Ask HN: Why do I struggle to follow corporate meetings?
I find a lot of non-technical meetings go something like this:
"Hi guys, as you might be aware [Robert Smith] of the [communications department] has recently released his [quarterly review] of our ongoing [transformation strategy]. We've received a lot of positive feedback so far, but I wanted to give you all an opportunity to share your thoughts in this meeting. Would anyone like to go first?"
Then about half of the team (normally the same people) will jump into the discussion and somehow seem to know what the hell is going on.
Meanwhile I'm there wondering who is this [Robert Smith] of the [communications department]? What is the [transformation strategy] and why does it need a [quarterly review]?
Occasionally someone will ask what the [transformation strategy] is, but typically it won't be answered in a way that helps me understand what's going on because even more names and departments will be dropped and the strategy itself will be described in such a vague way that it means nothing.
I guess a concrete example that comes to mind was from a place I worked previously where they would talk about their "omnichannel" strategy a lot. Whenever someone asked what "omnichannel" meant it was described in a way that seemed to mean nothing, "a multichannel sales strategy", etc. About 6 months into the job I finally figured out we were just using it to refer to some extra functionality that we were working on that would allow customers to collect and return online orders from our regional stores. But this was never how it was referred to in corporate meetings.
Am I the only one who experiences this? I can't work out if there's a part of my brain that's missing that prevents me from understanding what's being discussed in these meetings or if this is a common experience. I'm very practically minded which probably doesn't help, but I worry I'm not making enough of an effort to understand what's happening in the business outside my personal bubble.
Does anyone struggle with this, or do you have any recommendations for people like me who do struggle to understand what's happening in corporate meetings?
273 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadYou can try using some BS of your own; for example, say modestly 'I love [the strategic thing] but I've struggled to communicate it effectively to my team. How can I make it easier for them to understand?' which flatters the person running a meeting enough that they might be tempted to show off. Don't have a team? Invent one, just evoke the existence of some confused and dissatisfied co-workers who you are eager to motivate.
Keep notes on different people/ideas and give them a BS score out of 10 (nothing complicated). After a while you'll get a sense for what actually impacts productivity or business outcomes vs what's just the corporate cheer squad.
Most bigger corporate meetings could have been an email with some bulletpoints on top with most important things everyone must know, and later then details for people that are interested.
But if it wasn't a meeting, where else would the management get a change to flex, pat their backs, do some ritual sucking up and self promoting and generally justify their existence?
OP: Just focus on your real work and responsibilities, ignore the corporate meetings as much as you can get away with. Unless you want to join management, in which case you have to start clapping loudly and play the game.
How am I being a jerk here, pointing out the obvious truths. I don't treat other people as enemies. I'm just speaking my mind about systemic problems.
I don't book company wide meetings that are (semi-)mandatory and waste thousands of person-hour of work time for the company, just because I enjoy it and am in position that can do it. I try to be mindful about the communication I initiate and treat other's people time with respect. I write TL;DR in my emails and optimize for groups performance, not just my own self-interest.
The thing you should deduce from what I wrote is that instead of being self-optimizing stupid/naive/cynical person, I actually (possibly irrationally) care about my craft and efficiency of the group I belong to, and can do my own critical thinking, instead of accepting status quo uncritically.
I would only add that you should try to avoid these meetings if at all possible.
Just say you have a pressing deadline that requires your full attention. Then continue coding.
C'mon, I'm not the only one here who uses "The Corporate B.S. Generator" for all their meetings, am I? Am I? https://www.atrixnet.com/bs-generator.html
You may also appreciate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXW0bx_Ooq4
Oh man, I would never start playing some sitcom-style communication game. That seems like it could go very wrong, and be stressful and annoying even if it goes right.
ah, Tibor...
And you can respond to whatever they say with a thinking nod while stroking your chin. And street-kids would say "bet", you simply say "hmhm, very agile."
You'll be CEO in no-time.
This is so 2010s. You need to update your vocab. Let me FTFY
> That will really decentralize our stakeholders
I have been a part of a number of these high level strategy type efforts at my company. I have often found that I seem to be the cynical one against an onslaught of relentlessly optimistic people.
