Former Shopify dev. For what it's worth, this isn't the first time they've purged all recurring group meetings. It happened several years ago as well. Surprised the article doesn't make mention of that; maybe their source hasn't been at the company long enough to know.
I won't comment on the merits of this at large, but it was annoying for me at the time because I had several recurring calls with external partners, which were all summarily axed. The bot didn't discriminate between meetings with 3+ Shopify employees, or 1 Shopify employee and 2+ external contacts. Hopefully they fixed that this time, because it was embarrassing having to explain to partners why all of our recurring meetings had gotten deleted.
Also ex-Shopify. Tobi has done this a couple times, and IMO it comes from a place of narcissism. It's applied very arbitrarily across the entire org at random times. It very much feels like he wants to do something big and visionary instead of the boring day-to-day of actually managing like an adult, so he just throws bombs that generate headlines.
Even for devs who didn't have a lot of external meetings it was a pain because the executive leadership is basically just undercutting the authtority of managers. When I was there Shopify's middle management was extremely ineffectual because devs basically had free reign and executives didn't put any effort into top-down management, they just focused on "vision" (like joining the doomed Facebook crypto project, or hiring interns based on their esports experience)
Does Tobi even work these days? Sometimes I think he prioritizes playing video games over running a multibillion dollar company. It’s frustrating because Shopify could have been much bigger as a result of the pandemic if they had someone with a bit more ambition.
This seems odd to me, given that he looks (from the outside at least) to be one of the most ambitious CEO's around. E.g. Building a fulfilment network to compete with Amazon.
From the inside, he has an ego like Elon and focus like Dorsey. Several of his executives are very good at managing him, but he lives in and broadcasts from a white void detached from reality.
Can I ask what your source for this is? Perhaps you're an ex-employee?
I never worked under Tobi directly (or even close), but I was almost always thoroughly impressed with his communication and direction. I think I have a totally different take than the one you stated. The only axis I could see Elon & Tobi both sitting on is being members of the tres comas club.
Externally he has a personal writer whose whole job it is to make him seem smart. He's the darling of the Canadian tech industry, which badly needed a win since the implosion of Nortel, so he has a ton of advantages. In SV he would be a mediocre wannabe founder but in Ottawa he's hot shit.
That seems disingenuous at best—the man helped create Ruby on Rails & founded a mutli-billion dollar tech startup that has been wildly successful. Is there really any ground to question his intelligence, or rather, whether or not he's smart?
If you are a self-made billionaire you should be allowed to be a little narcissistic. But seriously this is more like a sign of panic. This quarterly numbers is going to be bad.
I'm sure there are other solutions but in my building tons of meeting rooms go empty because they've been booked for endless reoccurring meetings that no longer reoccure. The solution was to clear all of the reservations and say to rebook if you still have meetings
Was that solution "cancel meetings" or "clear all physical room reservations from meetings, but leave the meetings alone"? Sounds like there's a slight difference there.
What about when you are working on something but you also message somebody on Slack/Teams a question and they instantly hit you back with "hey, instead of talking through it on chat, let's both stop everything we're doing and join a call"?
By all means, I get it that sometimes (not sure how to measure it/what the answer is) it's quicker to "bite the bullet", hop on a call, screenshare, etc.
but it does seem almost like a communication style preference. some people are super quick to want to jump on a call no matter what. and then the question becomes does it "impede" those whose communication style is not to jump on a call. it's like "rude" to say "i'd prefer not to jump on a call with you", forcing them to go from "call communication style" -> "type communication style"
it really makes me wonder if some people are on 1 on 1 or small group calls basically 4+ hours out of the day (by choice. not scheduled meetings or on call incidents)
I'm one of those people who almost always wants to immediately get on a call to solve a problem rather than typing it out. I get that it's tiring being on calls all the time but it's also much more effective to have a call for most types of work conversations, even as a software dev.
Here's the way I look at it.
If you are asking me a question where my reply isn't time sensitive, and it doesn't need to turn into a conversation about my answer, that doesn't need to be a call.
If you just want a status update on XYZ from me, which may be a short conversation, that probably does not need to be a call.
If you want my help with just about anything code related, that's a call. Screensharing is way easier for me to see what you are talking about, and it's much easier for us to be on the same page if we're both looking at the same thing.
