing the threshold of effort that your requester is willing to invest in getting it done. If they can't be bothered doing a meeting, you shouldn't bother doing the work for them.
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.
Me too. I used to be super dilligent about immediately responding to emails, requests, meeting invites and I never once benefited from doing so. I only trained my peers into learning that I was a "yes man" that always responded quickly, and they abused this.
Therefore, I now no longer rush at all responding to emails unless its actually urgent and concrete. If someone sends vague requests, I just don't ansewr. If they don't come back, I can infer it probably wasn't that important or they found some resolution on their own.
I also never respond to meeting invites just in case I can avoid the meeting. I think I've probably dodged 100 unnecessary meetings over the last couple of years by literally just never responding or showing up. I of course don't do this with 1-1 meetings, but meetings with: multiple people where I'm not needed, there is no listed agenda, and my involvement is not clear; F that.
I also frequently just say "no, I can't", which I didn't for most of my carreer, and just suddenly realized I could do largely without consequences or repercussions. It's fascinating.
Not advocating this, just more addressing the mindset on it, but in the game of office politics people don't mention concerns ahead of time because they don't want to give the opposing view point opportunity to research how to defeat their argument in a meeting, not that they "can't" give an intelligent response. They're choosing not to in their own self interest.
"The enemy must not know where I intend to give battle; for if he does not know where I intend to give battle, he must be prepared in a great many places. And when he prepares in a great many places, those I have to fight in any one-given place will be but few."
You generally also get paid with ~10% of everyone else, regardless if you get 3x more done or 3x less done.
So, if like most people, your working to live instead living to work - your employer is doing a terrible job incentivizing you to do more than the bare minimum.
We all know you are far better off doing almost nothing and then all your time trying to get promoted for it, than trying to get promoted by actually doing a good job and thinking you'll get promoted based on merit.
Anyone who would advocate for this strategy against any SME is a moron anyway.
It's like watching someone who's expecting a knife fight walk in with a concealed handgun only to be immediately confronted with a tank.
The email is usually an attempt to not waste time in the meeting and get shit done. Leadership always favors those who can make it so. Anyone who stalls for time or hides information will always look bad. I don't get why people so desperately try anyway.
Most of these strange gambits in office politics are a losing game for the inept and inexperienced. One can only wonder why we keep pretending like there even is such a "game" of office politics.
id place the reason that its more work to identify and raise those concerns ahead of time, since if they are correct, you did all that work coming up with the happy path and the issues ahead of time, vs if the issues come up later, you can focus on and fix them as they come up.
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.".
Well, most of the time "this could have been an email" means "if it were an e-mail, I could just ignore it instead of having an hour of my life wasted".
I think not reading or responding to e-mails is largely (from my experience) indicative of more fundamental communication problems in the company/group.
The first problem is e-mail fatigue. Many groups have ridiculous amounts of automated e-mails that amount to line noise. The information in them is rarely actionable and certainly never so critical it needs to be read by everyone immediately. "Everything is OK" alarms are fucking infuriating. It's very easy to miss the super highly critical e-mail from a manager that's just a lazily forwarded e-mail from the automated systems. The "Have you seen this?" with the entire contents of the line noise e-mail from the automated system.
Second is people, especially middle management, that for some reason assume e-mail is a real-time communication medium. They send an e-mail and expect the recipients to drop everything to respond to it. Simultaneously the people actually doing work are actually working and not checking their e-mail every nanosecond to see if they need to drop their actual work to explain their actual work to management. So then the middle management sends a cascade of instant messages and schedules meetings to get the people doing actual work to drop everything to explain their actual work. These meetings will inevitably contain complaints about not getting work done.
It's now even worse with AI in the middle. Instead of using LLMs to write easy to scan and digest bullet point e-mails they're used to expand bullet points into useless novellas.
My solutions to these problems are thus:
1. RSS - Automated systems should just emit RSS feeds with their normal status with separate feeds for exceptional conditions. Only in those actual "machine on fire" conditions are e-mails sent by such systems. Parties interested in constant updates just watch their feed reader and everyone has a single source of truth for event logs from the automated systems.
2. Automated systems should just file tickets automatically so everyone involved has a single source of truth and can all collaborate in one place. Even better if the ticket/bug tracker supports RSS because it becomes dead simple for anyone to follow feeds they're interested in and even set up system notifications for new issues.
3. Company/group wide e-mail policies that constantly remind everyone it's not a real-time medium and that filling everyone's inbox with noise is not effective communication. This can be enforced with automated delivery delays guaranteeing e-mail won't be immediately delivered as a safeguard against people using it instead of actual real-time channels.
4. Verbose e-mails are also rarely effective communication and shared LLM prompts that make e-mails shorter and clearer would also help.
Removing most of the noise from e-mail makes it more effective and can make it an actual communication medium. If e-mail becomes effective communication far less of everyone's limited lives needs to be spent zoning out in meetings where their only purpose is to "give a status update".
Back in the days of paper memos the literal cost and effort required to send them required the sender to really think about what they were trying to communicate and how to say it best. Because e-mail is essentially free it is widely abused since so little thought needs to go into its composition and delivery.
> * 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.
You hit the nail on this, a lot coming from middle managers too who still think that a busy calendar of these meetings it means they are very productive. I remember a manager I worked with, he was so keen on having meetings, a discussion between me and a colleague and he overheard it? Meeting to discuss “the conflict”!! It was soul crushing experience thankfully i left quickly, only to know later he started having meetings for meetings, so in those meetings they discuss what they will discuss on the other meetings!
Also, there are some other sinister reasons, an email is an artifact that can be traced and searched, a meeting usually is just verbal communication and even meeting minutes get challenged later.
Email chains can fail to converge. Yeah, the meeting could have been an email, but what if it was going to be 20 email back-and-forths? And not everybody is responding quickly?
You ask three people what we should do about a problem. They float ideas. You think the discussion is converging on a solution, and then one of them (who hasn't been heard from for the last three days) suddenly protests where the group is going, saying that they don't agree at all, that they have several concerns, that nobody talked to this other group that needs to be consulted, and so on. Then for that other group, nobody responds for a week because they're busy on something else.
A meeting can force people to say what they have to say, now, or be ignored. That forcing function has value.
And it's not (just) that "people refuse to do anything". It's that multiple people, doing things asynchronously, on different time rhythms, sometimes means that the group consensus advances v e r y s l o w l y, if at all.
With any request, schedule a follow up meeting to discuss the completed work, or to perform an autopsy if there was some impediment.
Make sure to actually say “autopsy”.
“Inquisition”, “colonoscopy” or “employment review” all work well too.
If you have two Bob’s definitely get them involved.
Then have a practice of letting such meetings be cancelled if the work is done and went well.
This can be done as a consistent and transparent inside joke. Humor often generates the social permission to communicate hard truths, by also providing psychological stress dispertion.
I cannot vouch for any of this, but please share your experiences.
A highly profitable company can be poorly run and still survive exactly because there is so much more margin for error than for a company which is barely profitable (or worse).
Granted, that kind of situation is unlikely to continue indefinitely, but it certainly can happen.
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.
If you reduce a companies purpose to solely being "making money" then by that definition sure.
But in my opinion the worship of money and reduction of everything to being solely a dollar maximizer is one of the biggest problems that humanity has at the moment - it is a reduction in purpose by the blind and greedy.
My definition of a well run company is one that is still profitable, but has happy employees who are maximizing their potential and growth. Who is a good tax paying entity so that it contributes back to the society that is supporting it. Is making a healthy return for its shareholders despite all of this, and is not doing anything evil like producing toxic chemicals, harming vulnerable people or polluting the environment.
Is it idealistic? Yes of course it is. Our collective description of greatness should be to aim at perfection so that even falling short of it is still excellent.
Saying it must be well run because its profitable makes me sick, because that line of thinking feeds unrestrained greed, and is exactly the reason our state of capitalism is so unbalanced and full of greed right now.
Unfortunately, the market is a competitive environment, and it's competition that ultimately reduces companies to money printers. Your idealistic companies, if they existed, got outcompeted by those who sacrificed some of that idealism in exchange for a little more profit.
Wrong. You are being too much "economic idealism" - the market is not perfectly efficient and theres easily enough room for companies like I describe, and they exist today, especially in more well rounded European countries.
And then seperatly, we are talking about the definition of "well run companies" and I was putting forward my definition of one, which is what we are talking about in this thread.
In this second case, some people live life only bothering to deal with crises, and delay anything else. It's likely not the direct threat of a meeting, but that you've made it clear it's a crisis.
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.
