My take on this... a small meeting among close people can have big payoffs. Much of the payoff is fast transfer due to total communication (body language, casual, back and forth) and then that loses it's power as the meeting gets less intimate. The unexpected face to face conversations and the overall environment are what makes in-office work well. Big meetings lose much of that power. Zoom meetings lose much more of that power. AI note taking sessions... might as well not even bother. Just send docs that of course nobody will read. This is just cargo-culting.
nlawalker · 28m ago
In my experience, at least, it's because a lot of "meetings" aren't actually meetings, they're presentations that are actually better consumed async after the fact, but historical precedent demands that everyone be invited to attend the live taping and emote and cheer politely.
DonsDiscountGas · 2m ago
It's not just historical precedent, it's about creating common knowledge that everybody has received the relevant information
meroes · 29m ago
The problem is these meetings are so low information density even an AI summary is not worth my time. And it’s not some elitist mindset. It’s like the entire reason there are these regular meetings is to make some mid level person feel better. They like giving directions vocally because that authority is harder to question than if they wrote up a memo and all the receivers can poke holes in it. I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills.
hobs · 15m ago
The last sentence is it - most people can't communicate much less write well, hell, I don't write well, but I hope my ideas are at least clearly communicated.
jawns · 8h ago
I bet there are a bunch of people in upper management who hear about this phenomenon and think that employees are skipping meetings to slack off (appearing to do work but they're actually playing Mario Kart).
In reality, it's more likely that they're being judged on their attendance of BS meetings, but if they attend the BS meetings, they won't be able to make the BS deadlines they're responsible for hitting.
So they're likely buying themselves time to do the actually important work, while still attempting to meet unrealistic expectations around meeting attendance.
pj_mukh · 8h ago
Having had been on both sides of this coin, I agree a lot of managers mis-manage meetings.
But then there's those engineers who don't show up to meetings and then a month later come to you with a
"I don't know how we're deciding on some of these critical product features"
and I don't know how to tell them its because they skipped some meetings where they could've been part of that discussion.
jbc1 · 2h ago
Even if the final nod of agreement happens in real time the actual decision making process for critical product features should involve planning, thinking, research, etc. There should be a strong paper trail such that everyone knows what the decision is going to be prior to the "everyone gets together and declares this is how things are going to be" step.
If them missing some meetings means they're in the dark as to how those features were decided on then I can't see that as a defence of attending every meeting so much as a statement of BS meetings being so predominant in the company that all decisions are made through a BS process.
MrJohz · 45m ago
This might not be quite what the previous poster meant, but in my experience it's often not that the developer missed a meeting and now doesn't know some critical piece of information. Rather, it's often that the developer has some knowledge about the code that changes how something should be implemented. Because they weren't at the meeting, nobody else knew about this, and it's only later, when the developer sits down to write the code, that everyone finds out.
In this case, there's nothing to document from the meeting because the information wasn't shared in the first place. The information could only have been shared if the developer had been in the meeting.
(FWIW, I've rarely seen this from a developer not being in a meeting entirely, but I've seen it a few times where a developer has treated the meeting as a "read-only" event, i.e. expected that other people provide all the requirements and not used their own expertise or experience of the code to push back on decisions.)
sneak · 32m ago
Most people in meetings don’t type very fast, and find it easier to talk than to write.
This means that prior to AI transcription/summary bots, there wasn’t much written documentation about the decisions and conclusions from meetings. Now hopefully that will change.
jbc1 · 25m ago
I wasn't so much saying that there should be plenty of documentation generated during a meeting as saying that there should be plenty of documentation prior to the meeting. That the meeting is based on.
Aeolun · 28m ago
> and I don't know how to tell them its because they skipped some meetings where they could've been part of that discussion.
That there was a meeting where that decision was made between 55 minutes of crud doesn’t really mean anything to me though. I’m not wasting an hour of my day every day on the off chance today’s meeting will contain anything of importance.
woah · 12m ago
Then just implement it I guess
david-gpu · 1h ago
It is helpful to communicate in advance what is the specific agenda of each meeting, so that people can make an informed decision on whether to attend.
