Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

331–340 of 405 posts

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

#331
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.

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…

>Conversely, if I thought I didn’t need to be in a meeting, then I wouldn’t send a tool to gather stuff for me to then just ignore the tool output - because I don’t need it.

The only way you know that you didn't need to be at a meeting is to be at the meeting. Catch-22 is a fun game.

With dictation tools and analysis you can have meeting notes and then you or AI search for things that might affect you so you can reach out and correct the record.

Simply put in modern larger companies there is too much going on at any given time. Most companies of any size are made up many purchased companies and their applications that are kind of glued together into a corporate structure. You can blame culture rot on the participants, but most of the time they are being asked to do too much in a dysfunctional organization.

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

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re going to be missing out on some really interesting problems, because the interesting ones are frequently cross-disciplinary, in my experience. Still if you want to stick to what you know, that’s fine too.

Well I'm on a team now managing a cloud SaaS package. Meaning most problems just involve finding workarounds for their incompetence. I tend to grab the more interesting issues, which is easy because nobody else wants them. But in general I hate my job and I can't learn much from it. I have to admit that if I was in a more fulfilling position I'd be happier to collaborate. But I'll never be a "team player". I just don…

you hating your job puts all of this in context.

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

#333
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…

Let's not pretend someone who sends an AI note taker, which also implies they have time to read notes taken by an AI of a meeting they couldn't find time to turn up for is someone lacking in time.

The prerequisite of reading notes written by an AI means you have time.

They should just be honest and say "I don't need to be in this" or "I don't want to be in this" rather than pretending they do.

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

#334
My company started to use an AI note taker for interviews. I was skeptical but had no say and decided to reserve my judgement. What surprised me was how many notes it produced. it will write hundreds of bullet points which ends up feeling exhaustive to try and review. In addition it makes lots of mistakes, maybe due to misinterpreting what a candidate said, accents/audio issues. So while I didn’t have to type during the interview, I still have to write my own overall impression anyways. I’ve found practically zero value from it, it just feels gimmicky.

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

#335
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…

Let's not pretend someone who sends an AI note taker, which also implies they have time to read notes taken by an AI of a meeting they couldn't find time to turn up for is someone lacking in time. The prerequisite of reading notes written by an AI means you have time. They should just be honest and say "I don't need to be in this" or "I don't want to be in this" rather than pretending they do.

This doesn't follow. Plenty of hour long meetings could easily be summarized in a paragraph. Having the time to read a paragraph does not equate to having time to sit through an hour long meeting.

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

#336
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is that people who talk like that aren’t management material. “I noped out of the management track” = “nobody was considering me for the management track”

IMO management positions are mostly lobbied for/created by try-hard social climbers, at least initially. "We're taking a lot of X work, maybe I should lead a team to deal with that?" "Y has so many reports, maybe I can form a subgroup to help with that?" Creating new positions for people who want to be more important than they are right now is the main mechanism by which private orgs expand. Doing this is considered…

I have a suspicion managers will become redundant sooner than tech workers, although certain big CEOs love to try to say otherwise... (wonder why...).

An (good) AI manager is far more efficient than any human manager, and doesn't need to resort to this tiered system. In theory, they are far faster any any human manager too, meaning the company can scale around them without any issue.

Maybe you still have a board that reviews decisions at a high level, and an office of human manager cogs that can review the individual AI decisions, but then your company structure can become such that a corp of 1k+ individuals can _directly communicate with their customer(s)_

Now, of course I'm not going to pretend that this won't come with its own share of issues, but that's what the "manager cogs" are for...

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

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO management positions are mostly lobbied for/created by try-hard social climbers, at least initially. "We're taking a lot of X work, maybe I should lead a team to deal with that?" "Y has so many reports, maybe I can form a subgroup to help with that?" Creating new positions for people who want to be more important than they are right now is the main mechanism by which private orgs expand. Doing this is considered…

>and a confused bottom layer of people who have to use this deliberately broken human telephone to communicate with their real ultimate bosses, the owners. Which just feels like efficiency if you're the owner: less people reaching out to you with problems!

Exactly, the dysfunction comes from the top: the unelected investor class.

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

#338
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is simply not true. Writing - particularly in the context of instant messages sent during work - cannot convey tone, and it is far less asynchronous than being able to have a conversation with someone. It is though. The amount of thought that can be put into writing is at least 1-2 orders of magnitude greater. The amount of thought that can be put into conversational speech is limited to roughly one second per…

The amount of thought that can be put into writing as a function of total time thinking/communicating is probably nearly the same or less than talking. That is, if you spend a second figuring out what you're going to say, you can put more thought into your words. > Writing also has the benefit of maintaining a record of what was said. The number of misunderstandings that could have been a avoided by writing is stagge…

Not to mention, misunderstandings crop up in text all the time, often due to lack of tone being conveyed

Can you elaborate on this? "Tone" is something that inherently has to be interpreted, so it doesn't make sense that you're attributing this as a quality that shields from misunderstandings.

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

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been around a while in various forms. It's still no replacement for synchronously asking follow up questions and being available for decision making.

But that's what a modern AI agent can do, which previous ones couldn't. If a company gives it full access to the project management system, your previous conversations with it, and its prior conversations with the other team members, I believe it can be quite good at follow up and recommendations. I do absolutely see managers giving it some limited decision making (e.g. "Yes, we should split this subtask off into nex…

Yea but that's not quite the same social pressure and implication of urgency; people are more motivated if they know they're talking to a human. That's my impulsive guess, anyway.

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

#340
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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN