alt Hacker NewsWhy do we have so many meetings?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Every time a meeting is canceled, an angel gets its wings
I have recently learned that meetings help with one thing we're really bad at, which is deadline and estimations.
Not meetings about deadline, or meetings about estimation, but the shared experience of having timed events associated with stakeholders and involved parties.
It's like an invisible cue system the brain adapts to and starts reacting/responding to in the form of scheduling and resource allocation. (Which can be a double edged sword for some people: e.g. when they wait until the meeting to ask a question)
A 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.
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)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
That's a very good question. Let's set up a workgroup that meets once a week.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most people are unimpressive and mediocre.
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.
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.
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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.