Also, it may be helpful to have the meeting organizer send meeting notes after every meeting, including action items assigned to specific people. The notes don't need to be extensive, but there better be an executive summary of what decisions were made, if any, and any unexpected roadblocks that were found.
That's how things were done at one of the mega corps where I was employed and it worked great.
bargainbin · 7h ago
100% this. As some who’s regularly derided by his colleagues for “hating meetings”: I don’t “keep meetings to a minimum”, I “keep meetings to a benefit”.
If I’ve called a meeting it’s because there’s a benefit to the instant vocal communication. If you’re not there, you’ve not attended the meeting, no matter which tools you use to record, transcribe or translate.
Conversely, if I thought I didn’t need to be in a meeting, then I wouldn’t send a tool to gather stuff for me to then just ignore the tool output - because I don’t need it.
These tools are a sign of cultural rot from both participants and the fact people are even making them shows deep flaws in how we communicate in the modern workplace.
sokoloff · 7h ago
Just tell ‘em that!
We had an internal RFC comment/discussion meeting on a proposed engineering standard. In that exact meeting, a dev flipped out and expressed exasperation that they weren’t asked to comment on the proposal. In the exact meeting that was one in a series of opportunities to comment on the proposal…
robertlagrant · 7h ago
Yes, this is pretty universal I think. Some people think software engineering in a team is writing code as much as possible, and doing anything else is bad.
skywhopper · 2h ago
Did they get to read the RFC before the meeting? If they had access but didn’t use it, then this is out of line. But if they only got the RFC during the meeting when they were asked to comment, then flipping out is overboard but the feeling is understandable.
theamk · 6h ago
I'd tell them directly.. "You were invited to the meeting on 2025-MM-DD to discuss this, but you did not show up, nor did you follow up with organizers later. Sorry, you've missed your opportunity to comment"
Seems direct and uncontroversial, and IMHO most people react well at this.
8note · 1h ago
but i didnt get invited to the meeting in the first place! and i dont think my management chain was either!
pk-protect-ai · 6h ago
That's the thing, these meetings are B.S. Engineers need a task, time to think, and write about the solution and its cost. Period. Talking in a room full of people who love to hear their own voices and love to stroke their egos does not actually help engineers do their job. When engineers need to communicate, they communicate with their colleagues. There are tools for such communications that do not require talking and immediate responses. Being reactive (which is what meetings enforce you to do) costs more, as reactive and forced responses will be far more technically unsound.
zdragnar · 28m ago
Feature development is rarely so cut and dry that you can hand a developer a task and let them run with it.
To get there, you need a confluence of context and expertise from several domains:
- what problem needs to be solved (user story)
- what options are available (interaction design, technical capabilities)
- what the cost of implementing each option is, and the opportunity cost of each level of implementation / each option (technical capability, resource management, sales, user research)
- managing group consensus on the path forward (communication to technical and non-technical audiences)
- break down of any large chunks of work into smaller tasks that can be done and planning the work to be done in series or parallel (resource management, technical capabilities)
Finally, after all of that, you have a task (or several) that can be handed off.
There's really no way to get here without at least some thought into the implementation details, as the business can't make the decision on which options without knowing rough timelines.
woah · 10m ago
> Engineers need a task, time to think, and write about the solution and its cost. Period. Talking in a room full of people who love to hear their own voices and love to stroke their egos does not actually help engineers do their job. When engineers need to communicate, they communicate with their colleagues.
Seems like when you say "engineers", you mean "people with my exact personality"
mystifyingpoi · 8h ago
> while still attempting to meet unrealistic expectations around meeting attendance
I've routinely seen people attending a meeting from the office on Zoom camera, all gathered in a single big conference room, all looking and typing on their laptops for the entirety of the meeting, saying something maybe once or twice. I suppose they were simply working on their assigned tasks, listening to others in the background. How effective is that - I don't know.
These days I don't care. I'm 100% "at work" when I'm in the office, so whatever. I just pull up my phone and plan my next vacation trip or whatever. When I'm remotely I take my laptop to the kitchen and start preparing stuff for dinner. Life is too short for this mess.
celsius1414 · 1h ago
> I suppose they were simply working on their assigned tasks, listening to others in the background. How effective is that - I don't know.