Your “well-written” problem statement will create thankless work for me that nobody will see or appreciate. I know this because “you” usually send me your “urgent” non-issues and (asinine) “solutions” but, being the diplomatic guy that I am and actually understanding the game that I am forced to play, in contrast to you, I will deny, deflect and if cornered, will call a meeting in what can only be described as some form of malicious corporate compliance. This is all because I am too polite and too political to just say “get lost”. I would if I could, but I can’t. “You” usually have some leverage because you are good with networks or the details of FreeBSD or whatever.
i recently decided to see if i could make an "agentic" NBER and use its agents to do research for my other agents in the agentic state. I would love to speak w/ someone there and show them the sims, I do not think all of the meetings are needed and eventually there will just be agent proxy meetings that send messages to some HITL when needed for more guidance, This cold put more value on the real meetings IMO.
Note: THIS IS JUST FOR FUN, because I needed an economic policy thinktank for my agents to query. I had to do the same for CEPR
this is to say that alignment and prioritization arent the same thing.
they agree to the thing, but making a meeting moves the priority from low to high because you are signalling through making a meeting that it is high priority
Eh, i see it mostly as a delay tactic rather than anything else. After yhat, its a scheduling forcing method. Then lastly, they just are procrastinators so they use other peoples time as the ordering of their work.
I have this even on slack. I prefer text because it gives me time to thi k before responding but I think some people just don't have very good reading comprehension. Or writing skills.
So they force everything to "let's set up a chat about this".
I firmly believe 20 minutes is the optimal amount of time to meet, introduce a problem and evidence, and make a decision that allows all parties to move forward aligned.
I suspect office work defaulted to 30 minute calls because of TV/Radio broadcasts in the early 20th century, but I haven't researched this theory further.
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?
What's particularly annoying is once the meeting is arbitrarily scheduled in for say an hour then many feel the need to drag the meeting out over that entire hour regardless of if everything important has been covered within 20 minutes. Along with this comes the annoying trend of the meeting organiser 'giving you time back' if they conclude the meeting slightly early as if they are doing you a favour for not running the meeting for the entire duration when really that should be the default.
A big reason is a lack of agency. I work with large organisations where people cannot or do not know if they can make an executive decision. What to do? Call a meeting with everyone who might have a view on it so that you can then make a decision.
The problem, of course, is when an important person is not available so a decision is not made and then when something comes up mid-week, we need to wait another week to have another meeting.
Give people guiderails, let them try (and fail sometimes) and watch them flourish. On the other hand, tell them that they need permissions from X, Y and Z and watch them do the minimum amount possible.
It's also about lack of leadership and (true) strategy. Many large organizations just careen from "crisis" to "crisis" and are extremely reactive; lacking a long term strategy and clear plan, it becomes extremely hard to actually make decisions.
People endlessly defer because they don't want to be the person to "take the blame" for a decision. Making decisions when you don't connect them to an actual goal/plan/vision becomes a liability. The solution is endless meetings where liability is distributed to...everyone in the meeting. It's successful, in a way, but also exhausting and makes you feel like your job involves just tilting at windmills (imaginary crises).
The problem is failure seems more costly than the 30-120 minute call that may align all necessary parties. I think a lot of effective work cultures have moved towards the "move fast and expect mistakes" mentality you describe, but most people/organizations are still carrying mentalities from the "old ways"
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."
A less cynical way to put this is that it's a type of socialization (in an organizational context): the process of sharing and building internal consensus around a new concept.
That can take many forms, but communication before a big meeting is common because if you're announcing a new idea, you want people to support it, and springing it on everyone for the first time in a big meeting is just gambling.
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.
Indeed, the enjoyment in software engineering may come from problem-solving (for many of us at least) - but that means that at the end of it, you've created something that solves that client's problem; you've built something for them that they're now going to use. The requirements stage, and subsequent refining based on what the client needs to do, absolutely is the most important stage.
> a significant part of that success came from Notch's very active involvement in the community
I've never heard it argued otherwise, although it probably doesn't get emphasized enough. It was very interesting at the time to watch how closely he interacted with the community, asking opinions and listening, while also making them feel involved by being open about the details of what he was doing. It was a massively refreshing counter to the way the big game studios were coming across so arrogantly at the time, being certain they knew better than their users about what the users wanted. Notch's attitude created that community feel around the game, and made you feel unusually close to the development and even the decision-making processes. That in turn led to word-of-mouth advertising that resulted in Minecraft becoming one of the biggest selling games of all time.
Why do I feel every meeting has a rambling motormouth that will speak for at least 80% of the meeting, making the most obvious, remedial "points" (with illustrative anecdotes of course and repeating them over and over) and then keep the meeting running late?
This sounds like a former CEO I used to work with. Huddled an entire team into a meeting g bc he wanted an update, proceeded to talk through 80% of the meeting time.
End result: someone was appointed to send an email with the update.
People with no social lives outside of work tend to do that. They have no one to talk to other then on meetings, so they talk a lot on meetings. They are not aware of what they are doing, but it is a consistent pattern.
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.
This. Seems like the more you sync with your manager, the more he/she likes you and your career seems to flourish. Nothing much to do with the quality of your thinking or work it seems. If I do my job but don't have a great relationship with my manager, to hell with my career. But if I sync with my manager everyday for even the smallest minutiae, I am seen as team player. Go figure.
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.
As our economy becomes more and more riddled with nonsense jobs that provide no economic value, it becomes increasingly important for the people in those jobs to create the impression of value (this is their only product), and that's what meetings are largely for. Excessive pointless meetings are not broccoli, even if meeting-attenders see higher wage growth than their peers. Excessive meetings are a symptom of an economy that's becoming more and more disconnected from the real world and from creation of real economic value.
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)
Meetings make the cost of collaboration and uncertainty visible. As disruptive as they are I find them to be the most effective way to explain to less technical stakeholders why something is particularly complex or exactly why we need high degrees of certainty in seemingly unimportant portions of the product spec.
They also drive me crazy since we tend to have many of them with relatively little actionable output, but as others have said what tends to happen in the wake of these is the technical people backchannel our own conversations about what needs doing and the sequencing of what we should build to meet the evolving product vision.
What frustrates me is when I complain about there being many meetings on my calendar I'm told to just decline them, but then I'm effectively ceding authority since the time to voice opposition to a particular plan or task is in whatever meeting I'm declining.
Perhaps all of the above is more prevalent in product-led orgs rather than engineering-led orgs, I'm curious if people on the other side of the spectrum have different anecdotes.
The paper seems like a high school science project, but in my experience one common reason for having a meeting is this: Person A wants Person B (Person C's boss) to tell Person C to do something. That's it. So Person A slacks or emails Person B saying I need to get Person C to do this thing. Person B says oh we better have a meeting. The three get onto the meeting and Person B says "yeah so Person A was talking about this thing, I'm not really sure what it is...". And the meeting ends with Person C saying "ok I will do that".
All of this can be avoided in my experience by creating a culture of task assignment. Often I've seen the bug/issue tracking system used to facilitate this but you can use other applications. In this scenario Person A would open a bug detailing what they want done, and either assign it, or put it in the triage queue so Person B get assigned next. Person B reviews, makes any notes, then assigns to Person C. That's it. No meeting.
A byproduct of working remote is the amount of human connection in general has gone way down. The only time I "see" the people I work with anymore is when we're on a meeting.
Meetings that could have been an email, in some ways, are replacing hallway and water cooler conversations. Are they a good replacement for that? Not really.
Meetings are the broccoli of work – widely disliked, but probably good for us anyway.
If you don't like broccoli, it just means you're preparing it wrong. Don't steam it, boil it, or microwave it. Here's how I prep frozen broccoli.
Preheat your oven to 400ºF/200ºC.
As soon as the oven has preheated, put the frozen broccoli into a mixing bowl and drizzle 2tbsp / 30ml of olive oil over it, and toss with your fingers.
Spread the broccoli over a baking sheet, sprinkle a small amount of salt over it, and bake for 20 minutes.
Also, broccoli has been bred to be less bitter over the years, starting somewhere around the 1990s. People who remember it from before that as a child may remember a much less tasty vegetable, particularly if they're sensitive to bitterness.
That can also be excellent, but it's much harder for some people to digest! For instance, I'm not a fan of how I feel from eating raw cruciferous vegetables even though they are delicious.
steamed broccoli is great though. i think a lot of people overcook it at which point it switches from great to disgusting, but maybe its also a parsley/cilantro type deal where some people taste certain things as being extremely similar to piss?
Same here. Love steamed. But if you overdo it, it changes color/texture and starts to taste nasty. But get it just right and it's amazing with a bit of butter, or in a pasta, or almost anything.
The fundamental problem is that brain-to-brain transfer of information is really hard. And face-to-face communication is often a better vehicle for it than written communication.
