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AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings

washingtonpost.com

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Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings

#171

Post by maccard »

nottorp wrote: post #157
Spivak wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The worst part about the standup ritual is that no one talks outside standups. With async text communication channels you'll post when an issue shows up. With the standups you'll wait until the next standup and maybe forget the details until then, or forget about the issue entirely and that will lead to technical debt. > when an issue shows up Advanced usage: post proactively before you reach the task/issue. This way…

> With async text communication channels you'll post when an issue shows up

You clearly work with excellent teams who don’t need this then. My experience is that a large number of people, even competent people will not post when an issue shows up and will wait for however long until an update is asked of them and then say they couldn’t do it because they’re blocked.

Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings

#172

Post by maccard »

esskay wrote: post #169
pj_mukh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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" You write up meeting notes, tasks, etc right? If you've got engineers who are unaware of functionality because of a verbal meeting being missed you've got deeper problems to address.

Not OP but yes and those meeting notes are turned into tasks with callbacks to the meeting they came from. Yet we still get the “where do these priorities come from” questions.

You’re not asking for meeting notes you’re asking for a transcription which has the same problem as an email - people don’t read rhem

Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings

#173

Post by jumilbiju »

jimbob45 wrote: post #130

It’s occurred to me that scrum masters are not long for this world at all. It would only take one engineer to suck up their entire organization’s meetings and then train an AI scrum master on them. Surprised we haven’t seen a Y-combinator company do it yet.

[dead]

Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings

#174

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

dgb23 wrote: post #156
jedberg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 on…

But you can share your daily status asynchronously as well. This might not scale well to larger teams, but we simply write a short message in a dedicated channel each day. It contains a short status and a few bullet points to plan the next day. Slack makes this conventient because you can write a top level message and then use the reply feature to add more details.

As you said, async doesn’t go well with scale, and async comms is OK if statuses are all you’re gonna write there. But in meetings you get to have back-and-forth, and while you can also have that in async, you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read. Which they might not do altogether.

Anyway, I’ve come to really dislike async comms. If something is being communicated to you over async, it’s something not important enough that you can ignore it, in many cases indefinitely. Meetings are still the best way to keep everyone in sync and it’s a structural strategy to keep everyone accountable for making progress at their jobs.

Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings

#175

Post by maccard »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #2

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 sessi…

> 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.

Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings

#176

Post by anal_reactor »

jawns wrote: post #4

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…

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.

Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings

#177

Post by munksbeer »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #2

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 sessi…

> 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.

Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings

#178

Post by Fendy »

I recently became an active user of some AI note-taking tools, and I've noticed that they are really great. As long as I set up the account, they send a robot to the meeting and write down almost everything, especially when there are people from different backgrounds and ACCENTS! God, they saved my life a thousand times, I would say. And reading summaries or even transcripts are so much more efficient than attending the meeting in person.

Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings

#179

Post by randomcarbloke »

dgb23 wrote: post #156
jedberg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 on…

But you can share your daily status asynchronously as well. This might not scale well to larger teams, but we simply write a short message in a dedicated channel each day. It contains a short status and a few bullet points to plan the next day. Slack makes this conventient because you can write a top level message and then use the reply feature to add more details.

async scales better than sync in this context as on larger teams you might need a queue.

Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings

#180

Post by nandomrumber »

meroes wrote: post #65

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…

> I’m convinced most meetings are to make up for poor writing skills

by people with low verbal IQ

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