If I’m doing that, I’m taking notes on the meeting. As long as the agenda items are at all relevant.
theamk · 6h ago
Many meetings I've been on only require my attention for a small part. So I've been doing my work and listening in background; once they start talking about part I care about I stop my work and start to actually participate.
LiquidSky · 8h ago
These are the same executives/managers who lost their minds at the idea of butts not being in the physical seats at the office, so yeah.
apwell23 · 7h ago
> it's more likely that they're being judged on their attendance of BS meetings
Some middle manager types in my company track emoji reactions to their messages in slack. I got written up for it, no joke.
That was easy to automate though.
vjvjvjvjghv · 20m ago
That’s next level.
david-gpu · 1h ago
I would be updating my resume and talking to old colleagues. What a load of BS you have to deal with, man.
Leo-thorne · 8m ago
I use AI to take meeting notes too, and it really makes things easier. I can focus more on listening. But sometimes it changes the vibe a bit, like we’re all just talking to a bunch of bots. Now I only use it when I’m leading the meeting, and I always ask if others are okay with it. The tool is helpful, but real human connection still matters.
skeeter2020 · 8h ago
I feel this is a symptom of poor meetings, where they are used for information exchange (which I think should come before the meeting) instead of collaboration and problem solving. You could save your time and a bunch of AI-generated notes you'll never read with the simple rule of "no agenda, no attenda". Remote has allowed us to adopt meeting policies that would never exist in-person: giant, long, back-to-back sessions with no purpose, plan or opportunity to pee.
asabla · 8h ago
> no agenda, no attenda
I've been using this mentality for the last three years. Some responds with hostility and some see the benefits, but most are just indifferent to it sadly.
I've also been observing people just throw in a short sentence or some AI generated shit list which is then not followed during the meeting.
But those who take this seriously usually have pretty darn good meetings (e.g not book the full hour, force people to stay on topic, shares notes after the meeting etc)
Aeolun · 24m ago
I like my meeting where we don’t have a fixed agenda but anyone can bring something up. If there’s nothing, we just end the meeting.
Scarblac · 8h ago
What do you do if you skip such a meeting and a decision you don't like but that you can't weigh in on anymore is taken there?
chongli · 25s ago
That’s where you have stakeholders within a company and you require sign-off for decisions that affect them.
asabla · 8h ago
If it's essential that I attend for such a meeting, the organizer usually reach out.
If not. Then I'll have to either live with the decision or at least give feedback on it.
Nothing is final until you build it (from a developer point of view).
bee_rider · 7h ago
Maybe “make a decision about X” should be on the agenda? I bet he’d show up in that case, if he cared about X.
Scarblac · 5h ago
Yes, but that's too late now. If everybody else did show up and discussed X, it's only going to look bad for you.
theamk · 6h ago
In this context, I don't see an incentive for meeting organizer to create an agenda. They don't care at all about op's opinion about X.
andy99 · 8h ago
Lol I've seen this happen, people feeling they're too important to attend meetings and then complaining when something happens in them.
Skipping meetings because they aren't organized the way you like is pretty passive aggressive. I agree with all the criticism about poorly organized meetings, but I think the non prima Donna thing to do is push back on their existence or format, not just skip them. That's part of why a job is a job.
tgsovlerkhgsel · 1h ago
It's "the boy who called important meeting" - if the first 9 meetings in a series provided zero value, you shouldn't be surprised that someone refuses to attend #10.
asabla · 8h ago
It's not about being a prima Donna. It's about business value. Too many meetings over the years should either be better planned, not taken place at all or could have been an email/chat message.
Business value first
jjj123 · 7h ago
You’re both in agreement that most meetings are unnecessary and that it would be better if meetings had a set agenda.
But the other poster was saying it’s prima donna behavior to skip a meeting without asking the organizer if they can add an agenda first.
Scarblac · 5h ago
Meetings with an agenda are generally better, but that doesn't mean meetings without one can't have any business value. If you skip it, you make sure you at least don't contribute to anything decided in it.
xnx · 8h ago
> "no agenda, no attenda"
I love this phrasing of the principle.