Since I get to make certain rules, one of them is that I won’t (one exception below) attend a meeting without an agenda and context. It’s not the Bezos paper, but simply something like “let’s nail down the skeleton of the Fubarco proposal: I think we should have the sections 1: agreed abojectives, 2:…. I’m not sure about 4, which is why we need to talk. Agenda: A: agree on the structure, B: give each section an owner; I suggest…”
Often that’s enough to cause the meeting not to happen.
(We are remote most dayssome have one unstructured morning meeting called “watercooler discussion. Not a standup!!”)
One thing that I've been wondering is if I could somehow transmit everything in my head somehow automatically into text so that an LLM can reasonably respond to almost everything about what I'm doing and how updated live to other people. Perhaps it could escalate the things that matter to me and meetings would be transformed so that others could pull things out of me faster than having to talk to me. I might even be completely obviated by sufficient encoding of self.
Perhaps the visible actions and text I write are all holographic-principle-like sufficient encoding of my invisible prior thought given sufficient information. Curious to see!
We are not even remotely near the point of being able to interpret the complexities of thought in a way that we can transmit them outside of the head automatically.
Simple commands, maybe some voluntary muscle control. But nothing as complex as 'What are the pros and cons of these two business approaches?'
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.
- why do everyone pretend to dislike meeting, yet obviously very few actualy do
Isn't someone already working on a system were every employee has an AI companion that would represent them during meetings? The employee chat about the meeting's topic with her avatar beforehand until they are on the same page, then for all the avatars hold a meeting at the speed of light and come back with the overall decision that was reached. No more politics, and perfectly asynchronous. I'd love it.
TL;DR People are pushed to specialize as companies grow and meetings are cartesian products of interests.
As responsibilities become increasingly important (more financial import), their work is divided into specialized slices for optimization, redundancy, and bus factor. The number of combinations of people that might be necessary to answer questions or provide guidance in decisioning expands exponentially (small slope, correlating to recruitment). If something in a meeting is considered missed, unsaid, or backtracked, the event is memorialized and pushes for more meeting with a larger audience. The people in large meetings self-select into smaller meetings around their specific vertical interests, in order to align with the interpreted decisions of the larger meetings.
Meeting bloat is the result of a conflux of human behavior, lossy communication, optimized behavior and competing interests. If it was a simple single reason, humans would have solved it long ago.
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.
I've run a 1-man software company for the last 21 years. I don't think I've had anything you would call a meeting in that time. Also haven't worn a tie, commuted more than 1 minute to my office or had to set my alarm clock for work. Living the dream. ;0)
you have so many meetings because you send billions of messages that have NO value, but create a wild number of different expectations accross the spread of those involved in any one project, and so meetings are one way to try and get people on the same page.
but off course there are now millions of people entrenched in organisations who are messaging and meeting specialists,and for whom procedural tacticts are instinctive and will only defer and conduct actual work when under direct supervision from a superior.
I could talk about how deal with some of that, but, no.
From my recent experience, I think it is the exact opposite of where we should go for.
We have essentially two kinds of meetings:
- daily meetings, scheduled, 30 minutes, with a timer, overruns happen, but rarely, and not by a lot.
- unscheduled meetings, often more than 1 hour, sometime massive overruns
The latter are by far the more useful ones, and because they are infrequent, take less time overall.
The problem with the daily meetings is that they degenerate into everyone taking turns saying what they are doing, who cares except for the manager? And we have Jira, everything is there. Sometime there is something interesting: maybe someone found something to save everyone's time, maybe a strange bug that need some collective mind to figure out, or a breaking change people need to be aware of. But these report are often cut off by "let's move on, we will talk about it later (maybe)", which mean either another meeting, or people missing information.
The unscheduled meeting however usually have a clear goal, and a solution has to come out of it. Cutting the meeting short without a solution loses the entire point, so overruns are common, but in the end, we have something meaningful.
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.
Boomers want to hear themselves talk they think meetings equal work. They are lazy and instead of learning on their own they require others to spoon feed the information to them.
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.
Yeah that's true to an extent. I've also had many occasions where someone asks for an update on x and I respond with a two line email asking a yes/no question and the person just says "let's hop on a quick call" etc. That's so frustrating because they're turning 30 seconds into 30 minutes.
Not the person you're responding to but just needed to vent that. It's been happening a lot lately in my world
Some people only really think things through by talking. Reading doesn’t do it for them. Even if they’re just talking to themselves, they don’t really process the information until it actually comes out of their own mouths.
You need to figure out which people are which type. You seem to be a “this could have been an e-mail” type of person. So am I. But my wife is a talker.
For some of those talkers, they actually need to see your face and not just hear your voice. Otherwise, they feel like they’re not getting any information from you.
And for some of those people, it has to be in-person, a video call won’t do — they can’t see your entire environment around you and all the things you can see which they cannot.
To be fair, over 90% of all human communication is not verbalized — it’s in the expression on their face, the way they look around the room, what they’re looking at while they’re talking to you, your body language, the faces you’re making when they are the one talking, etc….
Of the remainder, over 90% is not the actual text of the words being spoken, it’s in the delivery of the words, your tone of voice, are you speaking quickly or slowly, etc….
So, those of us who are on the “this could have been an e-mail” spectrum, we are depending solely on the text in front of us, which is about 1% of the total information that could have been conveyed through non-textual and non-audio parts of the process.
If you’re okay with that, then that’s great! But that only works with other people who are on that end of the spectrum.
So, to get back to my earlier point — you need to know what type of person you are, and you need to know what type of person the other person/people is/are. And you need to adapt your communication style to suit them. Or, make sure that they understand where your limits are and how far you can adapt, and then it’s up to them to try to adapt the rest of that distance.
My wife and I are about to celebrate our 27th anniversary. We are still very much a “work in process” on this topic. I am no expert, but I do have decades of experience with hard lessons that I’ve learned over the years.
Some people just don't have enough to do and setting up "quick chats" makes them feel busy.
ornthey think they have a lot of questions and think they will be less disruptive by having a call. You also didnt give them the response they wanted to hear, which is that you own the problem and they can tell somebody else that its being handled
I feel you.
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.".
My theory is that it’s an intuitive rate limiting scheme devised to cope with the corporate fire hose. There’s no limit on the amount of text coming into an office worker’s inbox in a unit of time. But if one focuses on verbal communication, there’s always going to be a single stream.
Personally, I don’t do this; instead I deal with the stress of the fire hose by grinding my teeth to stubs at night. And for the messages I don’t get to, instead of “let’s discuss”, the sender gets nothing at all.
The kind of person willing to work into the night will also be rewarded with even more requests. Over time your colleagues figure out who works with urgency and who doesn't, and that informs who they ask when they need something.
Yep, this was me most of my career. Started a new job a couple of years ago, except this time I dialled down the effort to like 80% and enforced strict separation between work hours and home hours, and it's been wonderful
My gut based on what you're describing is that there is some degree of "strategic neglect" happening here, where people the people doing this are effectively allowing the things being asked of them to self-prioritize: the proposals/emails/PRs/etc that get attention are the ones where the person who sent it follows up or schedules a meeting to discuss it, meaning they're likely higher priority than things where the person doesn't make that extra effort. This is a longstanding if exasperating strategy many people use, but I think it's getting more popular now that lobbing out a long proposal is easier than ever (because of AI).
I've worked with a lot of people who will not engage with a request until the request has been made multiple times.
Its a very lazy way of filtering.
"It couldn't have been that important" is their logic.
I mentioned elsewhere that I was once coached to do this. In that situation it honestly wasn’t lazy at all. At the time I was fielding such a high load of incoming requests that even reading and responding to them was eating up a huge chunk of my time and preventing me from getting anything else (i.e., actually doing any of the requested work) done.
I realize that this looked to the people requesting my attention like deliberate stonewalling. That’s because it was. And it wasn’t cool. But, “This quarter I didn’t ship any software because I was too busy answering email,” would not have earned me a satisfactory performance review. And I certainly was not going to openly admit to anyone but my immediate manager that I was using persistence as a prioritization signal. I saw what happened to the poor schmuck who made that mistake.
Are LLMs are going to neutralize this as a tactic? Or reinforce it? They will happily bombard you with text, and you can set up an agent to fire back. More text than ever will be transmitted, with less and less of it ever coming to the attention of a human.
itll stay exactly where it is.
scheduling a meeting is telling somebody that you consider this to be a priority and therefore they should too
Just because it is your priority, doesn't make it mine.
The current situation I have is that I have 5 people demanding that I have their stuff as a priority, and they will schedule meetings to tell me such.
If I'm in 5 hours of status update and demo meetings every day how much actual work is going to get completed?