The genius is that failure scenarios are, by definition, detail-oriented.
Consequently, it's an easy bridge into the discussing the details that actually matter (i.e. those that could threaten the entire plan).
> Setting the agenda and defining the terms is a way to exert power, in many ways far more important than any substantive outcome to the meetings.
No, setting an agenda is a way to give people a chance to prepare for a meeting and to keep the meeting on track. A meeting with an agenda sent out ahead of time is far more efficient than a meeting where people just show up and think of things to chat about.
> You can try using some BS of your own
Please don't do this. Believe it or not, it's actually really easy from the management side of the table to tell when someone is just laying on the flattery and trying to say all the right things to butter people up.
Engineers who try to "play politics" usually overestimate their ability to manipulate other people and underestimate other people's ability to see right through it. You may think you're just playing the game, but I guarantee it's coming off as patronizing to the genuine employees around you. Those genuine employees are the people you need to build trust with, and these political manipulation games will only do the opposite.
> Don't have a team? Invent one, just evoke the existence of some confused and dissatisfied co-workers who you are eager to motivate.
Now this is pure keyboard warrior fantasy material. Doing anything resembling this will destroy your reputation at the company in short order. Chronic liars and manipulators may not be called out in public, but their negative reputation will spread quickly among people in the know.
Actually it’s been shown that ass kissing and flattery are quite effective unfortunately.
> Engineers who try to "play politics" usually overestimate their ability to manipulate other people and underestimate other people's ability to see right through it.
Actually, engineers are often quite adept at manipulating social systems to their advantage. If you think engineers are just heads-down nerds without personal agendas they promote ruthlessly, you’re the patsy.
> Chronic liars and manipulators may not be called out in public, but their negative reputation will spread quickly among people in the know.
Seriously? Politics over the last 10 years come to mind. Bad behavior is often rewarded. Doesn’t mean you should partake, but I don’t call it cynicism as much as realism.
> Seriously?
Why do you doubt that at all? It's literally what the parent comment suggested doing: Keeping track of different people and getting a sense for who impacts business outcomes versus who is all talk. This is what people do in general. It's not some magical skill that only engineers can have. We all observe who gets things done and learn who can't follow through over time.
These ideas that only engineers can see how things work and that once we're promoted to management we just become dumb robots incapable of seeing reality is ridiculous.
> Politics over the last 10 years come to mind. Bad behavior is often rewarded. Doesn’t mean you should partake, but I don’t call it cynicism as much as realism.
Politics isn't the workplace. If you're using hot-button public politics spanning the country as an analog for teams working together in a workplace, you're going to end up with some deeply flawed mental models of how management works.
I mean, I sort of agree... But on the other hand, it's literally called 'office politics' and is generally pretty analogous with 'public politics' (e.g. balancing diverse viewpoints to achieve a common goal). It's not really as binary as you are implying.
This seems like a statement you could use to describe one’s own path, but not the path of others.
People absolutely are promoted to management positions. This cannot be disputed.
Whether the individual transitions into the role effectively and becomes a good manager is a separate thing.
I’ve worked with managers who started as devs, and took naturally to the role.
I’ve worked with horrible managers who started from the same place.
> but the fact that you see it that way explains a lot about your position.
What does it explain? You are implying it’s meaningful, but it’s impossible to engage with your position until you articulate it.
There are people who decide early in their career to go technical and never change their mind.
There are people who decide early in their career to go management and never change their mind.
But there are a LOT of people in the middle, and that's been the overwhelming majority of people I (anecdotally) know in management roles - they were good at what they do so they were promoted to management - junior dev, senior dev, tech lead / architect... whopsie, now you're manager and you don't know how you really got there; or you found you are good at talking to customer, understanding their pain points, and are also good at helping and supporting your team, so you accept a promotion you never thought you would a decade ago. And any other number of permutations. But I do know any number of people who did not "make a different career choice". They simply were doing a good job and ended up a manager. Inertia is a more powerful career drive than many people acknowledge.
(Oh and, for many companies, project managers are paid less than senior developers, so it's not necessarily better money either)
That's a lot of words to say "it's a promotion".
