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.
jedberg · 1h ago
> I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills.
That's not entirely it. Some people just won't say something unless put in a setting where they are explicity asked for it. I've had meetings where I ask for a status, and someone says they are stuck on X, and they've been stuck on X for two days.
And I'll ask why they didn't just ask for help. They weren't comfortable asking for help. They were only ok stating the problem when asked specifically for status.
So it also creates that environment were some people are more likely to share.
kaashif · 1h ago
It's usually possible for the person running a small project to ask everyone for status and know what everyone's going to say in the meeting before the meeting.
Then the meeting is pointless. But not all projects allow for that.
coliveira · 1h ago
Why do you think a larger meeting is a remedy for this? Quite the opposite, if you can't get a personal status from a large group, doing the meeting is completely pointless because it demonstrate lack of preparation.
xyzzy123 · 1h ago
There's this huge difference in quality between execs who work in writing and execs who NEVER write _anything_ down, which is surprisingly common. In my experience it correlates closely with toxic behaviour and I don't know why it's common for senior management in many orgs to allow people to operate in this style.
coliveira · 1h ago
Most modern companies drift toward the non-written style (effectively managing by the seat of the pants) because it has the appearance of being more effective, even when it is in fact the opposite. Business myth makes the guy who is always having meetings to appear more dynamic and effective, and is consequently rewarded by upper management.
lynx97 · 1h ago
As parent already hinted at, writing down stuff makes you vulnerable to criticism. Just stay vague, and you have a lot of wiggle room left...
DrillShopper · 44m ago
An exec writing down minutes can also come back to bite them in the ass if there's a lawsuit or criminal investigation. Email can have retention policies. That's harder to enforce with paper, especially when it's someone's personal notes.
lynx97 · 34m ago
Ya, it quite simply boils down to Plausible deniability.
coliveira · 1h ago
> because that authority is harder to question
It's not even that, they do the meeting to appear personally leading something. Modern companies confuse leading meetings with true leadership, because hardly anyone knows how to do the later. It is a fast, effective way to give an appearance of leadership and say they're doing something, while doing close to nothing.
lynx97 · 1h ago
COVID opened a whole new field of "work" for a particular group of people. Previously, you had to have some task and the necessary skills to be occupied at work. Now, you can fill a whole workday with meetings, giving the false sense that you actually do stuff. Its a not-so secret cult. At least that is how I observe it currently.
rekenaut · 59m ago
Trust me, the 80% meeting workday became prevalent loooooong before the 2020s.
lynx97 · 52m ago
I trust you thats the case for your environment. Where I work, useless meetings started to explode March 2020, and never went away.
jannyfer · 35m ago
Were you born in 1997? If so, it’s possible you just weren’t senior enough to see the 80% meeting workday prior to COVID.
lynx97 · 33m ago
Weird guess. No, you're off by 18 years. However, I am not working in a software shop.
adwn · 21m ago
> Weird guess.
The guess probably stems from the number in your user name: 97.
georgemcbay · 50m ago
Can double confirm.
I'm 51, have been working in software my whole professional career, this isn't something that started with COVID.
The massive increase in tech hiring might have made more of these people exist in absolute terms, but they have always existed.
dyauspitr · 37m ago
I’m of the opinion that people that don’t like meetings have poor communication skills and need extra time to come up with cogent responses. Issues that can be resolved in a three minute meeting will take hours over async communication.
dodslaser · 4m ago
Personally I don't mind spending several hours solving a problem over "async communication" if that means I'm free to work on other stuff while the other party is formulating a response. Then I also get the benefit of having something in their writing to refer back to.
The kind of person who takes hours to explain something in written form are unlikely to explain it in 3 minutes in person. More likely, they set up a meeting where they waffle on about an issue, expecting the receiving end to distill some valuable information from their ramblings, and then inevitably end up complaining when the solution doesn't match their expectations (which of course were never formalized anywhere).
Fade_Dance · 14m ago
Nobody is complaining about 3 minute meetings... Try 30+
hobs · 2h 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.
coliveira · 1h ago
In the past, companies had people specialized in translating conversations into written documents: secretaries. And executives took seriously the task of reading these documents. All this seems to be gone.
chii · 1h ago
When you can't write well, you "resort" to using a lot of body language and facial nuances in face-to-face communication, which works acceptably. Unfortunately, this doesn't translate well on zoom.
This "writing well" as a form of good communication is needed, but while in school, those same people who cannot write well also likely were complaining about learning how to write essays and such. Over time, this sort of lack of learning has resulted in poor written communication into adulthood i reckon.
