No, meetings are low information density because people are too lazy to plan an agenda and assign homework to a meeting beforehand, so that the meeting can focus on solutioning and actually delivering value.
I noped out of management track to focus on being a top level IC because I could informally do the actually valuable "management" stuff in that role anyhow (documentation, planning, mentoring, client consultation, etc) without the expectation that I'd get sucked into 5 hours of meetings a day. Leadership still knows who I am and what I do, now I just have someone else to relay a lot of the little shit, and when I communicate with them it's about really important shit that needs reiterating.
I have a lot of informal relationships with people because I'm a go-to, so I can still play office politics if I want.
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 being prepared then having to take up the first part of the meeting with catching everyone up anyways. So he structured meetings at Amazon as an introductory period of reading so everyone was always on the same page once discussion began. No slideshows, just reading a document of n pages where n is less than 6.
I personally find the high level IC pseudomanager role sad. I went back to IC to be closer to the metal. But the expectation is I’ll be a product manager, program manager, and people manager all in one while the focused roles work in a self limited silo.
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 all standing scheduled regular meetings are basically useless. If I run a startup again they will be outright banned for my org. Meetings about a specific topic or issue are different.
I might disagree on this. For a meeting that covers any moderately complex situation to be productive, the attendees need to understand the context. That sounds like what Bezos was after. Doing “homework” beforehand ensures that people aren’t sitting idly while one person is reading the report for the first time or otherwise trying to bring themselves up to speed on the context everyone else already knows. I don’t think that’s the best use of everyone’s time, unless you expect meetings to be the primary objective of those attendees. It sounds to me that leadership should be delegating decisions to people who understand the context rather than spending time at every meeting going over background. Of course, that only works well in high-trust environments.
How do you ensure everyone does their homework? If they are busy, they won’t. If they’re managers they’re probably in back to back meetings all day. Do they prepare for every one of them? This implies they should be working 11 hours a day just to keep up with homework for their baseline meeting load? In my 35 years I’ve never seen a busy manager or even IC show up having read the material ahead of time. Especially a very senior person who gets scheduled in 16 x 30 minute sessions in a day. It’s impractical and they’ll just show up and tell the junior people to explain the material and do a presentation while they ask questions. Pointing out the inefficiency for everyone else who prepared is a nonstarter as they’re busy and more senior.
It’s not about delegation. Everything that can be delegated should be but often there are decisions that need to be made that involve more capital or other outlay/risk than delegates are entitle to have discretion over. Further there are cross organizational decisions where the “join point” is a fairly senior person and they need to tie break between delegates.
Amazon was pretty good about delegation and independent empowerment, at least at aws. But there were certain decisions that always went to Jassy or bezos. People moaned about how much work it was to prepare for those and what a friction it was but those frictions and efforts were throttles and high risk decisions to keep entropy from eating them alive due to the scaled and delegated nature of most processes.
To your point, I think this tone has to be set by the senior person or else it won't take. It has to be ingrained culturally.
Correct me if I'm off, but it seems like you're saying these things are true:
1) There are certain high-level decisions that must be made and only certain people can make them because of the risk.
2) Those people are busy and in meetings almost all of the day.
3) Because they are busy they can't do the homework.
All of that points to the decision-maker as being the bottleneck. Certainly I'm missing the nuance, but that doesn't sound like an organization that delegates effectively. Real delegation, where people are delegated the authority to make important decisions, could reduce the need for all of the above. What exactly are they being delegated if not the authority to make high-level decisions? It's sounds like delegation in name only, or a more superficial version of delegation. Sometimes I think leaders think of “delegation” as “allowing someone else to do the stuff I don’t really want to do.” That’s not the type of delegation I’m alluding to.
The issue is this view doesn’t scale beyond a small organization. There are a variety of reasons many of which I already pointed out but including you can’t hire uniformly P99 leaders.