My suggestion is not that OP should play politics (which s/he would likely neither enjoy nor prosper at) but rather do some very basic tests to get a feel of what is actually going on and avoid possibly ending up as a convenient scapegoat if a manager's grand plans don't pan out.
I fully agree that anyone stuck in an actually dysfunctional corporate environment should look for an exit where they can focus on actually working as a team.
How do you know you didn't just catch the people who are bad at it?
One reason why good judgement becomes essential the higher up you go. If you just "believe in management", managers below, above and across from you will saddle you with likeable and incompetent people.
I go so far as to reject meetings that don't have an agenda specified. Either that, or (if I'm feeling generous) reply to the meeting invite with a "Maybe" and ask specifically for an agenda.
If a meeting doesn't have an agenda, then it has no terminating condition, and is therefore an infinite loop until it times out.
Don't go to those meetings.
And more constructively, don't create those meetings.
An agenda takes ~3 minutes to add; there's no excuse for not having one.
E.g. Agenda for this comment: (1) express agreement, (2) clarify what's toxic about agenda-less meetings using computer science analogy, (3) appeal to reader to improve their own behavior, (4) preemptively rebut complaints about suggested behavior. Done.
I desperately wish this to be true, but the years spent watching them get promoted and rewarded tells me otherwise.
I take it you've never worked for a FAANGM.
That is only true for companies in a highly competitive market. There are all kinds of markets, some are very competitive (e.g., the market for a commodity like gasoline or flour), some are total monopolies or oligopolies (e.g., the market for smartphone operating systems, or for electricity or water in your city) and many are some hybrid somewhere in between.
The less competition a company has to face, the more they are able to grow dysfunctional while still staying profitable, thus avoiding any serious pressure to curb the dysfunction.
See https://open.lib.umn.edu/exploringbusiness/chapter/1-5-monop... or any intro microeconomics text for more.
Also, even in cases that are more competitive, managers are human and make mistakes, and the feedback cycle might be so long that a lot of dysfunction can happen before it's time to pay the piper and a whole division has to be sold off or laid off. This is most likely to happen at companies huge and diversified enough.
I think you have been fortunate enough to never work at a place like the one OP described. I have, although only once. If you find yourself in such a place, yeah, take it as a sign to get out.
I have and, while the parent may be a bit on the cynical side, you're take is boarding on dangerously naive for anyone who wants to understand the non-engineering part of an org.
My experience is that the real path to success is to do cynical things naively. That is, if you cynically see things how they are, and act accordingly, you won't get very far. Management in large orgs (and many small ones as well) requires "true believers" so to speak.
Meetings are a lot about asserting power, but the most successful people in large orgs genuinely believe that those people asserting power are better than them, and hope to one day be as powerful.
Flattery works insanely well, but it works better coming from a true sycophant, one who genuinely aligns their personal success with your opinion of them. I've been the object of flattery many time, and to be honest, it does feel good and work even when you know it's some what BS.
> Now this is pure keyboard warrior fantasy material.
I literally laughed out loud when I read this, since I was more or less told to engage in this type of behavior to succeed by senior leadership when I worked in a large org. Inject yourself into projects that didn't need you, find ways to make yourself relevant, do whatever it takes to grow your team (because your authority is directly proportional to the number of people under you).
Personally I think that entire culture is reclusive, so left that role very quickly and stick to IC work and smaller leadership roles on teams that do more resemble the world you're describing. But make no mistake, parent is accurately depicting the realty at the majority management roles in large corporations.
Tech people are not the people with 'real jobs' while everyone else 'bullshits'.
Terms are above your head because they generally relate to operations outside the scope of your knowledge.
(Edit: 'omnichannel' could mean a lot of things, it's definitely a bit 'buzzwordy' but it almost assuredly refers to some cross functional project of some kind that the OP is not aware of. This immediate implication of 'things I don't understand are bullshit' is antisocial and a bit glib - maybe understandable for some young people (?) but still, it's a problem to default to this posture.)
The biggest 'bullshiters' tend to be on the tech side, who go on and on about technology that is not needed, this is because they can very easily talk past others on domain knowledge.