This sounds like the tragedy of commons. If someone arranges a meeting with you, it is more likely that you will work on their project afterwards, because you have already been thinking about it during the meeting, you already have the context in your mind, and probably a few ideas about what to do next...
Therefore, everyone starts demanding meetings from you, because they have nothing to gain by not doing so -- you wouldn't use the extra time to work on their projects, but on the projects of those who insisted on meetings.
If you have so many meetings that you can't get actual work done, that sucks for everyone, but again, they have nothing to gain by canceling their meeting, unless everyone else does the same thing. But the others won't do the same thing, because now you have time to work on some projects, and they prefer those to be their projects.
What I learned managing high performers is a disproportionate number of them had very hard childhoods and carry permanent scars that make this behavior destructive. These are the people that generally get ignored in every aspect of their life because their brain is operating much faster than the rest of society and get mistaken for being insane in every facet of their life. So when they experience this kind of behavior in an environment that's supposed to reward them for their ideas, it's stultifying. Those high performers are not going to continue putting effort and energy into novel ideas if they're being ignored.
The solution is pretty simple: just fire the manager.
a high performer will push through that to get what they want done though. the obvious case for a higher performer in this is to develop strong back channels and trust with whoever usually blows off unnecessary work
To be clear, I'm not saying a one sentence Slack message can't be ignored. I've coached these folks about how they might need to make multiple attempts to get someone's attention and they're always receptive.
But that's very different than when an engineer stays up all night investigating a very serious issue, writing it up completely, and offering multiple solutions in a wall of text that can't be brushed off in Slack. The engineer makes multiple attempts across multiple weeks and communication platforms to get their attention, and it's ignored. Not "we're busy but will get back to you when we can." Just completely ignored.
A high performer (and really anyone) should not have to resign themselves to office politics to workaround this kind of dysfunction. It's imperative to fire such managers so that you don't lose the trust of the people doing the work.
You know, there are a lot of things I hated about working at Amazon/AWS. But one thing that worked really well for me was how they handled meetings.
First off, you have to have an agenda. And the agenda has to point to a document that lays out all the things you’re going to talk about. Depending on the nature of the meeting and what you are there to discuss, that might be a simple “one pager” or a more in-depth “two pager”, or a very in-depth “six pager”. But the expectation is that everyone will sit there at the beginning of the meeting and read through the document. If you want to read it in advance, you can do that. But the expectation is that everyone will read it for the first time at the meeting.
Once you’ve all read the document, then you can discuss it.
This method addresses both ends of the “this could have been an e-mail” spectrum. But it requires a lot of rigor, and you have to get good at writing proper documents. Otherwise, you’re going to get destroyed at every meeting where you are the person writing the document. Fortunately, they have a lot of examples you can crib from, so you can get good at this quickly.
They also delegate a lot of responsibility for making decisions to the edge. You can ask around to see if a meeting needs to be held on certain subjects, and the answer is usually “no”. You can make the decision yourself and justify it, and document that justification. Then you move on.
If you’re having a disagreement with someone on a topic, you really need to work hard to come to a consensus or agreement with the other person on that subject. You don’t want to have to write a document and have a meeting with a senior person, and then have them ask “why the fuck didn’t you two guys settle this yourselves instead of bringing this problem to me?” Bring solutions, not problems.
Or, if you have a problem that really is insurmountable, then at least bring along a couple of potential solutions or paths towards potential solutions, and then the meeting becomes a discussion of which path to which solution will be chosen and why.
Totally fair. I don’t know your actual situation and I also find these kinds of interactions to be infinitely frustrating.
But it took me a long time to realize there can be a sort of “double empathy” problem across communication styles that makes it difficult for people to accurately infer each other’s intent. They might even be operating from two slightly etiquette norms, such that the same behavior is considered polite by one person and dismissive or hostile by the other. Not saying that’s your particular situation, just talking generalities since that’s all I reasonably can speak to on a pseudonymous forum like this.
This is similar to me asking some basic questions to the LLM instead of reading the text it wants me to read and review. The difference is that it’s a robot and you’re not.
LLMs are a good case study, and I'd argue it's exactly the same phenomenon - just with LLMs, people feel allowed to just say "I don't have time to read this wall of text, 90% of that is noise anyway", because LLMs won't get offended.
Also GP is presuming the person on the other end should automatically care about request being sent to them. They don't.
Most people just have no practice or experience writing. Asking them to respond to or write a large response to an email is a total non-starter for them. That's the default culture in the corporate world unless you have a strong company culture otherwise.
You know how popular grammarly and 2023-24 era chatgpt were? The prospect of writing an email actually makes most people quite anxious. They are not in the comments of hacker news, as a rule - they're watching YouTube and TV and don't read blogs. Just the way most people prefer to live.
It blew my mind to enter college and peer review other people's papers. Up until that point I understood that there was a range of capability with writing, but I figured that in college courses the floor would be pushed up. I was dead wrong, and it was shocking to me that these folks had managed to get all the way through high school writing like 8th graders.
ETA: This is over 20 years ago, btw. I hear it's gotten materially worse. That terrifies me.
The TOEFL is a joke. Several years ago (before LLMs) I proofread group project papers for my wife's coursework at a large US state university. The sections written by foreign students were usually even worse than what I would expect from a native 8th grader. I assume they had found some way to cheat.
TOEFL will grade people on how good they are at writing, but it does not approve or reject candidates. Maybe the threshold for acceptance was set too low?
Sure, that's probably a factor in addition to cheating. Most US colleges accept too many foreign students just to get their tuition, which leaves fewer spaces for more qualified US citizens.
Well, its meant as an exam for foreign students whose first language is not English. Its important to understand that they probably write much better in their first language.
TOEFL = "Test of English as a Foreign Language"
There is somebody that I am having to work with right now that will not respond to a single thing I ask unless it is on a live phone call.
I will ask a relatively simple question via email, and then he will call me back an hour later and leave a voicemail just saying "Sorry I missed you, call me back" instead of even answering my simple question. I'm almost never at my desk, always running around out on the production floor (manufacturing engineer). I'll get his voicemail, call him back and leave HIM a voicemail re-iterating my question, and then I will also send an email again re-iterating my question.
We will go back and forth like this until EVENTUALLY we catch each other at the right time, then it's a quick 2-minute call. It takes days and days, sometimes over a week, to get one single answer that takes 2 minutes to talk over.
He is an external consultant I am working with, so I can't even just walk over to his desk. Absolutely infuriating. As soon as this project is done I am never asking him another question again, I'll find someone else. (I inherited the project and don't have the resources to find another consultant right now)
> He is an external consultant
Called, no answer, left voicemail
Billed 15 minutes
"I need the answer in an email, thanks."
Also the essential "Please submit your response to my question in the form of an answer to the question", otherwise you'll never get one.
It’s about to get a lot worse too. Gen Z has had noticeably worse reading comprehension scores over the last 5-10 years and they are starting to enter the workforce now. Many prefer video over text and firmly believe that written text is “the harder medium”.
Not gonna lie, I've had the PR issue before.
The solution? Blast the PR into your shared slack noting that it isn't being reviewed on time because maybe XYZ person is busy.
Watch how fast they are suddenly free to review when their name is attached to something in public.
The real solution is to simply fire these people. There is no good excuse for ignoring requests repeatedly besides laziness or self importance.
>There is no good excuse for ignoring requests repeatedly besides laziness or self importance.
Not necessarily, there are also plenty of cases where a person's KPIs don't match their responsibilities or the actual needs of the team. This is frequently a management problem where resources haven't been properly assigned and the employee will always prioritize what they are evaluated on to minimize friction. Far too often managers collect responsibilities for their team (or are told to take on something), yet have zero plans other than "it will work itself out" and they don't bother to formalize how the requests will be dealt with.
There are certainly a lot of people out there that refuse to do their jobs, but it is common enough that there is something else wrong that a discussion with the manager about where the process is failing is the first step.
It’s not necessarily laziness. They just don’t care about your request. “This thing you’re asking for is not important compared to the other things I need do.”
I used to run build call and this was the bane of my existence. People who just never engage (but pretend they are to get you to go away).
what is "build call"?
Fair question. It might be internal jargon. Refers to making a go/no-go “call” on the quality/readiness of a new build.
e.g. A new release candidate is built and tested from a commit. Some tests fail and each test failure is blocking unless the product area owner (or test owner) attests that the issue is not a blocker (test flakiness, test environment specific issue, extremely low priority bug, etc). The build can release only when all test blockers are closed out.
Most build call processes I’ve seen burn more time investigating flaky tests than real issues and the person running build call (often the “release driver”) typically wastes significant time flogging people to close out the same flaky bugs from the last build. I strongly recommend not building one if you can avoid it.
