[BlargMcLarg]

>Even if you aren't an active participant, you get to at least listen in.

This is why "it could've been an email" exists. If you're not making me an active/reactive, valuable contributor, then you're wasting my time and the boss' money.

>That is not the way to succeed.

I mean, seems a lot of people managed to succeed just fine going radio silent for a long time and simply observing their target audience until the last moment. Which does allow for long stretches of work, and rails against the "communication and work need to be heavily intertwined for success!" spiel. Nor does it say meetings are the best way to do this intertwining, even situationally.

>To succeed you need to make sure what you are building is actually what you should be building.

Which does not necessarily conclude that meetings do this.

The whole comment also misses obvious points such as analysis paralysis, death by committee and more.

[maccard]

> This is why "it could've been an email" exists. If you're not making me an active/reactive, valuable contributor, then you're wasting my time and the boss' money.

In my experience, the people who work like this are the sort of people with 5000 unread emails who ignore slack DMs too because they're "too busy".

> I mean, seems a lot of people managed to succeed just fine going radio silent for a long time and simply observing their target audience until the last moment.

This is a local optimization, and only works if the entire team is on board with "keep BlargMcLarg unblocked" at the expense of themselves. As the parent put it, this is a people problem, not a tech problem, and by only dealing with _your_ needs you're ignoring the needs of your team.

> Which does allow for long stretches of work,

This is a time management (and people) problem. Not going to any meetings is likely to result in producers appearing at your desk because they don't know what's going on (because _they_ have 5k emails and you've not spoken to them in a week). It also doesn't solve the long stretches of work problem; time management does.

[BlargMcLarg]

>In my experience

In my experience, there is absolutely zero correlation between preference for meetings and willingness to communicate asynchronously. To me, this is simply advocating for meetings to force people to communicate and be empathic. This has its own set of problems, as evident by anecdotes in this thread and the many discussions prior.

>This is a local optimization

On the flipside, you assume that the local optimization does not lead into a global optimization, while referring back to the parent's "meetings good" as a global solution. Obviously, giving an anecdote of the other extreme of the curve is just there to show how absurd the notion of "meetings are best" is. There is success on both sides of the curve. I would really like to see empirical evidence of "meetings best", as the trend continues towards "more meetings" (or really just more bureaucracy) without any strong evidence as to why this is beneficial for the entire company.

>As the parent put it, this is a people problem

I agree. More communication != better communication. Synchronous communication != better communication. Just like some books read better with fewer words, so can less communication lead to better communication. Unlike what a lot of pro-meeting people like to believe, the anti-meeting crowd isn't arguing for "no communication" as a whole.