I sit on both sides of the fence, and as soon as I get on the business side, I immediately see it - tech people 'controlling' the schedule and much of everything else because of their domain knowledge, often without the self awareness to recognize what's going on, operating with the implicit assumption that their need to push back 2 months for some refactor is inherently more important that other needs.
And yes - a lot of effort is filler and inefficient - that is probably the real culprit here.
Do not heed any of this ridiculous Machiavellian advice (aka 'keeping notes on people'? WTF?). Assume the best, do your jobs, obviously some people will BS, oh well, move on.
alot of the 'business' conversation is carried out largely in subtext. you can learn quite a bit about the internal machinery of the company where you work by just learning to read that.
there _is_ quite a bit of useless sleeze on the business side. but to believe all of it is, and that somehow you have a better view of inter organization struggle and market response than all of those who do it full time is naive and counterproductive.
The reason this is common sense on business side and much less on tech side is that tech side is much cleaner in terms of relationships. Otherwise said, bullshiting is less common and people are not used to it.
As you said, the moment you cross to in between or to management, bullshiting and lying becomes normal. Moreover, sales and management gets rewarded for lying and their words are rarely checked for accuracy. I have seen them lying with straight face about our progress or capabilities of our software one too many times. I have also seen them lying to damage other employees. The worst stab in back, lying about other people or situation I have seen were not coming from tech. Sure, I have seen tech people lying, but it is visible for higher up more quickly - and they are not in situations in which they can do as much damage in the first place.
Second thing, tech people controlling schedule is a good thing. Writing from place where tech people often dont control that and the delays and pissed off customers caused by that refactoring not being done are very very real thing too. Everywhere where tech people did not controlled schedule was hot mess - and even relationships got much much worst. Because business then blamed tech for consequences of unmaintainable software (meaning absurd amount of bugs, deadlines not really met etc) and tech people resented business for causing it all.
Tech teams are just as capable of dicking around or diving down bullshit rabbit holes that don't deliver value as anyone else.
To parent's point, I find a productive skill is humility: the person on the other side of the desk/screen is assumed to be trying to say something useful, albeit in language or concepts I don't understand.
And specifically, humility whether it's tech or non-tech controlling the schedule: each know something the other doesn't.
You can dock around even when business controls schedule. It is just different dicking around - you make it seem as if you have done work, but skip on parts like "checking whether you broke something" or "testing it" and waste rest of time in discord.
Nevertheless, if actual issue is laziness then it is not that hard to eventually figure it out and address that. Even when tech co tools schedule, business tend to have way more control including political one. And genuinely, both dicking around and rabit holes are minor issues compared to what can happen when people bullshit in software development.
The question of schedule control is not about who bulshits tho. It is about systematic motivations and consequences either arrangement has. And business controlling it is in my experience as disastrous as having programmer to do sales.
I definitely didn't say that!
I said 'the moment you cross to the business side you see the technical side bullshitting'.
Step out of the bike-shedding technobabble wars for a minute and you'll see technical organizations are more like cats than dogs ... refused to be herded or do tricks, they do 'what they want' and 'think it's right'.
I will admit there is a degree of overt candor in the technical side that is worse on the business side, but there's enough lack of self awareness among techies as to the level of the value of what they are producing, technical debt, trying cool new things, pie in the sky thinking etc.. 80% of technical work should be more or less like 'construction' not 'research' - admittedly that 20% is also quite rare and critical.
The kinds of BS-ing and inefficiency on 'both sides' are different and that's what the OP might be struggling with.
And 'Sales' - that's another dimension entirely - don't worry or even assume anything about 'honesty' there, they bring in the $$$, that's the fuel that drives everything else. Don't assume they are liars necessarily other, it's just a different form of communication.
"By the deadline" is always chosen, and then management gets to complain about the incompetent developers who are just trying to deal with the hackathon-quality code they've been forced to write.
You are doing people disservice here. If op followed your advice, op would look like idiot to teammembers.
Sometimes when people don't understand something else, it isn't bullshit, it's simply something they don't understand.
Consider this recommended reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
That is very transparent, by the way. If your goal was to hide that you don't understand it, you didn't achieve it.