It's also a massive peeve of mine when someone asks a question on messaging, refuses to have a call, and then proceeds to take forever getting back to me. It's one thing it I say something like "Try this, this, and this. Let me know what works" and then I can get back to my work.
But if I'm trying to step you through something and you sometimes reply immediately, sometimes in 5 minutes, sometimes in a half hour, then you get to have calls whenever you want my help from then on
I understand what you're saying, but for many of us, the threshold is much higher for a call.
I tend to, and I know I'm not alone here, accomplish most of my work in very focused blocks that often take me multiple hours to get into. Often I'll go a whole work day without being able to get there, and often when I'm in the flow, I'll work 12+ hours because that's how I'm most productive.
Your 5 minute call may cost me 3-6 hours of productivity. Once I've pulled my head out of what I'm working on, it's not a given that I can jump right back in. Sometimes that's worth it. It's possible not having that call may cost you 3 hours of productivity. But because some people have different work styles, people who focus easily (or are working on easier problems) often don't think of the costs for those who don't.
I’m having trouble following. Presumably the person you’re interrupting is also doing serious-business-focus work.
First off, since you’re the one interrupting them, common courtesy suggests you should try to accommodate their communication preferences.
Second, that five minute call is saving you 45m of text back-and-forth, which lets you get back to focusing faster. Not to mention saving the helper frustration, if you’re regularly leaving five minute gaps between replies.
And not even getting into the pernicious effects of having a culture where pseudo-synchronous instant messaging is broadly preferred over synchronous calls. In such cultures, all communication is so inefficient that everyone is in several conversations at all times; good luck ever achieving focus in that environment. There’s a reason why Cal Newport hates Slack, and he literally wrote the book on focused work.
Haven’t had that problem with calls. People have had to learn how to politely end conversations probably about as long as we’ve been using language. Once you learn that, the calls don’t drag.
On the other hand, if a call takes five, ten, fifteen minutes for good reason, it would have been hours or even days of messages. How many times have you spent ten minutes helping fix a newbie’s dev environment, and afterward they say “wow, thanks, I’ve been stuck all morning”?
And those calls aren’t rare! Knowing how (and when) to use calls over messages has been one of the most useful “soft skills” in my career toolkit.
I read the grandparent differently than you and nightpool.
I read the first two paragraphs as general policy, and then the following lines as specific cases. To come to the interpretation you guys had, you have to assume that the fifth paragraph supersedes the first. It's possible that's how the author meant it, but that's not obvious. The first paragraph implies virtually always preferring calling, independent of which direction the help is flowing.
Addendum:
I don't love Slack, but my company is small, and the number of messages per day is in the 10s. Nevertheless, I have notifications disabled for all messengers, because I also find them interrupting. I only see messages when I'm switching windows anyway. I have the same on my phone: I only have visual notifications. I disable sounds and vibrate. When I'm either being particularly productive, or particularly struggling to focus, I close all communications apps.
Okay, but in this situation you are the one that asked them for help with your code. There's no "interrupted productivity" here if you're already blocked and waiting for advice or help with something. And besides, if you spend 3-6 hours working on completely the wrong thing because you were "in the zone" and that misunderstanding could have been resolved with a 5 minute call, then the 5 minute call is worth it every single time.
The person you're replying to said "If you want my help with just about anything code related, that's a call. Screensharing is way easier for me to see what you are talking about, and it's much easier for us to be on the same page if we're both looking at the same thing."
I think that's an entirely reasonable position. How does this depend on "If both people are working on the same thing"? If I'm trying to help you debug something, and it feels like pulling teeth when I know I could solve your problem with a 5 minute screen-share, I'm probably going to choose the 5-minute screenshare over the hour-and-a-half of 10 different messages spread out over random intervals. The GP said the exact same thing:
It's also a massive peeve of mine when someone asks a question on messaging, refuses to have a call, and then proceeds to take forever getting back to me. It's one thing [if] I say something like "Try this, this, and this. Let me know what works" and then I can get back to my work.
But if I'm trying to step you through something and you sometimes reply immediately, sometimes in 5 minutes, sometimes in a half hour, then you get to have calls whenever you want my help from then on.
I really think "more effective" and "easier" are about communication styles and personality, not incontrovertible truths. I completely believe that to you it's much easier to handle these things on a call. Please believe that for me it's much easier to handle in a written format. Neither of these styles or preferences are wrong, and I reject the premise that either is better or worse. They're just DIFFERENT and people with a given preference proclaiming that it's THE easy way, or _the_ right way, is the source of a lot of conflict. I think we'd all do well to be more understanding and empathetic about the fact that different people are comfortable with different ways of communicating, and both sides (in reality there are many more than two sides) should try to meet each other in the middle more often.
