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

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

#191

Post by poincaredisk »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #174
dgb23 wrote: post #156

Earlier 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…

>async doesn’t go well with scale,

Sync is even worse at scale. I had the pleasure of attending standups in a 20-person team. It was a nightmare where I said two sentences and then wasted the next two hours of my life listening to things I either know or are unrelevant to me.

>you’re punishing everyone with having to back-read

Great, because skipping three pages of unimportant conversation is faster than skipping 30 minutes of banter between two extrovert UI developers as a backend specialist.

>structural strategy to keep everyone accountable

Sounds exactly like something mid level managers say to themselves. Structural synergy? Keeping people accountable? I just want to work, damnit.

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

#192

Post by VSerge »

0xEF wrote: post #183
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Fair point in your case, but my experience across companies and industries is that people just don't read. It's true in any customer facing experience where tutorials etc are routinely unread and ignored, it's true for execs who are always short on time and want the exec summary in order no to read a whole memo (however misguided this may be in certain instances), it's true for seasoned professionals who prioritize and decide to ignore certain requests until they are clear enough / repeated enough, the list goes on.

Even people getting @mentionned on slack or in emails seem to find it acceptable to say routinely they didn't see/read whatever it was they were specifically asked to look at.

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

#193

Post by falcor84 »

jedberg wrote: post #95
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. 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…

I predict that in "20 minutes in the future" we'll see the industry moving to AI based scrum-assistants with a scheduled daily trigger, that will reach out to each dev to have a check-in conversation and then automatically synthesize the input from everyone and update the project manager (possibly AI-based itself) with insight about how things are progressing and recommendations.

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

#194

Post by scott_w »

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.

> But you can share your daily status asynchronously as well.

In practice, this is harder because people don't speak up unless prodded. And on Slack, I spend a lot of time and effort prodding people for that update, whereas a stand-up takes 15 minutes, tops.

Not attending stand-up is a lot more visible than silently ignoring an async update request on Slack.

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

#195

Post by lqet »

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 also used to think that work meetings are low information density.

Then I attended our first parent-teacher conference at kindergarten. It was incredible: 2.5 hours of discussions and ridiculous complaints ("why does my child has to put on splash pants on rainy autumn days, putting them on is just such an ordeal!!"), and not a single bit of relevant information was transmitted. Not a single decision was made. I went home in utter disbelief.

Currently, our parents' council is trying to organize a party for the children who will be going to school after summer. What should've been a TODO list where parents can write down what food they will bring and who will help with what escalated into 2 evenings of discussions, a Skype meeting, and a Whatsapp group where several fractions of parents have been fighting over whether T-Shirts should be printed to celebrate the end of kindergarten for over a week now.

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

#196

Post by scott_w »

portaouflop wrote: post #188
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When you get to that point, those two people should take the discussion outside of the sync call. The purpose of a sync is to figure out whether your current work is on track and, if not, who and what is needed to fix that.

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

#197

Post by Cthulhu_ »

pj_mukh wrote: post #16
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…

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" > > and I don't know how to tell them its because they skipped some meetings where they could've been part of that discussion.

What else was discussed in these meetings? Was everything in there relevant to this one developer? This is what I find an issue in a lot of meetings, the majority is just not relevant to me; do I need to spend an hour of my time and attention span just in case there is something relevant? It's so draining.

IMO someone organizing / fronting a meeting should fine tune the agenda of a meeting so that it's maximally relevant to everyone attending. Anything that is more broadcasting / announcement / "for your information" should be done async, not just because people want to skip a meeting but also because they may be absent, sick, living in another timezone, or needing the information down the line.

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

#198

Post by Cthulhu_ »

sneak wrote: post #64
jbc1 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most people in meetings don’t type very fast, and find it easier to talk than to write. This means that prior to AI transcription/summary bots, there wasn’t much written documentation about the decisions and conclusions from meetings. Now hopefully that will change.

I've also read a thing (dunno if it was opinion or fact) that posited that people's reading ability is directly correlated to a preference for video, I suspect it's the same with meetings. I read / write all day (including on here lmao), meetings are draining in comparison. But the people in those meetings don't read / write nearly as much as I do.

I did once think that if the meeting were to be transcribed, people are outputting paragraphs of text in a short amount of time, just verbally. But keeping up with that is pretty draining, as you have to listen and process it, whereas with reading you can skim and re-read things easily.

I sometimes think people's basic skills - reading and typing - are underdeveloped or not assessed, and they should be assessed when applying for a job that involves reading and typing. But I don't even think people consider reading/writing skills when looking for staff since the assumption is that everyone's is good enough.

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

#199

Post by scott_w »

coliveira wrote: post #116
MrJohz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The point in the parent comment still stands. There should be a paper trail so that the developer would have to confront the need to add such a detail. If the decision was made in the meeting alone, then it was lost in time as not all developers can be expected to be in every meeting.

How? Meeting notes can never contain all the detail of the meeting and, if they do, there would be so much content that you'd likely miss them when you read the documentation. That's to say nothing of the time investment of the person to catch up on every document produced.

In that case, you're essentially relying on the people in the meeting to know they should document that thing as important which, given the person who knows it's important isn't there, is pretty unlikely.

Even in an ideal world, we'll have developers not in the meetings they need to be in. My contention would be that we should try to get people in the right meetings and, over time, the number of issues where someone isn't in the right meeting will be lower than if we just don't have those meetings.

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

#200

Post by codeduck »

lqet wrote: post #195
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 also used to think that work meetings are low information density. Then I attended our first parent-teacher conference at kindergarten. It was incredible: 2.5 hours of discussions and ridiculous complaints ("why does my child has to put on splash pants on rainy autumn days, putting them on is just such an ordeal !!"), and not a single bit of relevant information was transmitted. Not a single decision was made. I we…

Nothing made me appreciate the information-density of engineering meetings like attending parent/teacher or sports club committee meetings.

It's like... people, is your time not worth more than this thirty minute bun-fight over summer clubs?

Still hate meetings though.

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