The thing Bezos did with Amazon was create a scale free organizational culture which is resilient and highly adaptable. You can’t do that by adopting processes and organizing artifacts that depend on perfect execution by everyone everywhere all the time against some ideal. You have to build processes that are resilient to inadequacy and even incompetence yet still be successful at all levels reliably. When you’re managing an organization of over a million employees with a pretty flat org structure this becomes even more important. Saying “delegate effectively” is not a resilient thing - setting up a structure that ensures delegation happens but executive leadership is aware of and involved in enterprise critical decisions is hard to do.
One way Andy Jassy does this is he requires the documents to be read in his meetings to always use a specific style including Oxford commas. If he reads the document and there aren’t Oxford commas he ends the meeting and you have to reschedule - which can take months. So, you really are certain you have made the most succinct document according to a protocol that’s very low cognitive load for him. He delegates most decisions to his team and they to theirs but at the scale of aws or Amazon, there are some decisions he is a part of. And that number is a lot because Amazon is enormous, not because he doesn’t trust his team or delegates.
But some things he doesn’t. At aws he never delegated pricing decisions. He scrutinized any pricing change in detail. If you did a good job and everyone on his team already was bought in he invariably had something incredibly insightful no one else thought of. He would send it down and his subordinates would often be empowered to approve it. But he always reviewed pricing at least once. This was less about micromanagement and more about choosing to apply his time against what he felt his org should really care about. Margin, cost, scale, and customer experience of these things.
No offense, but nature of these replies sounds more like someone parroting tech speak than someone applying principles that have a context beyond just tech or AWS.
>scale free organizational culture
The fact that the meetings are bottlenecked by decision makers ability to synthesize information imply it is not, in fact, “scale free”. Scale free would imply there are not such bottlenecks.
I agree it’s about developing resilient processes. What you allude to is not that, because it implies single points of failure within decision-making, bottlenecks etc. It doesn’t come across as a clear understanding of true process-oriented culture.
>he reads the document and there aren’t Oxford commas he ends the meeting and you have to reschedule
I can’t know, of course, but I suspect this has more to do with ensuring due-diligence than document formatting. It’s the same thing Van Halen did in the 1980s by requiring brown M&Ms removed from the bowl in their dressing room. It was a quick heuristic to ensure the venue read their rider/contract completely and adhered to it because a lack of due diligence in set design, pyrotechnics etc. would have been a major safety issue. I’m willing to bet checking for a lack of Oxford commas is shorthand for “what other details did they miss?”
>And that number is a lot because Amazon is enormous
Again, this implies the opposite of “scale free” culture. A true scale free org wouldn’t have any nodes with a large number of connections. A large number of decisions does not mean any single individual has to involved in those decisions directly. Why is he not willing/able to select someone capable of making those decisions? (Honest question to understand the dynamic).
In my experience the biggest issue with homework beforehand is that a substantial portion of the attendees won't do the homework. Frequently it's the people who you most needed to have done the homework. Now you need to rehash it for them anyways and everyone who did the homework has their time wasted. That's one area where the Amazon Silent Read shines. The other way I found it very useful is that people leave comments on the areas that need discussion and now you can spend the rest of the meeting just on those points. Would be great to have left the notes before the meeting but that's where reality sabotages things.
I’ve admired meeting stewards who will adjourn the meeting if people aren’t prepared and reconvene it later. If that person has authority and is well respected, it only has to happen once or twice, but obviously it can’t be applied everywhere.
Often, the purpose of the meeting is to get a busy VP to listen to some proposal and then say “yes.” That VP was booked solid for three weeks, and is booked solid for the next three weeks. This is his only 15 minute free time slot.
Aint no way anyone’s going to adjourn this meeting just because someone isn’t prepared.
>> No, meetings are low information density because people are too lazy to plan an agenda and assign homework to a meeting beforehand, so that the meeting can focus on solutioning and actually delivering value.
Honest question, how many people have this happening at where they work?
