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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every time a meeting is canceled, an angel gets its wings
> 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.
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)
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?
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.
That's a very good question. Let's set up a workgroup that meets once a week.
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.
Figure 3 is interesting. After manager vs non-manager, the strongest predictor of meeting load is whether the work is in-office or remote, with remote & hybrid workers having both more and (much) longer meetings on average. That lines up with my experience, and is one of the big reasons I dislike hybrid work in particular.
I doubt their data would have supported this, but I do wish they had distinguished hybrid from fully distributed. Anecdotally, the one time I worked at a 100% distributed organization the meetings were efficient and the meeting load was low. Not quite as low as the fully in-office companies, but I think some of that was that we deliberately padded meetings with some social time as a stand-in for the water cooler.
Most people are unimpressive and mediocre.
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.
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.
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.
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.