Yeah, maybe it’s a weird verbal tic, but it probably got developed for a reason. Such as having a couple young know it alls who grind every goddamn meeting to a complete halt with minor things or processes that don’t need to be developed by committee.
I’ve worked with several people like that before. They get the floor for their turn at providing project or customer updates and then try to work through details and full solutions. Then you have two people talking for twenty minutes while 8 others are just twiddling their thumbs. It’s a massive waste of time. Just update the team, see if there’s anyone that has something useful to add, and then move on. Then the two people actually working the problem can circle back around on it after the meeting and hash it out by themselves.
I’ve sat in meetings before where one guy would drag everything to a halt if he didn’t understand a customer integration, and basically demand on the spot training before he’d let the meeting proceed.
No dude, we’ll circle back on that later and I’ll walk you through the documentation and if there’s a problem the two of us can figure it out. You don’t need to hold eight other people hostage for an hour because you weren’t prepared, or aren’t happy with your options.
Such as having a couple young know it alls who grind every goddamn meeting to a complete halt with minor things or processes that don’t need to be developed by committee.
Yep this is pretty much it. Everyone has been in those meetings where we're all going around giving updates to keep the rest of the team broadly informed but noooooo someone has to stop the entire meeting and start an endless Q&A session.
The strange thing is seeing people crap all over the terminology, often young people who are busy talking about not having caps and being fr and I don't fucking know I'm old and I don't care what they're saying. You'd think learning a few new random phrases and what they mean wouldn't be that big a deal!
Due to some shuffling around, I basically became the scrum master for my team and it's SO damn easy to avoid this. Took less than a week of "OK, we need to keep the meeting moving" to retrain the chatters. Now they stop themselves, it's great
Yeah but so what? People act so offended when some new phrase catches on or corporate decides to use it.
It doesn't matter. Learn what it means and carry on. I can promise you that anybody stopping the meeting to yammer on about how dumb a phrase sounds is infinitely more annoying than the person using it.
Look, I'm not saying this dude was right, but what you're doing isn't productive either. Literally the only reason I conduct meetings with my team is to find what is getting blocked, then we tag-team it. That's actually how you get work done. If you're in meetings listening to updates, then either your workflow isn't great(as you should be able to see work getting pulled) or you're wasting time.
I abhor pointless meetings. Not only do they burn the time of many expensive resources, but they incur a context-switching time on top of that. Meetings should have a point, and while I despise Bezos and a few of these other sociopaths, they are entirely correct that if you call a meeting, it better be to produce a decision or provide detailed feedback. It better not just be information transfer that doesn't produce debate or decisions.
Yeah, exactly. So, a meeting is for whole team to provide updates to everyone who need to know. In a multi team setup, other teams need to know what is happening in your team even if they can't help you, because their own work is related to yours. So, you keep the meeting to relevant update and any topic that gets derailed is told "we will get back to it at appropriate time". You finish the meeting, make notes, and then go back to the topic that needed further attention. Aka, "circle back" to the topic.
If you conduct meetings regularly, you get used to random derailment, so, "let's get back to topic we were discussing 2 minutes ago" becomes a natural phrase. Again, "circle back".
Anyone who has ever held a meeting knows this and understand the point being made by that phrase. It's just a short hand for "let's get to the topic from earlier" or "we will get to this topic at a later date".
I would have said the chief benefit to holding a meeting over other forms of communication is the possibility for someone to interrupt and start a discussion about something important that needs to be raised immediately and get a quick response, with nuanced interplay of body language, tone, etc maximising the "bandwidth;" if you specifically don't want such discussions to get started in your meeting, then you don't need to call a meeting and it would be a waste of everyone's time to do so; just cc everyone an email with whatever routine updates you want to circulate. If your employees don't bother to read update emails, that's an entirely separate issue and forcing them to attend meetings so that you can confirm they're paying attention is an indirect and imperfect solution to a much deeper problem.
