[efitz]

There are some who believe that meetings never accomplish anything. If those people are in positions of power in an organization, there will be tension with people who use meetings effectively to coordinate, communicate and drive decision making with all stakeholders present.

[whoknowsidont]

>There are some who believe that meetings never accomplish anything.

No there aren't. If you are consistently getting push backs on meetings within your org it's not that the teams or IC's believe that meetings are useless (what a silly thing to say) it's a sign that they don't have faith in the organization structure to concretely do anything with the information or provide valuable input.

If you try to setup a meeting and get push back you should _immediately_ ask yourself why the other person feels that way about the people involved or even yourself.

[Aurornis]

> No there aren't.

Reading other comments in this thread will reveal a lot of them. :)

I've worked remote and across time zones for a while. I've encountered a few too many engineers who think any form of meeting or even communication is an unnecessary burden. They just want a queue of perfectly defined tickets to pull from and nobody to bother them until it's done at whatever pace they feel like working that week.

Strangely, being in a low-meeting company seems to make it worse, because meetings are so few and far between that some people get unreasonably upset when their week goes from 1 meeting to 2 meetings because we dared double their meeting load this week.

[robocat]

> unreasonably upset

I suspect some people have a conditioned pathological response to meetings - µPTSD.

Watch a bit of the GitLab Meeting Similator video and who could retain their sanity if they must participate: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rOqgRiNMVqg Watch the lady in the bottom panel struggle to look appropriately interested (or am I just projecting?).

[ungreased0675]

The tension is the desired outcome. I know meetings are useful and necessary, but if I start with the extreme position of “all meetings are worthless productivity leeches” it changes the conversation from justifying changing meetings to meetings having to justify their existence. Meetings should have to fight for their lives, not the other way around.

[gustavus]

I've seen this argument often but I'd guess 50-75% of the meetings in my organization could've been handled in an email. Often times the only reason we have a meeting in the first place instead of an email is because of the politics around things, which to me is a sign of inefficiency in the 1st place.

[ASalazarMX]

I've seen that different teams have different priorities, and while emails do help avoid many meetings, there's nothing like an in-person meeting to coordinate efforts.

Also, the more your meeting goes beyong half an hour, the less fruitful it becomes. Half-hour meetings are the most productive, one-hour meetings are understandable, multi-hour meetings are dreadful.

[michaelcampbell]

> There are some who believe that meetings never accomplish anything.

No more than those that believe every last one is 100% useful.