And with the advent of LLM and all these chatGPT-esque bots writing for them, esp. in school, the level of literacy skill is only going to continue to drop!
nipponese · 1h ago
In software, you have the privilege of writing succinctly to communicate facts. In every other industry, the message needs to be packaged with courtesies like a greeting, cushioned delivery, and salutations. It’s a big waste of time and people stop reading your messages. But don’t put a bow on it and you get labeled as an asshole. At least the AI note taker can make me sound more palatable.
nlawalker · 2h 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.
dalemhurley · 2h ago
At my previous company, one I started, I would try to organise a meeting with only the most essential people and then people would forward the invite as people would be upset they were not invited (normally because it is a prelim meeting to a wider meeting), the meeting would go from 4 people to 15, people would attend the meeting find it was irrelevant to them or too early to them, which is why they were not invited in the first place, and then complain about too many meetings. Ugh.
analog31 · 1h ago
This is my experience too. My meetings tend to be presentations of results. I invite the bare minimum of people who are likely to be interested, and like you, end up with a full meeting room plus others connecting online, often all over the world.
I figure, they're consenting adults, they're responsible for managing their time.
dalemhurley · 46m ago
A lot of mine at the time were workshops. I find workshops work best when there is an agenda and small teams, then you present to the wider group when ideas are more developed. A lot of the time, when additional people attended they would be seeing too early of a concept or idea and too many people would debate little details. I believe the best productivity is in small teams.
DonsDiscountGas · 2h ago
It's not just historical precedent, it's about creating common knowledge that everybody has received the relevant information
lazyasciiart · 2h ago
It is historical precedent. Having everyone sit slackjawed through twenty minutes of droning is no more proof that they received the relevant information than emailing them would be - that’s why schools have exams and other assessment on the knowledge they intend to impart.
singron · 2h ago
I'm sympathetic to this knowing how few people actually read their emails (and slacks etc.). If you've ever sent out a 30 second survey to your coworkers, you know what I'm talking about. But I also know people don't really pay attention in these meetings either.
I feel async communication could work this way with the right cultural hygiene (e.g. consistent labeling, brevity, novelty, and relevancy), and some places I've worked were better about this than others, but they all tend to suffer from tragedy of the commons. If anyone works somewhere where you and all your coworkers actually count on each other to read emails, please tell me where!
coliveira · 50m ago
The reason people don't read email is that companies have poisoned their communication channels. If an important email is right beside a practically junk message, it will be lost.
Spivak · 2h ago
So an email? You could not read the email, but I can just as easily not pay attention.
You have a way better chance of getting people to pay attention to a few paragraph email than that same information stretched to fill an hour.
Spivak · 2h ago
As well as those standups which are just micro-presentations where each person talks in turn about their respective card but there's no discussion. The teams that moved to async standups where they just post status updates in Slack and amigo only when needed seem happier.
riffraff · 27m ago
Text-only stand-ups also have a tendency to devolve into just posting text into the void than nobody reads, so you may as well move to the even simpler "I need to discuss" flags which reduces communication even more. But then some people don't like that.
I am afraid there's no perfect solution, and it just boils down to people's preferences and the skills of people involved. And the chemistry between them.
I've been in teams which flip flopped over time between "communication worsened" and "wasting everyone's time". Being remote for 15+ years I enjoy the "convivial" side of stand-ups but I hate when they devolve into rote status reports.
jawns · 11h 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 · 10h 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 · 4h 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 · 3h 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.)
coliveira · 42m ago
The point in the parent comment still stands. There should be a paper trail so that the developer would have to confront the need to add such a detail. If the decision was made in the meeting alone, then it was lost in time as not all developers can be expected to be in every meeting.
sneak · 3h 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 · 2h 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.
grogenaut · 1h ago
I had an engineer once show up to the re-scheduled "lets get the engineers ideas meeting before the yearly plan ships" meeting that we scheduled so they could be there who then proceeded to spent 15 minutes complaining how they didn't get any input before finally asking what the meeting was for, and finding out they had 45 minutes remaining to give feedback (they had skipped the meeting the previous day, and I wanted to make sure they gave their impact). (I tried to interject earlier but was asked "please let me talk" so I did).
bargainbin · 10h 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.
coliveira · 40m ago
No matter how they're used, AI companies will create the artificial need for every company and essentially every worker to use these tools, even if they're not needed.
david-gpu · 3h 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.