LiquidSky · 7h ago
>Remote has allowed us to adopt meeting policies that would never exist in-person: giant, long, back-to-back sessions with no purpose, plan or opportunity to pee.
Oh, if only that had been true, but pointless, aimless meetings have been a plague forever. Maybe less so the no-peeing.
But "no agenda, no attenda" only works if you're in a position to refuse. Often attending meetings is seen as part of the job, either formally or in the managers' eyes, so ignoring them without good reason isn't allowed without repercussions.
david-gpu · 1h ago
After working for a company where every meeting had a clear agenda and meeting notes with action items were sent afterwards, I would never want to work in a place that didn't follow the same pattern.
SpicyLemonZest · 7h ago
It's not a new problem. In a previous job long before remote, we had a 1.5 hour long biweekly meeting named "Team Meeting". No agenda, no goals, never went less than the full alloted time.
mystifyingpoi · 8h ago
> opportunity to pee
Social pressure is still a thing for some unfortunately. Or maybe memories from school creep in. Just go for a pee.
phs318u · 1h ago
If I have back-to-back meetings, I'll leave a few minutes early (with apologies) and also apologise to the next meeting if I'm late. If anyone calls me out, I'll apologetically claim "biological imperative". If they don't understand, I tell them that my bowels wait for no one. That is enough to get everyone to move on. No one wants to talk about someone else's bowels.
babymetal · 2h ago
These comments are creating exactly the feeling that troubled me about in-person engineering meetings and I still can't quite express it. It's like we all know we don't want to discuss this topic and can't help but do so. I get the same feeling whenever I see a bot introduce itself and then someone immediately replies "read stop". It's pretty close to a mixture of regret and disappointment.
teeray · 8h ago
Finally, the meetings that should have been emails are being turned into emails for the organizers of such meetings. The only meetings that will survive are those where genuine discussion is warranted. If it’s simply an “all hands” address to your reports, it can be transcribed, summarized, and read in a fraction of the time.
Yeah I thought of that scene too. But for some reason I thought it was from "Back to School"
green-salt · 8h ago
Same, we're so close to the meeting organizer to be AI slop next.
nkrisc · 2h ago
This is a complete non-issue if you use meetings to make gather feedback and make decisions. Send notes on the decision in an email after the meeting.
If you use meetings for something useful, then AI notes won’t be of any value anyway.
DebtDeflation · 7h ago
You don't even need AI. Just a bot that waits until the end of the meeting and then says, "Nothing from me. Thanks everyone."
bix6 · 1h ago
I was recently in a 1:1 meeting where the person I met with had 3 separate AI note takers join. What in tarnation?!?
8note · 1h ago
which one gave the best results? can you share?
bix6 · 1h ago
Not sure, they used them and I didn’t ask for any. I still take my notes manually.
xg15 · 5h ago
So how long until the first meeting were all the attendees are AI and the presenter is also AI?
sneak · 28m ago
This will probably become commonplace for routine interactions between corporations that don’t involve sales.
fcatalan · 59m ago
I haven't had an useful meeting in years. All the important collaboration and decision making has happened organically in text chat, which is great because it's all searchable and dated, and I do refer to that a lot. In fact they recently moved my main collaborator from another building into the next desk and we agreed to keep the work stuff in chat as much as possible so it isn't lost. So we chitchat about our kids but still type out our debate about the best version launch date.
Every meeting in person or via Zoom I have been in has been either an useless sales pitch, grandstanding by some manager, brown-nosing by some upstart or some other form of toxic socialization, scheming or conspiracy. I detest all those and avoid them, which is probably why I've become kind of an unpromotable pariah, which is ok, as a promotion would mean attending more of them.