You will probably get a better answer if you are honest, anyway. If you never worked with [the strategic thing], you should not be expected to know it.
Don't you worry about Planet Express, let me worry about blank.
Omnichannel just means "all the channels". A "channel" in this case probably means a particular sales path, e.g. website, app, brick-and-mortar, maybe phone, fax, distributors, resellers, whatever. Sounds like your company sells the same product/service through many avenues.
As for the reviews and strategies, eh, that's just the corporate world at work. There are people whose job it is to figure those kinda things out. If they're good at it, those are the sort of visionary changes that guide the company over the long term. If they're bad at it, then it's just the bureaucracy keeping itself busy with nonsense.
I dunno what your particular role at your company is, but if it's some sort of hands-on/in the trenches stuff, like you're a dev or designer or some such, you can just ask your supervisor "So all of that strategic stuff is a bit above me. Is any of it critical to my work or our team?" If not, then you don't have to worry about it.
Oftentimes, it goes the other way too... you show those folks what you've been working on and their eyes glaze over because it's not their area of expertise. It's OK. Big companies have different specializations of labor and you don't need to know all of it to be a valuable contributor.
If you do ever want to move into management or similar roles, though, you might want to pay more attention and get more clarifications from the people around and above you. It's OK to ask questions, but it's a trial and error process to identify the people who have the time, patience, and knowledge to give you useful answers.
This has practical implications for you beyond corporate meetings : it will allow you to prioritize what's important in a much better way, will allow you to prevent bad things happening later on because you'll know when to say no early in the process , and will allow you to make better technical decisions because you'll know the business implications or what you're working on.
It takes time (I've been there), and the key is essentially to learn your environment, and what the people outside your bubble do. You won't find the answer in books, so you'll have to ask.
That being said, one tip for meetings like this is to not get too hung up on the exact details in the moment and just soak it all in.
>Meanwhile I'm there wondering who is this [Robert Smith] of the [communications department]? What is the [transformation strategy] and why does it need a [quarterly review]?
Like this should happen AFTER the meeting. In the moment, your brain should trying to follow the flow of narrative:
“Someone did a thing to accomplish a goal and it seems like people are happy/sad/angry/frustrated/etc. about it. These people say this. These other people say that. I don’t know who that someone is, or what that goal was, but people seem pretty opinionated and seeing how everyone got thrown in here I guess it’s important. After this meeting I should go talk to Bob because Bob seems to have a lot of insight into this, seemed pretty level headed about the whole thing, and is a nice guy who answers people’s questions. I can utilize him to find out more.”
You will still feel lost, but you will at least walk away having a good idea of generally what happened and how people felt about it.
The other key to meetings like this is to not take every term at its absolute denotative value. Words will be thrown around that are suggestive of some general idea that is specific but pretty loose about the exactness of the term (“omnichannel strategy” for example. Complete goggbledegook.)
I used to write about omnichannel marketing, so I love that you gave that example. As the "explainer", I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the hell I was explaining. If you visited the website of one of the major omnichannel vendors, you'd mainly see a lot of inspirational fluff that was almost completely devoid of meaning. At the same time -- there was actual software being built and actual changes being made to the businesses that bought into omnichannel. So it's not nothing, but humans are built to deceive each other and a good deal of this corporate speak is part of an intricate dance of deception, built around advancing careers and justifying budgets and headcounts. Any good lie contains a measure of truth.
You can, if you put your mind to it, learn enough of the "language" to sit there and blabber to the execs about it and if you are, let's say, 60% comprehensible everyone will nod their heads and either politely ignore the other 40%, or, like you, believe that the 40% of chaff is actually something. But if you don't feel like you fit in with the babblers, it'll be harder for you than it is for them.
(source, designer in marketing. The BS is useful to trojan horse actually useful concepts to certain tiers of management.)
It reminds me a lot of dev teams creating a microservice and giving it a code name. Imagine someone from business joining standup and hearing a bunch of microservice code names and acronyms. They would be really confused! Maybe the same thing is happening here to you?
