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

Post by vb6sp6 » Thu, Jul 03, 2025, 9:49 PM UTC

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.

Post by jowea » Thu, Jul 03, 2025, 10:01 PM UTC

phil21 wrote: post #297

fnordpiglet wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homework before hand is an anti pattern IMO. It assumes people aren’t busy in the rest of their day and the meeting scheduler is inflating the toll of the meeting with a hidden prep tax. This is how people end up with 12 hour days. Bezos forbade pre-meeting homework at Amazon for this reason. He was having a hard time keeping up with everything and the meetings were basically people recriminating each other for not b…

All bezos did was explicitly make the homework a required part of calling a meeting. Correctly putting the majority of the prep work on the person calling the meeting to begin with. Then they simply moved the implied 20-30 minute prep time everyone should be doing anyways into the meeting block itself. If a meeting isn’t important enough to prep materials or an agenda for the meeting should be canceled. My theory is…

Post by captainkrtek » Thu, Jul 03, 2025, 10:49 PM UTC

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #363

captainkrtek wrote: post #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…

It kind of does what a human would do but in the most artificial and bloated way. It doesn’t have that extra thing that a human does to highlight things and filter out the garbage

Post by const_cast » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 1:33 AM UTC

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…

Post by kaashif » Fri, Jul 04, 2025, 3:24 AM UTC

smeej wrote: post #218

coldtea wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a nice way of saying that some people just won't tell you what they're up to async, you have to wring information out of them synchronously. Like, you explicitly ask them in an IM and they don't tell you? Not telling you on their own, I can understand. If the former happens though, you have bigger problems, that asking on a real-life meeting wont solve.

Seriously. This sounds like, "I can't manage my direct report, so I need to waste the time of everybody else on the team just so the little punk realizes he can't hide forever." A team meeting should not be the go-to solution for "Bob is bad at communicating"!