Most of the meetings where I work at now are on Teams, and are (for the most part) recorded so if people need to drop, or miss it because they can't make it for some reason. This also allows people to go back and watch at a faster speed or skip to presentations or important parts. The huge advantage is those meetings have a transcript so you can also read or scan the transcript instead.
I'm just wondering if in 2025 people are still having meaningless meetings.
Man people who talk like you must work in absolutely miserable companies.
Meetings at my workplace are to the point, never longer than they need to be, and while yeah I weasel out of as many as I feel I can, I don't send an AI notetaker nor do I need it summarized. We meet for a topic, we discuss that topic, usually bullshit for a little in and around the topic, and then we get back to work. I would say most of our half-hour scheduled meetings are 10 minutes, and most of our hour scheduled ones are about 30-40 depending what it is. If we have a LOT to do, VERY occasionally, we actually use up the full time and then end things promptly because we all have more to do.
We don't backstab or plot on one another, our work relationships are built on mutual respect for one another's contribution to our goals. Meetings (nor even being in leadership) are not about jockeying for power, they're about enabling the best of us to help push our goals forward.
I'm getting whole new kinds of appreciation for my job and it's deliberately small, flattened structure because apparently the default state of business is to turn into high school with higher stakes, and I would genuinely rather run into traffic than work at some of these places.
'Tech lead' in a lot of companies is a hybrid track that gets funneled into a 'director' level roles, which is almost fully management. Just like scientists evolve into PIs, which also entails mostly management.
IMO management positions are mostly lobbied for/created by try-hard social climbers, at least initially. "We're taking a lot of X work, maybe I should lead a team to deal with that?" "Y has so many reports, maybe I can form a subgroup to help with that?" Creating new positions for people who want to be more important than they are right now is the main mechanism by which private orgs expand.
Doing this is considered proof that this person is a natural leader who steps up to solve organizational problems and get things done. You can guess why this leads to many many layers of management mostly just having meetings with each other, and a confused bottom layer of people who have to use this deliberately broken human telephone to communicate with their real ultimate bosses, the owners.
I have a suspicion managers will become redundant sooner than tech workers, although certain big CEOs love to try to say otherwise... (wonder why...).
An (good) AI manager is far more efficient than any human manager, and doesn't need to resort to this tiered system. In theory, they are far faster any any human manager too, meaning the company can scale around them without any issue.
Maybe you still have a board that reviews decisions at a high level, and an office of human manager cogs that can review the individual AI decisions, but then your company structure can become such that a corp of 1k+ individuals can _directly communicate with their customer(s)_
Now, of course I'm not going to pretend that this won't come with its own share of issues, but that's what the "manager cogs" are for...
>and a confused bottom layer of people who have to use this deliberately broken human telephone to communicate with their real ultimate bosses, the owners.
Which just feels like efficiency if you're the owner: less people reaching out to you with problems!
>“nobody was considering me for the management track”
I don’t know if this holds any more than saying “the only people who get into management are those that couldn’t hack it in the technical side”. There are many people who get recruited for certain management tracks and turn it down so they can put more focus on technical problems.
IMO at the end of the day, every job is about solving problems and it’s up to you to choose the track that aligns with the problems you want to work on. Some want to focus on people and administration, others want to focus on technical problems. A problem arises when orgs only have one route to promotion (eg, you must get into management if you want to be promoted).
Promoted to their incompetence. The Peter Principle or as I prefer: "growth mindset meets reality"
This thread is insane. Plenty of people have turned down managerial opportunities. The inevitable path for any IC is this offer. Countless have told stories of their regret for either path.
I noped out of management track to focus on being a top level IC because I could informally do the actually valuable "management" stuff in that role anyhow (documentation, planning, mentoring, client consultation, etc) without the expectation that I'd get sucked into 5 hours of meetings a day. Leadership still knows who I am and what I do, now I just have someone else to relay a lot of the little shit, and when I communicate with them it's about really important shit that needs reiterating.
I have a lot of informal relationships with people because I'm a go-to, so I can still play office politics if I want.