The second thing you mentioned is their explanation about Robert Smith etc. You came out more confused after the explanation! To use the same standup example: the business person asks in your standup what does the “Odin” micro service do? It might be quite hard to explain what a single microservice does to someone without prior experience in that field.
Long story short: the best way you can get an understanding for what they’re talking about is to build a background in it. Feed your curiosity! Read a good intro book on business or economics to get a good foundation. See if you can setup some kind of regular 1:1 with a business person over lunch to learn more, etc.
Yes, and now, imagine someone from business joining our sprint starter meeting and having it explained in clear and concise way, as well as discussions over potential caveat/blocking points because we have two hours to give details and not fifteen minutes.
Imagine being marketing (so not business, not tech) and being invited at a corporate meeting, then at a PI planning from a big (50-100) dev team. I guarantee you will understand way, way more from the PI even if you are just being around and not actively asking questions (and actively engaging with adjascent team will make you understand more).
If your department head has a meeting about your department's priorities then you need to pay attention because they are the ones who are actually going to be observing and evaluating your work and how much they solved the problems that the department is being graded on. Pay attention to the people who pay attention to you.
That's probably why. A lot of these discussions don't really pertain to you, and that's okay. Those types of meetings are more for your PMs and your high level staff engineers to understand a project more holistically. To a new engineer, it's 100% fluff they don't care about.
They'll make more sense in time, but don't worry about it for now. You'll learn more the business and grow in responsibilities and then those meetings will both make more sense and have more interest.
I struggle with this too. But I also know I'm low enough on the corporate ladder (senior dev! not even junior!) to know it pretty much is all irrelevant to my day-to-day work, so I show up, tune out, bill the time (and eat the free food if offered).
Business and management work is... not nearly as complex. But the people doing that work have the same highly complex brains as you do. They can handle the same deep complexity as you. So with all this extra mental space, they add layers and layers of complexity to seemingly simple business processes. This complexity builds the moat protecting their turf from others. It creates the irreplaceability that you get for free.
Most of this complexity has no clear business purpose (bureaucracy). Some of this complexity is fiction or invented languages (bullshit). It is all designed to exclude outsiders and prevent anyone not on the inside from being able to tell what is going on or easily get anything done.
There are simply too many decisions for one person to make and informal processes fall apart at scale.
This is also where things take on a life of their own. Without strong guidance, you end up with the rules becoming more important than reality.
Bureaucracy has a very clear purpose. In business, politics, or otherwise.
Bureaucracy makes change difficult and slow.
Bureaucracy should be applied when you have a working solution to your problems and you don't want anyone (new devs, new managers, external forces) to change it.
Bureaucracy is often prematurely applied, in an attempt to "bring order." This cannot work. Bureaucracy applied to chaos cements the chaos into place.
The bureaucracy that can be changed is not the true bureaucracy.
To not understand that, and like some of the comments above to place technical work of an IC above that is ridiculous folly. Skyscrapers and bridges and big complex things like software requires human organizational structures which we view as 'bureaucracy'.
The men who established bureaucracies truly saved humanity from collapse, from utter chaos; by establishing laws and regulations, they restrained the animal within man, even without having any technology. I consider the establishers and enforcers of law the least appreciated in human history. It is a humongous task, to take up utter entropy and convert it into a semblance of civilisation, where the animal in man is kept within limits.
These things were invented long back, 2000+ years ago, and the formations have stood the test of time. They are still in use, the same ruthlessness is used to control human impulses. However, at a shallow level, our language and our "aspirations" have moved on. So we like to speak in more flowery language, hide the animal in man in public, and have forgotten why were the laws and regulations put in place by our ancestors.
I believe human regulation, through means other than bureaucracy is on the way. This alone can help humans get rid of the need to BS. With technology there is a way to combine both education/training & laws/reguations. In place education/training allows for "kind correction" while automated punishment will ensure "harsh correction". Both are needed for successful existence of human civilisation.
tolerable life > interesting life that ends in blow up
good enough > good
I feel "universal good" is too high a standard (pure fantasy even) for our species. I feel our species may disappear from the planet or with the planet at any arbitrary moment in the future; we seem not to recognise how fragile our existence truly is.