> I think we'd all do well to be more understanding and empathetic about the fact that different people are comfortable with different ways of communicating
This isn't about being comfortable it's about communicating clearly and effectively.
Some (Many?) people are just not good communicators regardless of the medium. However we learn to communicate verbally long before we learn to write, and most people communicate verbally in almost 100% of the interactions in their lives.
Additionally we first learn to talk about things with a lot of visual association. We use the shared ability to point at a visible thing and understand this is what we are talking about. You can even use this to communicate crudely with people who don't speak or read any language that you do.
Beyond all of that, writing clearly and reading comprehension are both additional skills that are needed for good written communication to occur, and all parties involved in the conversation need to have both of those skills to make it an effective communication style.
Given all of that, I'd say that if good communication is your goal, and it should be, then defaulting to verbal communication with a shared context (screen sharing or in-person or something else) is realistically likely to be better than written communication in almost all cases.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt in the previous reply but this is so arrogant it's quite silly. If you want to force your preferences on others be my guest but don't be surprised when some people respond negatively. Verbal communication is often imprecise and vague. I can't count the number of times I've had to write up a detailed summary of a meeting to ensure that two different stakeholders didn't just take away what they wanted to hear from the conversation. There have been many times where having a paper trail of my conversations has me allowed to prove that, yes, I did indeed inform so and so about that problem weeks ago. There are also many people, myself included, who have difficulty processing and producing spoken language (either through speech and hearing impairments or ASD or any number of other conditions). Your preference is just that, a preference, not a universal truth.
I'm really curious what part of my previous post you are taking so much issue with that you're calling me arrogant for it. I don't feel like I said anything terribly controversial. Are you angry that I suggested that many people are actually not very good communicators? You gave a bunch of good examples of people being bad communicators in your reply, so I feel like you agree with me on that?
I said most people learn to speak before they learn to write. Is that untrue?
How about the idea that you can communicate (crudely, sure) with gestures even with people you don't share a common language with?
How about the idea that both writing comprehensively and reading comprehension are high level skills that many people don't possess enough to truly communicate effectively via writing? Do you disagree?
I don't think it's unfair to say that verbal communication is a cornerstone of the (near) universal human experience.
This isn't just "my preference" is what I'm getting at. I'm pretty sure it's just the human default.
> This isn't just "my preference" is what I'm getting at. I'm pretty sure it's just the human default.
Not OP, but if I were to guess, the "arrogant" part is the sentiment you express here combined a little bit of what comes off as "talking down" in how you argue to support it.
> You gave a bunch of good examples of people being bad communicators in your reply, so I feel like you agree with me on that?
Many of the examples of "bad communicators" were showing how written communication can work around some of those flaws.
Good communication is hard, and it involves not assuming that your preferred/standard methods are the best in every context. You have to be willing to adapt based on who you are communicating with and what you are discussing. If someone is barely literate, written won't work well except for pretty simple things. If hearing, (or quality connectivity, social anxiety etc.) are an issue then you'll struggle using just verbal.
It also isn't always just one or the other. One person I work with really struggles with expressing ideas clearly in the written form, yet also struggles with understanding complex ideas if he doesn't have a written reference. Neither one of those issues is very uncommon in my experience.
While I'll agree that verbal does serve a large role (probably largest in this specific context/scale), I don't agree with you apparent suggestion that it should be the default / universal method nor that other preferences / needs are invalid.
Verbal communication may be the default option but there is a reason we often defer to (carefully constructed) written communication in complex domains. While emotional nuances may be clearer (to some) in verbal communication, the details of complex ideas often are not. Have you ever tried to "talk code" at someone without the aid of written code? It's woefully inefficient and prone to miscommunication. Writing allows you to externalize state and forces you to make explicit unstated assumptions that may simply go uncommunicated in verbal exchanges. Indeed, in your examples, the screen share on which the code can be read by both parties seems to be doing most of the clarifying work, that is, you are cheating and using written communication anyway.
>I said most people learn to speak before they learn to write. Is that untrue?
