Last year, after many years working remote, I joined a company with heavy in-office culture. I grumbled about all the commute, but now I am really really happy.
AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
181–190 of 405 posts
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#182Considering that most meeting software have built-in call record and transcription features, it is less wasteful and less distracting to automatically send the artefacts to all participants.
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#183The 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…
> They like giving directions vocally because that authority is harder to question than if they wrote up a memo Authority is also much harder to deliver in an asynchronous format. If someone can just _not read_ the memo, it functionally has no power. The risk isn't that your memo might be questioned, it's that your memo might never be read.
I have to disagree since I can also just not listen/pay any attention to what is vocally delivered in the meeting, which I find to be an abhorrent waste of my time in the first place. If the directive is in writing such as an email I (or the person who issued it) can't point to that and say "you did not read this" which shifts the onus entirely on the person receiving the directive.
About a year ago, I nearly quit my job over this, going so far as to put my two weeks notice in as a way to hold a gun to their head, repeating my frequent request that all directives handed down from on high _must_ be in writing if they are expected to be followed. My company had (still does, to some degree, but we are still working on it) a cancerous culture of he said/she said that was being abused to avoid any accountability from upper management, which was both impeding the actual work being done as well as demoralizing to th workers. We even ended up losing some talent over it before I used my own value and authority to put my foot down, making me wish I'd done it sooner.
Verbal directives only stroke the ego of the person delivering them and their meaning either evaporates or gets twisted as soon as everyone walks out of that conference room or logs off that video call. If the person issuing them is not willing to have their directives questioned when they are in writing, then they should not hold the position they do. It's not about questioning someone's authority, it's about ensuring the directive makes sense with the work being done and adds value or guidance to the existing processes. Screw the fragile ego nonsense.
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trust me, the 80% meeting workday became prevalent loooooong before the 2020s.
Isn't this just called "being a Product Owner"? I've never seen those people do anything but sit in meetings.
I don't know about anyone else, but contrary to my general disdain for meetings* I have found product owners/process managers to be useful in the regard of having one central person to funnel things through on a particular project. The bottleneck also creates a nice buffer of accountability in both directions and they typically offer either new or refined SOPs after solving the same problems over and over again. Plus, they can sit in on the meeting while I go do something useful.
I may just have been lucky with the few I've had to work with though, so your mileage may vary.
*or as the song says, a little less conversation, a little more action please
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#185More remote-work rage bait.
This allows folks who do not need actually contribute to a meeting to catch up on the content at a time that suits them later.
Sounds like a very efficient use of time to me.
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#186The 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…
sigh You have engineers that read memos? Must be nice.
That's on them, though.
But if you do not hold the engineers accountable for reading the memo, that's on you (or whomever has the authority to do that). This is why having things in writing is important and verbal directives have about as much value as a fart in the wind.
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I might be lucky. Or I might be avoiding large organizations on purpose. Most of the time at least.
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 impo…
> you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read.
What? Instead you are punishing everyone to sit on a meeting, hearing two people discuss something that could have been a dm. I get that some people prefer meetings but to me every meeting with more than 3 people is a massive waste of time
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#189The 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. 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…
You are talking about juniors mixed with severe introvert persona. Most juniors in dev are a variant of that. Its part of seniority to overcome these self-inflicted mental barriers (reverse doesn't obviously work - an extroverted dev can still be as green as spring lawn, even if loaded with yet-undeserved confidence).
If you need to babysit bunch of juniors thats fine, but it should be clear from one's role in team/project that this needs to be a continuous effort (at least till they grok how to step up, but it takes years if at all for some).
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#190In my opinion, sending an AI note taker to a meeting basically means that for the attendee, a recap email written by the meeting organizer would be enough - except that in my experience at least, most meeting organizers aren't writing these.
Best would be the meeting organizers to leverage their AI attendee to write a draft meeting recap and sending it out after review.