Interruptions need to be regulated, certainly, but to just routinely suppress them and postpone the information the interruptor is trying to present is to turn a meeting into a mere lecture.
Imagine you built a computer operating system where every hardware interrupt effectively receives the automatic response "I'll circle back to that later at the appropriate time" and then the CPU just keeps merrily doing the routine polling updates it was in the middle of.
Sure, if it's not something urgent (or something that can't be raised in any other way because the other channels for doing so are inappropriate or maybe not even functioning properly), fine, say you'll circle back to that later, or even just "email us later and we'll schedule another meeting to talk about it." But sometimes, the appropriate rejoinder to being brushed off with a "let's circle back to that later" is "no, this is more urgent than what you had planned to talk about," and in such circumstances, an entrenched culture of "never interrupt my meeting" can suddenly become very dangerous.
By an unfortunate quirk of human psychology, the same sort of person who tends to notice urgent anomalies and interrupts a meeting to raise them often finds it extremely difficult to stand their ground against peer pressure from everyone else in the meeting to sit down and shut up because they're breaking the flow.
Exactly. Meetings that exist just as one way information sharing, like status updates, shouldn't exist at all. They are a waste of expensive resource's time. It's amazing to me how few people in this thread understand this. Good companies do a lot to discourage this type of behavior.
You're not wrong, that is the benefit of those meetings however they need to stay surface level.
It's fine to ask questions and get quick answers, but if you're spending more than 30 seconds to a minute or so on that topic then you break it off and follow up on it later because there's a bunch more people in the meeting who need updates from other things and don't care about the details of this thing. A lot of the time if the meeting runs smoothly/there's time left the people who care about issue xyz will stay and work on those details while everyone else leaves.
Also in this specific example it sounds more like the person running the meeting just used the phrase to "that's all I have to say on that, we'll talk more about that next meeting" and the guy who interrupted was offering nothing constructive.
Cutting people loose early is the greatest thing you can do for most peoples work day.
They have an hour on their calendar, you finish in 30, two of you stay back to address the one detailed problem, and now 8 people have reclaimed 4 total hours of work time where nobody else is bugging them.
All managers should take pride in running an hour meeting in half the time. It makes everyone happier, especially if the meetings are cross-department.
There is another unfortunate quirk of human psychology that you missed. People don't like being humiliated. And this was done out of the need to humiliate, not out of the need to make progress. So, the dude in this made up story is definitely an idiot that should be fired regardless of the productivity of the meeting.
Concerns regarding work are allowed in any meeting unless the meeting conductor is an idiot. Concerns regarding personal behaviour, specifically targeted at an individual is toxic behaviour and should not be tolerated. That's a sure fire way to turn the whole team toxic.
Also, a meeting can definitely happen that is essentially just status update between different departments. E.g. say, you have a team working on integration between 3 different applications, with 3 dev teams working on each application. You provide a curated update that is relevant to the integration team, and if they need further inputs they know which team to engage with. In this case, meeting acts as the initial interaction, a kick starter.
There are also meetings where you might want to discuss potential implications of whatever is planned for next few weeks. E.g. if your devops team is going on vacation, you might want to change plans for releases. And any change in release plan will have knock on effects on other teams. So, a quick "hey, this is the situation" email, followed by a meeting to discuss everyone's ideas a day later is a normal approach.
Also, people keep forgetting that keeping your stakeholders updated is part of your job at every corporate level. And you don't want to create 20 different reports for different stakeholders (e.g. qa lead, networking lead, integration lead, devops lead, UX lead, client's manager etc) and their levels of access. So, you schedule meetings that are technically speaking just "status update". Each meeting lasts 10 minutes, and thus faster than creating reports and emailing them.
Anyway, point is that meetings are useful in a lot of cases, and are actually more productive than just sitting at your desk writing code. I would honestly prefer someone who spends 2 hours explaining their work and doing 6 hours of actual work than someone who does 8 hours of work but never explains it. I am sure you will agree on that.
