[phaser]

They could. But they rather get their "wisdom" from Steve Jobs trivia romanticizing the grind and being an asshole.

Like Elon Musk, who once wrote in a company-wide email in 2018: "Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value"

[ninkendo]

> Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value

I’d be interested to hear more about the context for this, since it sounds perfectly reasonable, enough that it’s triggering some cognitive dissonance with my general hatred for Musk.

It’s a truism in most companies that meetings tend to have too many people for no good reason. It’s just too easy to add extra people “just in case”, or adding whole teams when you only really needed one person, etc… and as an IC I’ve been in roles where I was in back to back meetings literally all day, leaving no time to actually get my work done. A policy of “if it’s obvious to you that a meeting doesn’t need you, feel free to walk out” sounds very reasonable to me.

[mrhottakes]

What if you're needed at the end of the meeting but not the beginning?

[ninkendo]

Then it would likely not be nearly as “obvious” that I’m not adding value, if all it takes is some time to pass before I’m suddenly needed. If we’re on a topic that will eventually make its way to something I can help with, I should be able to see that coming.

But if you say “but what if you don’t know” then it’s the same as if literally anyone else at the company is needed at the second half of a meeting: you say “let’s loop in mrhottakes, this seems like it’s his expertise” and you get looped in.

Preemptively adding every single person on the off chance they may be needed can lead to madness: at the limit you may as well add the whole company to the invite. After all, what if they’re needed at some point? It’s extremely wasteful. Multiply the number of people by their hourly salary: that’s how much a hour meeting “costs”. Don’t be wasteful.