Aeolun · 2h 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 · 2h ago
Then just implement it I guess
sokoloff · 10h 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 · 9h 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 · 4h 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 · 9h 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 · 4h 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 · 9h 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 · 2h 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.
pk-protect-ai · 2h ago
Excellent, this all can be written, thought over and discussed in written form. I do not see how this all requires a meeting.
woah · 2h 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"
pk-protect-ai · 2h ago
You might be right.
mystifyingpoi · 10h 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 · 4h 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 · 9h 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.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> 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
Everyone I know in senior leadership sees this as a plus. It’s known that middle managers waste time with performative meetings. Their value add is just seen to outweigh that drag. So if they can perform and employees can work, that’s sort of a win-win for shareholders.
LiquidSky · 10h 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 · 10h 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 · 2h ago
That’s next level.
david-gpu · 3h ago
I would be updating my resume and talking to old colleagues. What a load of BS you have to deal with, man.
xp84 · 36m ago
> [EU regulations] gives people a degree of control over their personal data, including the right to ask for it to be deleted.
The reason I think all-party consent laws are bad is the same reason I find the above sentence silly: If you say something out loud that is no longer your exclusive “data.” If you want to keep it secret either don’t say it, or say it under NDA or in a customary fashion such as telling a reporter off the record.
If you speak to me, I ought to have the right to memorialize it however I see fit (including note-taking with pencil, recording, and AI transcription) unless you and I agree otherwise (I do believe one should be bound to honor those commitments though).
Note: I live in an all-party consent state so I don’t record anything in actuality. But one should be free to — especially when dealing with corporate entities, who all force this recording unilaterally on everyone as a condition of ever speaking to them!
noufalibrahim · 54m ago
I'd prefer to reduce meetings as much as the next guy but when I am in one, I take notes. Detailed notes. It helps make sense of what's being said and gives me a deeper understanding. I park the notes when done and can refresh my memory if I need a follow up.
The fact that I thought and wrote the notes is a very important part of this. Sure, an AI transcript might be useful to refer to but writing things down as the meeting goes is a great way to aid understanding.
skeeter2020 · 11h 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 · 10h 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 · 2h 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 · 10h 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?
asabla · 10h 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).
chongli · 2h ago
That’s where you have stakeholders within a company and you require sign-off for decisions that affect them.
andy99 · 10h 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 · 4h 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 · 10h 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 · 9h 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 · 8h 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.
bee_rider · 9h 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 · 8h 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 · 9h 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.
toephu2 · 1h ago
How do you deal with daily standups? or 3x a week standups?
xnx · 10h ago
> "no agenda, no attenda"
I love this phrasing of the principle.
LiquidSky · 10h 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 · 3h 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 · 10h 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 · 10h 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 · 4h 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.
kstrauser · 1h ago
“Time for a bio break.” I’ve heard that often.
kaashif · 1h ago
Sometimes, when I need to pee, I say "I need to pee". I find this complex, advanced strategy works pretty well.
teeray · 11h 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.
gexla · 2h ago
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.
babymetal · 4h 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.
Yeah I thought of that scene too. But for some reason I thought it was from "Back to School"
green-salt · 10h ago
Same, we're so close to the meeting organizer to be AI slop next.
nkrisc · 4h 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 · 10h 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."
dpkirchner · 1h ago
Why wait until the end? Jus have it wait for the first three second lull after everyone joins.
F7F7F7 · 8h 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.
Leo-thorne · 2h 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.
jekwoooooe · 13m ago
I hope this finally ends meetings. Pretty much nothing ever needs to be a meeting. Everything can be decided async. Extroverts are the only ones demanding a meeting to hear themselves talk. I have yet to experience a single compelling remote meeting.
bix6 · 4h 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 · 4h ago
which one gave the best results? can you share?
bix6 · 4h ago
Not sure, they used them and I didn’t ask for any. I still take my notes manually.
xg15 · 8h ago
So how long until the first meeting were all the attendees are AI and the presenter is also AI?
sneak · 2h ago
This will probably become commonplace for routine interactions between corporations that don’t involve sales.
eunos · 10h 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 · 4h 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?"
photochemsyn · 34m ago
How can anyone be sure this story is at all true? Is it taken from an anecdotal story told to a WaPo reporter by a large investor in AI seeking to hype up the ability of AI to take good notes in a meeting, to create a marketing buzz around AI and draw in more investors? The naive credence given to this story in the comment section is probably not justified.