> The real solution is to simply fire these people.
I don't think that firing people is an intelligent solution to a problem that boils down to your personal inconvenience.
If you posted a PR and it's awaiting review, it is no longer your problem. You are literally blocked by others. Who knows what they are dealing with? Perhaps they have higher priority items than reviewing your work? I mean, would you stop making this complain after they review your 3rd or 30th PR? Everyone around you also has work to do.
If PR reviews are slow, escalate the issue with your manager.
This is why I said "repeatedly" i.e. a pattern has already emerged.
And in most companies I've worked at you are the one being held responsible for a PR/feature not being merged or finished on time - at least in my experience. You're often working on a different team from the people doing reviews, so in a large enough company they are just a faceless/nameless person from the perspective of your PM.
> And in most companies I've worked at you are the one being held responsible for a PR/feature not being merged or finished on time - at least in my experience. L
You are responsible for delivering tasks, but if you are blocked by the process then it's not you who is preventing the task from being delivered. Whether it's the scrum master or sdm or project manager, someone else is responsible for keeping the tasks moving. Once you mark a task as pending review, you are blocked. From that point onward all you have to do is raise awareness of reviewers to the task pending review, and raise visibility with stakeholders that your deliverable is being blocked by the review. As long as you don't slack in raising awareness, it's not your problem anymore.
Crazy solution to fire people. Found a toxic person in waiting.
[dead]
you are describing a work cultural issue - putting merges on the person that is writing, as a personal failing of people focusing on getting their own code merged, and probably having similar difficulty with that.
why are you working on teams where you are always touching somebody else's code without also making friends with them?
> it is no longer your problem
This is absolutely not true. If I can’t check in a fix or a feature because someone else isn’t doing the review, it’s definitely still my problem.
> This is absolutely not true. If I can’t check in a fix or a feature because someone else isn’t doing the review, it’s definitely still my problem
It isn't. It's your scrum master's/Manager's problem, because the ticket is blocked in review.
In the meantime you moved on to another task. Because the review is not your problem.
If I told my manager it was his problem to get my code reviewed, he would tell me to do my job.
Offloading responsibility for getting code through review to a manager or scrum master sounds at least as dysfunctional as people avoiding doing the reviews.
> If I told my manager it was his problem to get my code reviewed, he would tell me to do my job.
If that's how you interact with your team members, no wonder they refuse working with you.
What any competent developer does is a) update ticket to move it to review, b) call out the PR in whatever system you guys use, c) after a reasonable amount or time inform your scrum master/manager that your task is code-complete and is blocked by the review, d) update ticket with a notice that PR is still pending review. Go back to step b) and repeat until the PR is merged.
Done.
Updating the ticket and making a best effort to get the ticket moving is all that's expected from you. By design. That's how things are supposed to work. If your manager doesn't care, it's nothing they want to push anyway, as proven by the ticket history.
> no wonder they refuse working with you.
Weird and abrasive assumption you make.
> Updating the ticket and making a best effort to get the ticket moving is all that's expected from you.
I have never worked somewhere that ran things as you describe. But then everywhere I’ve ever worked has expected a high level of personal responsibility, not “best effort” that consists of a one time Slack message and tagging work as blocked.
This may be small nuclear team vs sprawling org difference.
This process works so well in a team that are all pushing together.
Moving the ticket along and a slack to the effect of "this one is quick and easy" Vs "this one's a bit gnarly, happy to jump on it with someone" generally sees PRs reviewed very quickly.
A pleading cat gif is usually enough as a reminder.
A well oiled team is working to deliver customer value (internal or external). I've been lucky enough to have had a few teams of incredibly good engineers over the years. So much gets done.
I can see it not working so well in a team of "individuals" focused on their own performance and "personal responsibility" solely for their bit.
The kind of teams that throw everything over the wall to an individual making a build gate go/no-go decision perhaps.
> This may be small nuclear team vs sprawling org difference.
This is very likely a big part of the difference. Most of my career has been spent at very large companies. Smaller teams that can manage to be more inwardly focused with fewer cross, team dependencies, can doubtless operate differently.
> The kind of teams that throw everything over the wall to an individual making a build gate go/no-go decision perhaps.
That’s not really what I described. I ran the process, not the fundamental go/no go decision, which was a distributed responsibility. That was the exact friction, and it’s very similar to the code review friction in large organizations. A PR author has a responsibility for their PR but it may require sign off from numerous other teams.
Some of this is necessary complexity that arises from large teams building large products. Some of it is certainly dysfunction.
When a small team sits close to each other, you can simply say: "hey guys, anyone got time to check my PR?".
In a gigantic org, you can message them on Teams, but everyone keeps getting messages on Teams constantly so they are probably going to ignore you for an hour.
> Weird and abrasive assumption you make.
Dude, you're the one talking about talking down to people telling them they are not doing their job. Relax.
> I have never worked somewhere that ran things as you describe.
What do you think a PR reviews process is? It is literally "I will be prevented from merging my work so that all of you may have a say on what I'm doing".
This is precisely how and why it is designed to work.
In basic scrum, you know that part where the scrum master asks in daily meeting whether people are blocked? What do you think it is used for?
Pray tell, what do you think a PR is used for, and how does the process work?
> Dude, you're the one talking about talking down to people telling them they are not doing their job. Relax.
What are you talking about? Are you confusing different commenters or are you intentionally trying to put words in my mouth?
And don’t tell people to relax when you are being actively rude. Try instead not being rude.
> What do you think a PR reviews process is?
It is not possible that you suddenly think our disagreement is about what a PR is rather who has responsibility to shepherd code through the process.
At this point I doubt your good faith so I’m out. Take care.
You're describing a specific way of working.
I've worked at places that operate the way you're describing.
The place I currently work at operates quite differently. We also ship more software, faster, and it's of higher quality.
Make of that what you will.
> The place I currently work at operates quite differently.
If your place of work had no one responsible for setting work priorities of managing task delivery and then find yourself blocked by mundane things like a PR then it seems you are developing novel ways of being dysfunctional. Perhaps you PR process is indeed not the problem but a symptom.
It's pretty rare that I get blocked on something mundane like a PR, but if I do I just tend to message a colleague something along the lines of, "hey, can you please take a look at X when you next have a moment? blocking me for Y" and that resolves the issue promptly.
TBH I think micromanaging inter-team communication by turning it into a process that requires a responsible individual to run is far more dysfunctional.
It is managers responsibility to set priorities including those of other team members. Including priorities of code review. That is not offloading. It is also considerably less toxic then "I demand people to be fired because my code review was not done in 12 hours".
Your PR is not the importantest thing being worked on.
I didn’t say anything about firing people.
What I said is it’s not my manager’s job to wrangle people to do code reviews for me. It’s absurd that the immediate response to friction is to offload it to someone else. Certainly if there is a cultural problem, or misaligned priorities, discuss the general issue with your manager. But “I set the ticket to blocked so I’m done” is not an acceptable process anywhere I’ve ever worked.
Much of the time the person I’m waiting on doesn’t report to my manager anyway. My manager can’t change their priorities any more than I can.
> Much of the time the person I’m waiting on doesn’t report to my manager anyway
But there exists a manager who is the nearest common ancestor of your and their manager.
Sometimes that’s the CEO, but sure.
This doesn’t change much though. If there is a general problem, it’s likely appropriate to pull in management to figure out the issue. But it’s probably not a management problem that my specific PR needs a review.
It's literally the most management problem imaginable.
Management decides the process, management decides who to hire, management assigns the roles and management decides how urgent the work is.
If the constellation is so that reviews are required, but the reviewer is not under the control by the manager and reviews do not happen, then some manager somewhere made a mistake.
Why? Because PRs are expected to be reviewed. Any process in which that does not work automatically is dysfunctional and needs to be fixed until PRs are being reviewed properly again.
If everything is working as intended, but it's the manager who created a false sense of urgency and pushed all of the responsibility onto the person who cannot do anything about that, then the only person who can fix the problem is the manager and the thing he has to do is something very easy: be more patient.
Edit: It might not be obvious, but all the things you claim that strengthen your position are already table stakes and assumed to happen regardless. The question is, who is responsible for making the invisible and automatic happen? And you're saying the manager can shirk his responsibility onto the blocked employee, which is hilarious because it means your entire operational strategy for fixing a broken process relies purely on being lucky.
Another thing that might not be obvious but if you write a bad pull request and the reviewer tells you it is bad and can't be merged that's on you as well, no shit Sherlock.
> Management decides the process, management decides who to hire, management assigns the roles and management decides how urgent the work is.
Also, management decides whom to blame. :)
> What I said is it’s not my manager’s job to wrangle people to do code reviews for me.
