[na85]

>I remember real meetings. They were far more exhausting than any zoom call. Completely draining.

Some were and some weren't. Bad leaders hold bad meetings. Good leaders hold meetings that are short, to-the-point, stick to the agenda, and involve only the people who actually need to be involved. To wit: if you don't hold sufficient authority to make decisions related to the meeting or if you aren't there to weigh in as a subject matter expert, then you don't get invited.

[tolmasky]

This doesn’t really conflict with my point. We already know that bad leaders vastly outnumber good leaders. And there are I’m sure plenty of good leaders who haven’t mastered the specific skill of “meeting management”. Again, the video conference simply peels away all the fluff and reveals the meeting for what it is. The hypothetical “good leader” you bring up can just easily invite the right people to a video conference. Hence if the video conference sucks… it’s probably not because you’re not in a room with these people. Perhaps you will be more distracted in a physical meeting and thus less likely to be sufficiently annoyed to consciously ask “wait, why are we even doing any these meetings?”, but it’s not because the meeting was “better” in any meaningful sense. Especially when you consider the well-known psychological effect of leaving a room blanking your mind.

[rtpg]

I have never been in a meeting that felt valuable as a synchronous meeting with more than 8 people.

Every virtual meeting complaint includes the grid of 16+ people. I feel like that’s the thing that is the problem

[rererr]

Not to defend meetings, which are mostly pointless, but there is also a third reason to attend: education. It is often low signal, but you can occasionally learn something about the topic or at least learn the communication norms of your team/company.

[spoonjim]

It's not just the meeting itself, it's also a factor of the person. There are people who like to be alone and any meeting is going to be oppressively awful for them. Other people love to be around other people and any meeting no matter how useless is enjoyable for them.