9283409232 · 3h 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.
bmalehorn · 1h ago
Would you mind sharing what AI note taking app do you use?
jfengel · 10h ago
Nothing says "this meeting should have been an email" like programmatically reducing it to plain text.
throwaway290 · 1h ago
Wow looks like I'm only one who is happy not talking to bots at my job. I go to meetings to ask questions (maybe answer too). I guarantee if I don't care about the topic I won't read your AI notes email even harder than I won't attend or listen in the meeting. But in case of the meeting you could tell I didn't!
crawsome · 9h 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 · 2h 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 · 9h ago
This is like the adversarial interoperability version of "this meeting could have been an email".
j45 · 1h ago
Some people have multiple ones.
jsiepkes · 9h 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?
coliveira · 23m ago
The big question is why they need 10 apps to take notes of the same meeting? Wouldn't be better to have just one and send the summary at the end?
apwell23 · 10h 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 · 4h ago
she is a CEO and Fortune 500 AI advisor! says her self-asserted promotional material
fcatalan · 3h 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.
mistrial9 · 4h ago
popular news reported in the US "Zoom Meeting Participants are Sending AI bots Instead"
compare and contrast the two headlines
trhway · 10h ago
Similar like that saying with politics - if you don't proactively replace yourself with AI, then you will be replaced by AI.
That's not entirely it. Some people just won't say something unless put in a setting where they are explicity asked for it. I've had meetings where I ask for a status, and someone says they are stuck on X, and they've been stuck on X for two days.
And I'll ask why they didn't just ask for help. They weren't comfortable asking for help. They were only ok stating the problem when asked specifically for status.
So it also creates that environment were some people are more likely to share.
Then the meeting is pointless. But not all projects allow for that.
It's not even that, they do the meeting to appear personally leading something. Modern companies confuse leading meetings with true leadership, because hardly anyone knows how to do the later. It is a fast, effective way to give an appearance of leadership and say they're doing something, while doing close to nothing.
The guess probably stems from the number in your user name: 97.
I'm 51, have been working in software my whole professional career, this isn't something that started with COVID.
The massive increase in tech hiring might have made more of these people exist in absolute terms, but they have always existed.
The kind of person who takes hours to explain something in written form are unlikely to explain it in 3 minutes in person. More likely, they set up a meeting where they waffle on about an issue, expecting the receiving end to distill some valuable information from their ramblings, and then inevitably end up complaining when the solution doesn't match their expectations (which of course were never formalized anywhere).
This "writing well" as a form of good communication is needed, but while in school, those same people who cannot write well also likely were complaining about learning how to write essays and such. Over time, this sort of lack of learning has resulted in poor written communication into adulthood i reckon.
And with the advent of LLM and all these chatGPT-esque bots writing for them, esp. in school, the level of literacy skill is only going to continue to drop!
I figure, they're consenting adults, they're responsible for managing their time.
I feel async communication could work this way with the right cultural hygiene (e.g. consistent labeling, brevity, novelty, and relevancy), and some places I've worked were better about this than others, but they all tend to suffer from tragedy of the commons. If anyone works somewhere where you and all your coworkers actually count on each other to read emails, please tell me where!
You have a way better chance of getting people to pay attention to a few paragraph email than that same information stretched to fill an hour.
I am afraid there's no perfect solution, and it just boils down to people's preferences and the skills of people involved. And the chemistry between them.
I've been in teams which flip flopped over time between "communication worsened" and "wasting everyone's time". Being remote for 15+ years I enjoy the "convivial" side of stand-ups but I hate when they devolve into rote status reports.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone I know in senior leadership sees this as a plus. It’s known that middle managers waste time with performative meetings. Their value add is just seen to outweigh that drag. So if they can perform and employees can work, that’s sort of a win-win for shareholders.
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.
The reason I think all-party consent laws are bad is the same reason I find the above sentence silly: If you say something out loud that is no longer your exclusive “data.” If you want to keep it secret either don’t say it, or say it under NDA or in a customary fashion such as telling a reporter off the record.
If you speak to me, I ought to have the right to memorialize it however I see fit (including note-taking with pencil, recording, and AI transcription) unless you and I agree otherwise (I do believe one should be bound to honor those commitments though).
Note: I live in an all-party consent state so I don’t record anything in actuality. But one should be free to — especially when dealing with corporate entities, who all force this recording unilaterally on everyone as a condition of ever speaking to them!
The fact that I thought and wrote the notes is a very important part of this. Sure, an AI transcript might be useful to refer to but writing things down as the meeting goes is a great way to aid understanding.
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.
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.
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?"
Even if just one person installs it, it resets the iteration and can begin again.
Just like malware.
Why do you even have a call with 16 people in it?
I am constantly amazed by allie K miller positioning herself as leader and visionary in every hot trend.
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.
compare and contrast the two headlines