I'm sorry to say, but it is. Is your manager responsible for managing workloads, task assignments, and priorities?
> It’s absurd that the immediate response to friction is to offload it to someone else.
That doesn't sound right. A PR review literally requires you to dump your workload onto someone else. Often times a PR requires significant amounts of time to review. Your team members need to set aside significant amounts of time out of their schedule to look at your work.
You cannot frame a problem that fundamentally revolves around dumping work onto someone else as being absurd to dump your work onto someone else. I mean, what do you think happens when you ask someone to review your work? Do you expect your team members to blindly sign off?
It's obviously about offloading work. And it's the Manager's job ro set those priorities.
It sounds way more dysfunctional to start doing the managers job to me.
If you think it is your responsibility to get a reviewer on the other side to prioritise reviewing your work then you basically made yourself responsible for hiring and firing people or reassigning their project responsibilities.
By the time you managed to have your review get through you might not even be a developer anymore.
> By the time you managed to have your review get through you might not even be a developer anymore.
That’s fair. No one I work with is “just a dev”. Everyone has responsibilities well beyond “take next item off backlog and implement”.
Dogbert: "I can only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good, either."
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.
> Blocking off face-to-face time is a signal that the work is important enough to get done.
This.
I'd also add that not bothering to book a meeting means that people treat you like a low-value work queue that they use to dump low-visibility and low-accountability work. They invoke you to handle silly tasks that no one but you accept.
By requiring a meeting, you're increasing the threshold of effort that your requester is willing to invest in getting it done. If they can't be bothered doing a meeting, you shouldn't bother doing the work for them.
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.
Me too. I used to be super dilligent about immediately responding to emails, requests, meeting invites and I never once benefited from doing so. I only trained my peers into learning that I was a "yes man" that always responded quickly, and they abused this.
Therefore, I now no longer rush at all responding to emails unless its actually urgent and concrete. If someone sends vague requests, I just don't ansewr. If they don't come back, I can infer it probably wasn't that important or they found some resolution on their own.
I also never respond to meeting invites just in case I can avoid the meeting. I think I've probably dodged 100 unnecessary meetings over the last couple of years by literally just never responding or showing up. I of course don't do this with 1-1 meetings, but meetings with: multiple people where I'm not needed, there is no listed agenda, and my involvement is not clear; F that.
I also frequently just say "no, I can't", which I didn't for most of my carreer, and just suddenly realized I could do largely without consequences or repercussions. It's fascinating.
Not advocating this, just more addressing the mindset on it, but in the game of office politics people don't mention concerns ahead of time because they don't want to give the opposing view point opportunity to research how to defeat their argument in a meeting, not that they "can't" give an intelligent response. They're choosing not to in their own self interest.
"The enemy must not know where I intend to give battle; for if he does not know where I intend to give battle, he must be prepared in a great many places. And when he prepares in a great many places, those I have to fight in any one-given place will be but few."
You generally also get paid with ~10% of everyone else, regardless if you get 3x more done or 3x less done.
So, if like most people, your working to live instead living to work - your employer is doing a terrible job incentivizing you to do more than the bare minimum.
We all know you are far better off doing almost nothing and then all your time trying to get promoted for it, than trying to get promoted by actually doing a good job and thinking you'll get promoted based on merit.
Anyone who would advocate for this strategy against any SME is a moron anyway.
It's like watching someone who's expecting a knife fight walk in with a concealed handgun only to be immediately confronted with a tank.
The email is usually an attempt to not waste time in the meeting and get shit done. Leadership always favors those who can make it so. Anyone who stalls for time or hides information will always look bad. I don't get why people so desperately try anyway.
Most of these strange gambits in office politics are a losing game for the inept and inexperienced. One can only wonder why we keep pretending like there even is such a "game" of office politics.
im unconvinced.
id place the reason that its more work to identify and raise those concerns ahead of time, since if they are correct, you did all that work coming up with the happy path and the issues ahead of time, vs if the issues come up later, you can focus on and fix them as they come up.
i dont think the meeting is in focus at all
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.".
Well, most of the time "this could have been an email" means "if it were an e-mail, I could just ignore it instead of having an hour of my life wasted".
I think not reading or responding to e-mails is largely (from my experience) indicative of more fundamental communication problems in the company/group.
The first problem is e-mail fatigue. Many groups have ridiculous amounts of automated e-mails that amount to line noise. The information in them is rarely actionable and certainly never so critical it needs to be read by everyone immediately. "Everything is OK" alarms are fucking infuriating. It's very easy to miss the super highly critical e-mail from a manager that's just a lazily forwarded e-mail from the automated systems. The "Have you seen this?" with the entire contents of the line noise e-mail from the automated system.
Second is people, especially middle management, that for some reason assume e-mail is a real-time communication medium. They send an e-mail and expect the recipients to drop everything to respond to it. Simultaneously the people actually doing work are actually working and not checking their e-mail every nanosecond to see if they need to drop their actual work to explain their actual work to management. So then the middle management sends a cascade of instant messages and schedules meetings to get the people doing actual work to drop everything to explain their actual work. These meetings will inevitably contain complaints about not getting work done.
It's now even worse with AI in the middle. Instead of using LLMs to write easy to scan and digest bullet point e-mails they're used to expand bullet points into useless novellas.
My solutions to these problems are thus:
1. RSS - Automated systems should just emit RSS feeds with their normal status with separate feeds for exceptional conditions. Only in those actual "machine on fire" conditions are e-mails sent by such systems. Parties interested in constant updates just watch their feed reader and everyone has a single source of truth for event logs from the automated systems.
2. Automated systems should just file tickets automatically so everyone involved has a single source of truth and can all collaborate in one place. Even better if the ticket/bug tracker supports RSS because it becomes dead simple for anyone to follow feeds they're interested in and even set up system notifications for new issues.
3. Company/group wide e-mail policies that constantly remind everyone it's not a real-time medium and that filling everyone's inbox with noise is not effective communication. This can be enforced with automated delivery delays guaranteeing e-mail won't be immediately delivered as a safeguard against people using it instead of actual real-time channels.
4. Verbose e-mails are also rarely effective communication and shared LLM prompts that make e-mails shorter and clearer would also help.
Removing most of the noise from e-mail makes it more effective and can make it an actual communication medium. If e-mail becomes effective communication far less of everyone's limited lives needs to be spent zoning out in meetings where their only purpose is to "give a status update".
Back in the days of paper memos the literal cost and effort required to send them required the sender to really think about what they were trying to communicate and how to say it best. Because e-mail is essentially free it is widely abused since so little thought needs to go into its composition and delivery.
> * 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.
You hit the nail on this, a lot coming from middle managers too who still think that a busy calendar of these meetings it means they are very productive. I remember a manager I worked with, he was so keen on having meetings, a discussion between me and a colleague and he overheard it? Meeting to discuss “the conflict”!! It was soul crushing experience thankfully i left quickly, only to know later he started having meetings for meetings, so in those meetings they discuss what they will discuss on the other meetings!
Also, there are some other sinister reasons, an email is an artifact that can be traced and searched, a meeting usually is just verbal communication and even meeting minutes get challenged later.
Email chains can fail to converge. Yeah, the meeting could have been an email, but what if it was going to be 20 email back-and-forths? And not everybody is responding quickly?
You ask three people what we should do about a problem. They float ideas. You think the discussion is converging on a solution, and then one of them (who hasn't been heard from for the last three days) suddenly protests where the group is going, saying that they don't agree at all, that they have several concerns, that nobody talked to this other group that needs to be consulted, and so on. Then for that other group, nobody responds for a week because they're busy on something else.
A meeting can force people to say what they have to say, now, or be ignored. That forcing function has value.
And it's not (just) that "people refuse to do anything". It's that multiple people, doing things asynchronously, on different time rhythms, sometimes means that the group consensus advances v e r y s l o w l y, if at all.
With any request, schedule a follow up meeting to discuss the completed work, or to perform an autopsy if there was some impediment.
Make sure to actually say “autopsy”.
“Inquisition”, “colonoscopy” or “employment review” all work well too.
If you have two Bob’s definitely get them involved.
Then have a practice of letting such meetings be cancelled if the work is done and went well.
This can be done as a consistent and transparent inside joke. Humor often generates the social permission to communicate hard truths, by also providing psychological stress dispertion.
I cannot vouch for any of this, but please share your experiences.
At my company it is "post-mortem"
How you asked them why?
It could be more productive than being angry. Or not, but worth a try.
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.
A highly profitable company can be poorly run and still survive exactly because there is so much more margin for error than for a company which is barely profitable (or worse).
Granted, that kind of situation is unlikely to continue indefinitely, but it certainly can happen.
