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Trust me, the 80% meeting workday became prevalent loooooong before the 2020s.
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.
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It's not just historical precedent, it's about creating common knowledge that everybody has received the relevant information
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…
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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…
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.
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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.
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...
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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…
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 do…
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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.
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 meet…
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 mee…
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!
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Trust me, the 80% meeting workday became prevalent loooooong before the 2020s.
I trust you thats the case for your environment. Where I work, useless meetings started to explode March 2020, and never went away.