Imagine a business person saying, "Oh, programmers protect their work by making it needlessly complex. Every few years they invent new tools and insist that the old ones are broken, so that they can re-implement the same features over and over. Today they say it's vitally important to switch to the new thing, jquery or docker or react or whatever it is this month, and five years from now they'll say it's just as important to get rid of it. That's how they make sure they'll always have a job."
That's the mirror image of what you're saying. Perhaps some of those "layers and layers" really are useless but most of them are probably to satisfy auditors or something similarly opaque.
Would they be so wrong? The state of the art is advancing, and these re-implementations can be huge improvements...but aren't always. The tools/techniques often seem to be used outside the domain where they're important (e.g. Big Data tooling used on data sets that can be processed on a nice laptop) or are so short-lived the switching cost is never reclaimed (e.g. always using the trendiest Javascript framework/tooling). This hypothetical business person certainly wouldn't be alone in wondering if the reason isn't sometimes job security, resume building, and/or to make a boring problem interesting rather than an attempt to find the most straightforward way of solving the business problem.
I can easily see the same applying to these business ideas. They sometimes make sense but often (usually?) don't.
The truth is, a lot of those people spend a lot of time trying to streamline processes and remove bureaucracy, and if they didn't, it'd be even worse.
It's interesting to see the differences. The work is the same, the same people do it, but there's much more of it, there's slightly better tech, and they have correspondingly less time to do the work. There's much more middle management, but ostensibly the systems are all doing very close to the same thing.
The thing is they've been through 3 complete reorganisations of the ~1200 people. If they'd left it exactly the same structurally then it would seem to be in the same shape as it is now.
They've been through 2 renamings, 3 rebrandings, they definitely did nothing; the placement of the business is entirely unrelated to the brand image but each new CEO came from outside of the company seemingly used it, rebranding, to make the organisation "their own".
One of the experiences early on in my second tenure was a group doing a Myers-Briggs type activity, just like they would have been 15 years earlier, just with a slight difference twist. People there in the interim described a third-style of the same process they'd been through.
Maybe you're not wrong.
This is the hacker equivalent of wanting to do a greenfield refactor of the code base. There's an erroneous assumption all the problems that exist within the current code base will be avoided when rebuilding. These efforts are occasionally successful, but mostly end up being just sound and fury with little measurable results.
It's bullshit jobs all the way down.
Lets not get ahead of ourselves now. It's folly to write off management, marketing etc's jobs as pointless, but its equally foolish to believe what you've just espoused.
There is only so much complexity that a single human can grasp, and that is why we specialise within organisations.
This is one of those fictions that engineers love to believe about management because it imbues a sense of superiority. Who doesn't like feeling like their job is better or more important than others'?
Having been an IC, middle manager, upper manager, and back to IC a few times, I can tell you this is a false notion. Business and management are different problems, but they're not necessarily "easier". As an engineer-minded person by nature, I honestly found the technical problems easier to handle than a lot of the management problems I had to deal with. Managing a computer program is generally easier than managing people. People are hard.
Many management and business problems fall into the “straightforward to understand but hard” category. The apparent “unnecessary”complexity around these problems is sometimes self important fluff, by far, far more often it represents individual or organizational learning about what is actually necessary to solve these “simple, but hard” problems.
When it works, we don’t even see it. When it fails, we do what our brains love to do: over extrapolate incidents to patterns and lock it into our confirmation bias.
And unless you're savvy, it's difficult to tell which part is which, thus the problem OP is having.
Humans are hard, and cannot be forced to do anything no matter the instructions. Individuals may be coerced or motivated or bargained with in specific ways. Correctly translating what you want to instructions the human understands is also hard and complex.
To solve the first problem, just stop going. See if anyone notices/cares.
The second problem isn't really a problem depending on your career goals. You can be a fine engineer if you don't understand the business, but you'll never get to the highest levels. At the highest levels, even as an engineer, you need to understand how your work fits into the greater business goals.
If however you are worried about career advancement, then you need to figure out a way to understand the business and the business needs.
The best way to do that is to just ask. If someone says something you don't understand, make a note to speak to them about it later.
If you don't know what's the subject of the meeting, why are you attending?