9283409232 · 1h ago
I'm going to buck the trend I see in this thread and say that the AI notetaker we've used has been helpful. After the meeting it sends a list of action items and meeting highlights that links to the timestamp in the meeting where we were talking about it in case we need to refer back. I've found it nice to have.
eunos · 7h ago
On the other hand, I have great difficulty following who speaks what during an online meeting. I think that most people speech arent clearly transmitted, well as a justification looking the live caption, it also contains a lot of mistake
bentcorner · 2h ago
I use live captions for this a lot and find that it's pretty accurate. It's helpful if someone says something that I don't catch and I can just scroll up the captions to make sure I understand.
Also helps if someone tries to interrupts and the live caption can notate who was the breaker so I can call on them without a dumb-sounding "uh who was that?"
F7F7F7 · 5h ago
When the Zoom CEO gave that outlandish interview to TheVerge about the future of Zoom being agents attending meetings for you…
Naively assuming that everyone wouldn’t just have their agent attend all of their meetings. Turning Zoom into a 5 second diff over an api.
jsiepkes · 6h ago
> He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The 10 others attending were note-taking apps powered by artificial intelligence that had joined to record, transcribe and summarize the meeting.
Why do you even have a call with 16 people in it?
crawsome · 7h ago
These apps are cancer. Otter.ai for example, by default, will scrape the call's contacts, and email every single one, saying they can access the notes if they sign-up. A 300 person meeting, their spam bot sends out 300 emails. Totally captive audience, and the person who installed the notetaker is often none the wiser that it happened.
Even if just one person installs it, it resets the iteration and can begin again.
Just like malware.
timewizard · 22m ago
I mean.. it's literally sending an audio stream of the meeting and it's contents to an external server? It's not even malware. This is a virus.
ZeroGravitas · 7h ago
This is like the adversarial interoperability version of "this meeting could have been an email".
jfengel · 7h ago
Nothing says "this meeting should have been an email" like programmatically reducing it to plain text.
apwell23 · 7h ago
> “We’re moving into a world where nothing will be forgotten,” Allie K. Miller
I am constantly amazed by allie K miller positioning herself as leader and visionary in every hot trend.
mistrial9 · 1h ago
she is a CEO and Fortune 500 AI advisor! says her self-asserted promotional material
mistrial9 · 2h ago
popular news reported in the US "Zoom Meeting Participants are Sending AI bots Instead"
compare and contrast the two headlines
trhway · 8h ago
Similar like that saying with politics - if you don't proactively replace yourself with AI, then you will be replaced by AI.
In reality, it's more likely that they're being judged on their attendance of BS meetings, but if they attend the BS meetings, they won't be able to make the BS deadlines they're responsible for hitting.
So they're likely buying themselves time to do the actually important work, while still attempting to meet unrealistic expectations around meeting attendance.
But then there's those engineers who don't show up to meetings and then a month later come to you with a
"I don't know how we're deciding on some of these critical product features"
and I don't know how to tell them its because they skipped some meetings where they could've been part of that discussion.
If them missing some meetings means they're in the dark as to how those features were decided on then I can't see that as a defence of attending every meeting so much as a statement of BS meetings being so predominant in the company that all decisions are made through a BS process.
In this case, there's nothing to document from the meeting because the information wasn't shared in the first place. The information could only have been shared if the developer had been in the meeting.
(FWIW, I've rarely seen this from a developer not being in a meeting entirely, but I've seen it a few times where a developer has treated the meeting as a "read-only" event, i.e. expected that other people provide all the requirements and not used their own expertise or experience of the code to push back on decisions.)
This means that prior to AI transcription/summary bots, there wasn’t much written documentation about the decisions and conclusions from meetings. Now hopefully that will change.
That there was a meeting where that decision was made between 55 minutes of crud doesn’t really mean anything to me though. I’m not wasting an hour of my day every day on the off chance today’s meeting will contain anything of importance.
Also, it may be helpful to have the meeting organizer send meeting notes after every meeting, including action items assigned to specific people. The notes don't need to be extensive, but there better be an executive summary of what decisions were made, if any, and any unexpected roadblocks that were found.
That's how things were done at one of the mega corps where I was employed and it worked great.
If I’ve called a meeting it’s because there’s a benefit to the instant vocal communication. If you’re not there, you’ve not attended the meeting, no matter which tools you use to record, transcribe or translate.
