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.
> 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.
This is absolutely not new and was as bad if not worse before remote work.
> 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.
I'm genuinely confused by this. Those sort of meetings have existed in the entire 20-something years I've been working corporate jobs.
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.
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.
> 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.
I skip meetings in order to play Mario Kart. Why? Two reasons:
1. My company offers no promotion path. I asked for a raise, and my manager gave me a project that is impossible to complete. Recently he admitted that the project is indeed impossible, but the upper management expected him to spend a year trying anyway.
2. I am often given very vague task descriptions, and when I come up with a solution, we keep having meetings until my solution is remolded into whatever my manager wants but didn't say explicitly.
It's very difficult to stay motivated in such an environment, but I'm afraid to change jobs because what if I end up with a similar manager except I'll be expected to actually attend the meetings instead of playing Mario Kart.
I agree that this probably says a lot more about the lack of value these meetings provide the attendees. I’ve been to enough where the organizer will stall and small talk to stretch them out to the scheduled time that I know some people are using these events to fill out their time card.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 66.8 ms ] threadThis is absolutely not new and was as bad if not worse before remote work.
I'm genuinely confused by this. Those sort of meetings have existed in the entire 20-something years I've been working corporate jobs.
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.
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.
1. My company offers no promotion path. I asked for a raise, and my manager gave me a project that is impossible to complete. Recently he admitted that the project is indeed impossible, but the upper management expected him to spend a year trying anyway.
2. I am often given very vague task descriptions, and when I come up with a solution, we keep having meetings until my solution is remolded into whatever my manager wants but didn't say explicitly.
It's very difficult to stay motivated in such an environment, but I'm afraid to change jobs because what if I end up with a similar manager except I'll be expected to actually attend the meetings instead of playing Mario Kart.
I am constantly amazed by allie K miller positioning herself as leader and visionary in every hot trend.
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?
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.
If you use meetings for something useful, then AI notes won’t be of any value anyway.
compare and contrast the two headlines
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.