Regardless if it's BS or not, if you literally couldn't care less about what Robert is doing and his latest report, and it doesn't concern your job, you shouldn't be on that meeting. Period.
To be honest, you can benefit from it by learning what the terminology is and how it translates into actual changes for the future of the company. If you can identify the places that leadership is putting emphasis in, you can work on things that further that initiative and likely catch the flow into promotions and bigger roles at the company.
For example: A company says they are doing digital transformation by moving their data from Excel spreadsheets into a Salesforce instance. This will be a multi year project that will hypothetically increase efficiency and raise revenues by 50%. If you are working on the Excel side of things, this would be a good time to consider learning about Salesforce!
Not everyone(hell, I would say most people) wants to do this, and that is totally okay. If you're in this camp I don't see a problem of just going about your business and day to day work.
The best thing to do (if you want to catch up) is ask someone who seemed to know what was going on to get you up to speed after the meeting. Or, if you don’t, just try to get out of the meetings. Nobody realised you had no idea what was going on.. they probably won’t notice if you weren’t there at all.
Or may not realize how much they respond themselves.
But yes, whether B2C or B2B there's a huge amount of marketing machinery that's needed to reach customers at various stages of the "buyer's journey" through a variety of channels--and to make anyone involved in sales more effective.
https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html
May you find peace in book 7 which includes…
In the East there is a shark which is larger than all other fish. It changes into a bird whose wings are like clouds filling the sky. When this bird moves across the land, it brings a message from Corporate Headquarters. This message it drops into the midst of the programmers, like a seagull making its mark upon the beach. Then the bird mounts on the wind and, with the blue sky at its back, returns home.
The novice programmer stares in wonder at the bird, for he understands it not. The average programmer dreads the coming of the bird, for he fears its message. The Master Programmer continues to work at his terminal, unaware that the bird has come and gone.
> Two swindlers arrive at the capital city of an emperor who spends lavishly on clothing at the expense of state matters. Posing as weavers, they offer to supply him with magnificent clothes that are invisible to those who are stupid or incompetent. The emperor hires them, and they set up looms and go to work. A succession of officials, and then the emperor himself, visit them to check their progress. Each sees that the looms are empty but pretends otherwise to avoid being thought a fool. Finally, the weavers report that the emperor's suit is finished. They mime dressing him and he sets off in a procession before the whole city. The townsfolk uncomfortably go along with the pretense, not wanting to appear inept or stupid, until a child blurts out that the emperor is wearing nothing at all. The people then realize that everyone has been fooled. Although startled, the emperor continues the procession, walking more proudly than ever.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes
In the corporate world, the emperor has clothes, but they are underwear and everyone pretends its a full suit and tie. Basically speaking, in order to sound more important people say "Omni channel sales strategy" but what that actually is a small Salesforce integration.
One way to not have to attend those meetings is ask questions like "by Omni channel sales strategy do you mean..." and remove the fluff from whatever they are saying, basically be the child in the story.
Not the best strategy in my opinion. There are far better ways to slip out, but they require more careful maneuvering.
My typical strategy is asking the right questions to the right people. I try appear helpful, while indirectly pushing to make the meeting more relevant or my presence less necessary.
I’ve often made the offer to be available when they need my input. Helps smooth things so people see me as busy, rather than deliberately avoiding them.
Sometimes you can be surprised with this question and they will explain a actual strategy with multiple moving parts and everyone is better off by having it explained. Often you can catch a technical gap or two during this explanation and improve on the approach.
It's really only the incompetent that get offended.
Now, imagine that you and upper management agreed to convert all space-indents to tabs - you might be up there getting recognition too. But since management has no opinion on the matter, you aren't.
That's about the significance of most company meetings. Sometimes you can get a sense of the power dynamic by seeing who's there, but most of it is irrelevant.
If there's something that directly affects you, it won't be stated explicitly, but your immediate manager will call another meeting immediately afterward. Then watch out!
Obviously many fields are specialized and technical, and complicated language is the simplest way to get ideas across, but I think we can draw that line pretty clearly.
I'm not saying that different disciplines don't have jargon that is useful, I'm saying that a lot of jargon is not useful.