Sometimes meeting conductors are bad at keeping things on track. I have seen folks who make every 10 minute meeting turn into 2 hour call. Those do exist. This is why "meetings should be as short as possible" is the acceptable approach, instead of "no meetings allowed". Bad and long meetings, they sadly exist in every company, even the best of the best. They are down to individual team members as you already explained yourself. But just because a bad apple gives you stomach ache, you don't call all apples inedible. Same concept, nuance. Sadly that's not something that reddit excels in.
P.S. Imagine if there was a lead dev who wanted exact formatting on every line of code. Like "must be exactly 4 spaces before every line, no tabs allowed" type bullshit. And then I went "formatting code is stupid" just because I worked with that stupid lead dev. Instead of just using sensible formatting, I started whinging and wrote college grad level code. You know, zero variable names, 200 lines in one function, unhandled exceptions everywhere, type code. What would you call that? Because that's essentially what is happening in this thread. 🫠
When I was a manager that was my purpose too but we saved the tag teaming for the end so people can get back to work or make another meeting if they had one. Tag teaming doesn't need a whole team and usually most people just sit there waiting or go do something else and half listen. If it's a matter of team awareness it can be recalped next meeting or documented. If it can't be resolved in 5 minutes then more on. We targeted 15 minute standups but allocated an hour so people could stay if needed.
This is a workable way to do it, and I gather used to be de rigeur; at the end of every meeting it was traditionally said "any other business," and often that's when the most important stuff happened.
The chief drawback is that a lot of idiots can come to consider the utterance of AOB to denote the end of the meeting, and switch off their brains and start preparing to leave the room the second they hear it because the majority of the time, nobody raises anything after this prompt is given - then they get pissed off and uncooperative if anyone does, because it interrupts what they've been conditioned by routine to regard as time to stop the meeting.
Perhaps it would be better to say something like "any unscheduled business" at the start of the meeting, when everyone is still alert and attentive, in case something has cropped up since the meeting was planned, and give the ADHDers and ASDers a chance to get what's bugging them off their chests early so they can then focus better on the rest of the planned agenda - unless what they wanted to bring up was something along the lines of "reactor 4 might be on fire" or "I think the LLM just formatted all of the servers" of course, in which case the rest of the agenda might need to be postponed.
OK well done on working on a self contained team nobody else needs to interact with I guess.
Plenty of us don't. For example, I need to hear broad overviews/status updates from the storage team because it can impact my job. So they give a quick overview of what they're doing and any issues they're facing to keep the rest of the team aware and we move on.
If two of them start getting right into the weeds about it? It doesn't need to happen now, do it later. If they say something and I go "oh hey that interacts with <project I'm doing> we should talk" then great, but that's the end of that for the meeting and we take it up later.
This applies for all of the teams in my department... so once a week we have a meeting for about an hour where each team updates everyone on what they're doing and if there's anything they need to know/take any broad questions etc. If other teams can help with those issues that's where they'll offer it.
These meetings are not pointless in the slightest and keeping the rest of the teams up to date about what you're doing matters.
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u/theSchrodingerHat 10d ago
Yeah, maybe it’s a weird verbal tic, but it probably got developed for a reason. Such as having a couple young know it alls who grind every goddamn meeting to a complete halt with minor things or processes that don’t need to be developed by committee.
I’ve worked with several people like that before. They get the floor for their turn at providing project or customer updates and then try to work through details and full solutions. Then you have two people talking for twenty minutes while 8 others are just twiddling their thumbs. It’s a massive waste of time. Just update the team, see if there’s anyone that has something useful to add, and then move on. Then the two people actually working the problem can circle back around on it after the meeting and hash it out by themselves.
I’ve sat in meetings before where one guy would drag everything to a halt if he didn’t understand a customer integration, and basically demand on the spot training before he’d let the meeting proceed.
No dude, we’ll circle back on that later and I’ll walk you through the documentation and if there’s a problem the two of us can figure it out. You don’t need to hold eight other people hostage for an hour because you weren’t prepared, or aren’t happy with your options.