Nobody Knows What a Meeting Is Anymore

Don't get me wrong, I like being traditionally employed as much as the next guy, let alone at a job that's fully remote. I don't take it for granted. However, I think meetings, in the Microsoft Teams or Zoom sense, have gotten completely out of hand.

Gone are the days where business people would sit around a table, have a clearly defined agenda beforehand (to know what the meeting will be about and prepare for it), and discuss that and only that during said meeting, which would last a specific agreed-upon amount of time. Modern work meetings end up being video calls where one or two people monopolize the "conversation", with occasional calls for attention to the rest of the participants, who in turn could not care less. Of course, you'll say "maybe your company is just doing meetings wrong" and you'd be correct if you weren't not correct. I took this job in part because they claimed they do meetings right. The reality of the situation is that the ecosystem around which corporations are structured in the 21st century (and especially in the 2020s) encourages or at the very least contributes to this meaningless drivel, and it's not the fault of workers who are just trying to get things done.

Upper management's obsession with metrics, optimization, and "KPIs" and "OKRs", acronyms which elicit "WTFs" from the rest of us, has created an environment where micromanagement is not only inevitable, but essential. How else will you convince people you're getting work done if you don't diligently note down everything, and hire people to note down the things other people don't note down, and hire even more people to hold the rest of them accountable?

I'm writing this during one of these meaningless meetings, and I hope to any gods that might be out there that my coworkers don't read this because I really respect them and the process, but I truly don't feel like I'm missing anything by spending my attention elsewhere. I can see on the timer that we've been in this meeting for 1 hour and 17 minutes, and yet, the meeting just started. The official, actual agenda of the meeting, has just started being discussed. What had been talked about until now was some impromptu presentation by someone who wasn't even in this meeting originally. The problem with this meeting is that it's supposedly one where we "plan out our sprint", but the reality is that one or two management people who have no real connection to software development get to ask us how to do their own job for an hour or however long it evidently takes. And that's productivity, supposedly!

And you know what, it's not their fault. That's the process. They were hired to do exactly that. The product manager, or whatever they are, was hired to hold these meetings and constantly ask the engineers about their estimates for how long things will take. They are literally there just to ask the same questions for every little task, get the answers, and write them down so that upper managers don't actually have to know what goes on and can just get the footnotes version curated by these middle management people. Their entire job is these calls, and so of course dragging them out feels good for them. They feel like they're getting more work done. More hours logged = more work done = more productivity, right?

What I mean to get at is that the corporate world is currently based on the illusion of productivity. There are so many ways to measure this made-up thing that there are competing standards on what productivity actually is and how it's measured! For most companies, part of productivity is tracking productivity. Go figure. There are roles to write down the questions, roles to ask the questions, roles to come up with the questions, and roles to come up with the roles to come up with the questions. And if you need some even higher deity in your hierarchy, you hire a consulting company to hire people to come up with the roles who come up with the roles who come up with the questions! And this illusion of productivity, that just because we wrote down what we have to do it's almost as good as having done it, permeates through the corporate world. Entire companies have sprung up around selling to other companies the idea of productivity, or tools to track it as if it's some concrete measurable metric that companies can and should maximize.

The complete dilution of what a meeting actually is, is a direct result of the maximization of metrics to appease shareholders. And the funniest thing is, private companies that aren't even trying to appease shareholders are falling into these practices just because they're industry-standard.

The questions I have, which I have not managed to answer for myself, are: Why is nobody at my company complaining about this? Why do people just accept this as a normal part of working?

After such a meeting, I'm not even motivated to get any work done. I'm drained, and I feel like I need to take a break. It's literally counter-productive. But the productivity-tracking people logged extra hours on their task, so it's all good. :)

Don't take my word as gospel, I'm just a worker, and I don't have a business degree to know what I'm talking about from the inside. I just hate meetings. Especially ones that drag on for so long that I can write an entire post about meetings during them.

Original estimate for meeting time: 1 hour and 30 minutes.
Actual duration: 2 hours and 10 minutes.
I talked twice, by the way.