Conversely, if I thought I didn’t need to be in a meeting, then I wouldn’t send a tool to gather stuff for me to then just ignore the tool output - because I don’t need it.
These tools are a sign of cultural rot from both participants and the fact people are even making them shows deep flaws in how we communicate in the modern workplace.
We had an internal RFC comment/discussion meeting on a proposed engineering standard. In that exact meeting, a dev flipped out and expressed exasperation that they weren’t asked to comment on the proposal. In the exact meeting that was one in a series of opportunities to comment on the proposal…
Seems direct and uncontroversial, and IMHO most people react well at this.
To get there, you need a confluence of context and expertise from several domains:
- what problem needs to be solved (user story)
- what options are available (interaction design, technical capabilities)
- what the cost of implementing each option is, and the opportunity cost of each level of implementation / each option (technical capability, resource management, sales, user research)
- managing group consensus on the path forward (communication to technical and non-technical audiences)
- break down of any large chunks of work into smaller tasks that can be done and planning the work to be done in series or parallel (resource management, technical capabilities)
Finally, after all of that, you have a task (or several) that can be handed off.
There's really no way to get here without at least some thought into the implementation details, as the business can't make the decision on which options without knowing rough timelines.
Seems like when you say "engineers", you mean "people with my exact personality"
I've routinely seen people attending a meeting from the office on Zoom camera, all gathered in a single big conference room, all looking and typing on their laptops for the entirety of the meeting, saying something maybe once or twice. I suppose they were simply working on their assigned tasks, listening to others in the background. How effective is that - I don't know.
These days I don't care. I'm 100% "at work" when I'm in the office, so whatever. I just pull up my phone and plan my next vacation trip or whatever. When I'm remotely I take my laptop to the kitchen and start preparing stuff for dinner. Life is too short for this mess.
If I’m doing that, I’m taking notes on the meeting. As long as the agenda items are at all relevant.
Some middle manager types in my company track emoji reactions to their messages in slack. I got written up for it, no joke. That was easy to automate though.
I've been using this mentality for the last three years. Some responds with hostility and some see the benefits, but most are just indifferent to it sadly.
I've also been observing people just throw in a short sentence or some AI generated shit list which is then not followed during the meeting.
But those who take this seriously usually have pretty darn good meetings (e.g not book the full hour, force people to stay on topic, shares notes after the meeting etc)
If not. Then I'll have to either live with the decision or at least give feedback on it.
Nothing is final until you build it (from a developer point of view).
Skipping meetings because they aren't organized the way you like is pretty passive aggressive. I agree with all the criticism about poorly organized meetings, but I think the non prima Donna thing to do is push back on their existence or format, not just skip them. That's part of why a job is a job.
Business value first
But the other poster was saying it’s prima donna behavior to skip a meeting without asking the organizer if they can add an agenda first.
I love this phrasing of the principle.
Oh, if only that had been true, but pointless, aimless meetings have been a plague forever. Maybe less so the no-peeing.
But "no agenda, no attenda" only works if you're in a position to refuse. Often attending meetings is seen as part of the job, either formally or in the managers' eyes, so ignoring them without good reason isn't allowed without repercussions.
Social pressure is still a thing for some unfortunately. Or maybe memories from school creep in. Just go for a pee.
If you use meetings for something useful, then AI notes won’t be of any value anyway.
Every meeting in person or via Zoom I have been in has been either an useless sales pitch, grandstanding by some manager, brown-nosing by some upstart or some other form of toxic socialization, scheming or conspiracy. I detest all those and avoid them, which is probably why I've become kind of an unpromotable pariah, which is ok, as a promotion would mean attending more of them.
Also helps if someone tries to interrupts and the live caption can notate who was the breaker so I can call on them without a dumb-sounding "uh who was that?"
Naively assuming that everyone wouldn’t just have their agent attend all of their meetings. Turning Zoom into a 5 second diff over an api.
Why do you even have a call with 16 people in it?
Even if just one person installs it, it resets the iteration and can begin again.
Just like malware.
I am constantly amazed by allie K miller positioning herself as leader and visionary in every hot trend.
compare and contrast the two headlines