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.
If you reduce a companies purpose to solely being "making money" then by that definition sure.
But in my opinion the worship of money and reduction of everything to being solely a dollar maximizer is one of the biggest problems that humanity has at the moment - it is a reduction in purpose by the blind and greedy.
My definition of a well run company is one that is still profitable, but has happy employees who are maximizing their potential and growth. Who is a good tax paying entity so that it contributes back to the society that is supporting it. Is making a healthy return for its shareholders despite all of this, and is not doing anything evil like producing toxic chemicals, harming vulnerable people or polluting the environment.
Is it idealistic? Yes of course it is. Our collective description of greatness should be to aim at perfection so that even falling short of it is still excellent.
Saying it must be well run because its profitable makes me sick, because that line of thinking feeds unrestrained greed, and is exactly the reason our state of capitalism is so unbalanced and full of greed right now.
Unfortunately, the market is a competitive environment, and it's competition that ultimately reduces companies to money printers. Your idealistic companies, if they existed, got outcompeted by those who sacrificed some of that idealism in exchange for a little more profit.
Wrong. You are being too much "economic idealism" - the market is not perfectly efficient and theres easily enough room for companies like I describe, and they exist today, especially in more well rounded European countries.
And then seperatly, we are talking about the definition of "well run companies" and I was putting forward my definition of one, which is what we are talking about in this thread.
In this second case, some people live life only bothering to deal with crises, and delay anything else. It's likely not the direct threat of a meeting, but that you've made it clear it's a crisis.
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.
An innovative approach. And by submitting a PR on Friday afternoon, you might get a free hand to do anything you like!
or 30k lines of slop every 5 minutes, nights and weekends included
why have review or ownership at all? git bisect and page the cause automatically
but also, you arent really blcoked on anyones review. just open a fork of their service and run a copy on your own team
Let me be that guy.
Your “well-written” problem statement will create thankless work for me that nobody will see or appreciate. I know this because “you” usually send me your “urgent” non-issues and (asinine) “solutions” but, being the diplomatic guy that I am and actually understanding the game that I am forced to play, in contrast to you, I will deny, deflect and if cornered, will call a meeting in what can only be described as some form of malicious corporate compliance. This is all because I am too polite and too political to just say “get lost”. I would if I could, but I can’t. “You” usually have some leverage because you are good with networks or the details of FreeBSD or whatever.
i recently decided to see if i could make an "agentic" NBER and use its agents to do research for my other agents in the agentic state. I would love to speak w/ someone there and show them the sims, I do not think all of the meetings are needed and eventually there will just be agent proxy meetings that send messages to some HITL when needed for more guidance, This cold put more value on the real meetings IMO.
Note: THIS IS JUST FOR FUN, because I needed an economic policy thinktank for my agents to query. I had to do the same for CEPR
https://nber.dev
this is to say that alignment and prioritization arent the same thing.
they agree to the thing, but making a meeting moves the priority from low to high because you are signalling through making a meeting that it is high priority
Eh, i see it mostly as a delay tactic rather than anything else. After yhat, its a scheduling forcing method. Then lastly, they just are procrastinators so they use other peoples time as the ordering of their work.
I have this even on slack. I prefer text because it gives me time to thi k before responding but I think some people just don't have very good reading comprehension. Or writing skills.
So they force everything to "let's set up a chat about this".
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.
I firmly believe 20 minutes is the optimal amount of time to meet, introduce a problem and evidence, and make a decision that allows all parties to move forward aligned.
I suspect office work defaulted to 30 minute calls because of TV/Radio broadcasts in the early 20th century, but I haven't researched this theory further.
I think humans just prefer halves and quarters over thirds. So, you either get a full hour, a half hour, or a 15 minute meeting.
> What bothers me most about meetings is their duration. There's no need to schedule hour-long meetings.
So finish them.
"What else is on the agenda?"
"Have we covered off everything?"
"Let's schedule a separate session for that."
"I think we're aligned. Let's wrap up early."
Etc.
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?
What's particularly annoying is once the meeting is arbitrarily scheduled in for say an hour then many feel the need to drag the meeting out over that entire hour regardless of if everything important has been covered within 20 minutes. Along with this comes the annoying trend of the meeting organiser 'giving you time back' if they conclude the meeting slightly early as if they are doing you a favour for not running the meeting for the entire duration when really that should be the default.
A big reason is a lack of agency. I work with large organisations where people cannot or do not know if they can make an executive decision. What to do? Call a meeting with everyone who might have a view on it so that you can then make a decision.
The problem, of course, is when an important person is not available so a decision is not made and then when something comes up mid-week, we need to wait another week to have another meeting.
Give people guiderails, let them try (and fail sometimes) and watch them flourish. On the other hand, tell them that they need permissions from X, Y and Z and watch them do the minimum amount possible.
It's also about lack of leadership and (true) strategy. Many large organizations just careen from "crisis" to "crisis" and are extremely reactive; lacking a long term strategy and clear plan, it becomes extremely hard to actually make decisions.
People endlessly defer because they don't want to be the person to "take the blame" for a decision. Making decisions when you don't connect them to an actual goal/plan/vision becomes a liability. The solution is endless meetings where liability is distributed to...everyone in the meeting. It's successful, in a way, but also exhausting and makes you feel like your job involves just tilting at windmills (imaginary crises).
The problem is failure seems more costly than the 30-120 minute call that may align all necessary parties. I think a lot of effective work cultures have moved towards the "move fast and expect mistakes" mentality you describe, but most people/organizations are still carrying mentalities from the "old ways"
> tell them that they need permissions from X, Y and Z and watch them do the minimum amount possible.
ah, this, so much this
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)
A less cynical way to put this is that it's a type of socialization (in an organizational context): the process of sharing and building internal consensus around a new concept.
That can take many forms, but communication before a big meeting is common because if you're announcing a new idea, you want people to support it, and springing it on everyone for the first time in a big meeting is just gambling.
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.
Indeed, the enjoyment in software engineering may come from problem-solving (for many of us at least) - but that means that at the end of it, you've created something that solves that client's problem; you've built something for them that they're now going to use. The requirements stage, and subsequent refining based on what the client needs to do, absolutely is the most important stage.
> a significant part of that success came from Notch's very active involvement in the community
I've never heard it argued otherwise, although it probably doesn't get emphasized enough. It was very interesting at the time to watch how closely he interacted with the community, asking opinions and listening, while also making them feel involved by being open about the details of what he was doing. It was a massively refreshing counter to the way the big game studios were coming across so arrogantly at the time, being certain they knew better than their users about what the users wanted. Notch's attitude created that community feel around the game, and made you feel unusually close to the development and even the decision-making processes. That in turn led to word-of-mouth advertising that resulted in Minecraft becoming one of the biggest selling games of all time.
Why do I feel every meeting has a rambling motormouth that will speak for at least 80% of the meeting, making the most obvious, remedial "points" (with illustrative anecdotes of course and repeating them over and over) and then keep the meeting running late?
This sounds like a former CEO I used to work with. Huddled an entire team into a meeting g bc he wanted an update, proceeded to talk through 80% of the meeting time.
End result: someone was appointed to send an email with the update.
Taking up airtime gets you promoted. It's kinda that simple.
People with no social lives outside of work tend to do that. They have no one to talk to other then on meetings, so they talk a lot on meetings. They are not aware of what they are doing, but it is a consistent pattern.
Hey, it’s our new VP.
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.
This. Seems like the more you sync with your manager, the more he/she likes you and your career seems to flourish. Nothing much to do with the quality of your thinking or work it seems. If I do my job but don't have a great relationship with my manager, to hell with my career. But if I sync with my manager everyday for even the smallest minutiae, I am seen as team player. Go figure.
It's simple.
It's the laziest and easiest way to get alignment.
Plus, Not everyone hates it.
It's nice to finally ask Mr A why they said Mr B should be working on login v2 instead of fixing bug b.
Management feels empowered and feels like they know what's going on if everyone meets.
> 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.
As our economy becomes more and more riddled with nonsense jobs that provide no economic value, it becomes increasingly important for the people in those jobs to create the impression of value (this is their only product), and that's what meetings are largely for. Excessive pointless meetings are not broccoli, even if meeting-attenders see higher wage growth than their peers. Excessive meetings are a symptom of an economy that's becoming more and more disconnected from the real world and from creation of real economic value.
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)
Meetings make the cost of collaboration and uncertainty visible. As disruptive as they are I find them to be the most effective way to explain to less technical stakeholders why something is particularly complex or exactly why we need high degrees of certainty in seemingly unimportant portions of the product spec.
They also drive me crazy since we tend to have many of them with relatively little actionable output, but as others have said what tends to happen in the wake of these is the technical people backchannel our own conversations about what needs doing and the sequencing of what we should build to meet the evolving product vision.
What frustrates me is when I complain about there being many meetings on my calendar I'm told to just decline them, but then I'm effectively ceding authority since the time to voice opposition to a particular plan or task is in whatever meeting I'm declining.
Perhaps all of the above is more prevalent in product-led orgs rather than engineering-led orgs, I'm curious if people on the other side of the spectrum have different anecdotes.
The paper seems like a high school science project, but in my experience one common reason for having a meeting is this: Person A wants Person B (Person C's boss) to tell Person C to do something. That's it. So Person A slacks or emails Person B saying I need to get Person C to do this thing. Person B says oh we better have a meeting. The three get onto the meeting and Person B says "yeah so Person A was talking about this thing, I'm not really sure what it is...". And the meeting ends with Person C saying "ok I will do that".
All of this can be avoided in my experience by creating a culture of task assignment. Often I've seen the bug/issue tracking system used to facilitate this but you can use other applications. In this scenario Person A would open a bug detailing what they want done, and either assign it, or put it in the triage queue so Person B get assigned next. Person B reviews, makes any notes, then assigns to Person C. That's it. No meeting.
Every time a meeting is canceled, an angel gets its wings
A byproduct of working remote is the amount of human connection in general has gone way down. The only time I "see" the people I work with anymore is when we're on a meeting.
Meetings that could have been an email, in some ways, are replacing hallway and water cooler conversations. Are they a good replacement for that? Not really.
Meetings are the broccoli of work – widely disliked, but probably good for us anyway.
If you don't like broccoli, it just means you're preparing it wrong. Don't steam it, boil it, or microwave it. Here's how I prep frozen broccoli.
Preheat your oven to 400ºF/200ºC.
As soon as the oven has preheated, put the frozen broccoli into a mixing bowl and drizzle 2tbsp / 30ml of olive oil over it, and toss with your fingers.
Spread the broccoli over a baking sheet, sprinkle a small amount of salt over it, and bake for 20 minutes.
Also, broccoli has been bred to be less bitter over the years, starting somewhere around the 1990s. People who remember it from before that as a child may remember a much less tasty vegetable, particularly if they're sensitive to bitterness.
Thanks. Will try that. The other way to enjoy it is eating it raw in a salad .. but yes "don't steam it, boil it, or microwave it"
That can also be excellent, but it's much harder for some people to digest! For instance, I'm not a fan of how I feel from eating raw cruciferous vegetables even though they are delicious.
Also, this feels like a great time to reshare that Brussel sprouts really were disgusting 30 years ago, and they are so much better today. https://www.allrecipes.com/science-why-brussels-sprouts-tast...
steamed broccoli is great though. i think a lot of people overcook it at which point it switches from great to disgusting, but maybe its also a parsley/cilantro type deal where some people taste certain things as being extremely similar to piss?
Same here. Love steamed. But if you overdo it, it changes color/texture and starts to taste nasty. But get it just right and it's amazing with a bit of butter, or in a pasta, or almost anything.
The fundamental problem is that brain-to-brain transfer of information is really hard. And face-to-face communication is often a better vehicle for it than written communication.
People don’t want to do the work sandwiched between stating they are going to do A Thing, and then finishing with stating that they did A Thing.
It’s redundant.
Managers don’t care about the actual work. They just care about the “going to do A Thing” and “Finished A Thing” comms.
So those two slices of bread at the end become two meetings.
Since I get to make certain rules, one of them is that I won’t (one exception below) attend a meeting without an agenda and context. It’s not the Bezos paper, but simply something like “let’s nail down the skeleton of the Fubarco proposal: I think we should have the sections 1: agreed abojectives, 2:…. I’m not sure about 4, which is why we need to talk. Agenda: A: agree on the structure, B: give each section an owner; I suggest…”
Often that’s enough to cause the meeting not to happen.
(We are remote most dayssome have one unstructured morning meeting called “watercooler discussion. Not a standup!!”)
One thing that I've been wondering is if I could somehow transmit everything in my head somehow automatically into text so that an LLM can reasonably respond to almost everything about what I'm doing and how updated live to other people. Perhaps it could escalate the things that matter to me and meetings would be transformed so that others could pull things out of me faster than having to talk to me. I might even be completely obviated by sufficient encoding of self.
Perhaps the visible actions and text I write are all holographic-principle-like sufficient encoding of my invisible prior thought given sufficient information. Curious to see!
We are not even remotely near the point of being able to interpret the complexities of thought in a way that we can transmit them outside of the head automatically.
Simple commands, maybe some voluntary muscle control. But nothing as complex as 'What are the pros and cons of these two business approaches?'
This neurolink video is SOTA as far as I know, and they're getting words/sentences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j806JHhCRo
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.
What I would really like to know, is:
- why do meetings make attendees feel important?
- why do everyone pretend to dislike meeting, yet obviously very few actualy do
Isn't someone already working on a system were every employee has an AI companion that would represent them during meetings? The employee chat about the meeting's topic with her avatar beforehand until they are on the same page, then for all the avatars hold a meeting at the speed of light and come back with the overall decision that was reached. No more politics, and perfectly asynchronous. I'd love it.
TL;DR People are pushed to specialize as companies grow and meetings are cartesian products of interests.
As responsibilities become increasingly important (more financial import), their work is divided into specialized slices for optimization, redundancy, and bus factor. The number of combinations of people that might be necessary to answer questions or provide guidance in decisioning expands exponentially (small slope, correlating to recruitment). If something in a meeting is considered missed, unsaid, or backtracked, the event is memorialized and pushes for more meeting with a larger audience. The people in large meetings self-select into smaller meetings around their specific vertical interests, in order to align with the interpreted decisions of the larger meetings.
Meeting bloat is the result of a conflux of human behavior, lossy communication, optimized behavior and competing interests. If it was a simple single reason, humans would have solved it long ago.
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.
I've run a 1-man software company for the last 21 years. I don't think I've had anything you would call a meeting in that time. Also haven't worn a tie, commuted more than 1 minute to my office or had to set my alarm clock for work. Living the dream. ;0)
I must congratulate you.
Because, in my experience, most middle managers don't know how to manage people effectively. Instead of focusing on outcomes, they focus on activity.
It's like measuring how fast the wheels are spinning rather than how far the car is actually moving.
https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediu...
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?
you have so many meetings because you send billions of messages that have NO value, but create a wild number of different expectations accross the spread of those involved in any one project, and so meetings are one way to try and get people on the same page. but off course there are now millions of people entrenched in organisations who are messaging and meeting specialists,and for whom procedural tacticts are instinctive and will only defer and conduct actual work when under direct supervision from a superior.
I could talk about how deal with some of that, but, no.
No agenda then no meeting. No meeting longer than 30 mins. Never, ever, EVER let a meeting over run. Which part of Never do you not get?
From my recent experience, I think it is the exact opposite of where we should go for.
We have essentially two kinds of meetings:
- daily meetings, scheduled, 30 minutes, with a timer, overruns happen, but rarely, and not by a lot.
- unscheduled meetings, often more than 1 hour, sometime massive overruns
The latter are by far the more useful ones, and because they are infrequent, take less time overall.
The problem with the daily meetings is that they degenerate into everyone taking turns saying what they are doing, who cares except for the manager? And we have Jira, everything is there. Sometime there is something interesting: maybe someone found something to save everyone's time, maybe a strange bug that need some collective mind to figure out, or a breaking change people need to be aware of. But these report are often cut off by "let's move on, we will talk about it later (maybe)", which mean either another meeting, or people missing information.
The unscheduled meeting however usually have a clear goal, and a solution has to come out of it. Cutting the meeting short without a solution loses the entire point, so overruns are common, but in the end, we have something meaningful.
I work at a small company these days, the ability to “just fix it / make it” and not have many meetings is an absolute joy.
Some reasons, occurring too often:
- Talking is confused with doing
- Design / Decision by committee alone is the path of progress, including attempts to improve itself.
That's a very good question. Let's set up a workgroup that meets once a week.
Meetings make people feel like they have accomplished something
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.
Collaboration requires synchronization.
Most people are unimpressive and mediocre.
Is okay.
Soon no more jobs. Then also no more meetings. Happy happy permanent unemployment
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Boomers want to hear themselves talk they think meetings equal work. They are lazy and instead of learning on their own they require others to spoon feed the information to them.
Boomers are 62-80 years old. Where do you work with an average age like that?
Where do you work that _isn't_ like that? Every job I've had in my 11 year career has had geriatrics at the top of the management chain.
Okay, you might be two-three layers higher than me.
Boomers are insufferable
Boomers are insufferable