This is true but completely irrelevant. Most people also learn how to dance before they learn how to write, that does not mean interpretive dance is a suitable medium for conveying technical information.
>How about the idea that you can communicate (crudely, sure) with gestures even with people you don't share a common language with?
This is an edge case, and again, kind of cheating as you are attributing the benefits of visual aids to the verbal format. It does not provide any evidence that spoken communication is universally better.
>How about the idea that both writing comprehensively and reading comprehension are high level skills that many people don't possess enough to truly communicate effectively via writing? Do you disagree?
Reading comprehension and the ability to write cogently are basic skills of any knowledge work. I think people who are poor communicators are probably poor communicators regardless of medium, so this is a red herring. In general, the things you are saying are true to some extent but do not constitute an argument for verbal communication being universally better than written (your claim). Rather, even if I am charitable and ignore the clearly fallacious parts of your argument, at most you've shown that in some circumstances verbal communication has some advantages (a much weaker claim which does indeed seem rather uncontroversial).
>I don't think it's unfair to say that verbal communication is a cornerstone of the (near) universal human experience.
>This isn't just "my preference" is what I'm getting at. I'm pretty sure it's just the human default.
So, those of us with hearing problems or speech impediments are simply inhuman? This is the arrogance I was talking about. Your assumption that your preferences and the way that you work most efficiently is universal when it is clearly not. Again, you are free to conduct yourself in this fashion but it won't make you many friends.
Absolutely agree. For some reason, empathy seems to be above average lacking in successful people, so they struggle to understand that what works for _them_ will not work for _everyone_.
That's probably what happened here, and I see it so often: CEO can work best under pressure, can communicate best in a call, whatever: In an almost selfless gesture, they aim to produce these good (for them!) conditions for others.
And since they are unable to understand that this doesn't work for everybody else, they get (at least a bit) upset because the only remaining explanation is that those people don't _want_ to be productive, or don't _want_ to communicate effectively.
This is definitely true, but I think there's a clear time-commitment component to it that you're missing in GP's answer: "It's one thing it I say something like "Try this, this, and this. Let me know what works" and then I can get back to my work. But if I'm trying to step you through something and you sometimes reply immediately, sometimes in 5 minutes, sometimes in a half hour, then you get to have calls whenever you want my help from then on"
If the choice for me is going to be spending 5 minutes to help you debug something over screenshare where I can actually look at what's happening and get backtraces, context, poke at things , or it's going to be 10+ messages over an hour and a half, then I think the screenshare is going to be better for the team most of the time, EVEN IF in a vacuum i prefer text-based communication.
I agree. IMHO It is "easier" for the person asking to go on a call because the effort will be offloaded to the person being interrupted, whereas if the person at least tries to explain it properly in written form, they are the ones making the effort.
When I ask for help I try to be the one doing most of the work, at the very least describing the problem accurately, and not forcing others to solve it on my terms.
There are reasons to go on a call but to default to a call IMO is an expression of the dynamic above.
For one, calls don’t result in a searchable log. If I remember I talked to someone about Foo, I can search for that in my Slack history.
If someone else asks me the same question about Foo, I can just send them a screenshot from our earlier conversation and we’re done. I can also talk to 4 different people about four different issues at the same time in chat, but I can only be in a single call at a time.
I'm surprised more people aren't talking about this, I find it to be far and away the biggest reason for me to avoid calls. so many problems don't just happen once, and I find that the people who prefer to jump on calls are also the people who prefer not to write or share any documentation about what they know. I take notes often, but it's always easier to just have the logs available.
God, there's nothing worse than going back to find something I remember talking about in Slack and seeing the damn "call ended at..." thing right where I'm pretty sure it should be. Now let me go see if I took notes in some other program. OK even if I did I missed some stuff that would have been there if we'd just used the goddamn chat instead of having a call. Ugh.
Yeah but search in Slack and MS Teams both suck IME. The idea of what you're talking about makes sense and I'm sure it works out for somebody sometime or other. But I haven't found having that history particularly useful.
Disclaimer: I work at Slack. Yeah, search could be better sometimes. But for this particular problem, I personally find search useful in two contexts:
* Even if I can't remember the exact phrasing I used for something, I often remember the person I discussed it with and just check my DMs or threads with them.
* Half of my responses to "help me" questions include links to repos in files. So I search for the last time I typed out three paragraphs talking about a a given link and that works pretty well.
The other situation "type it out" is useful is when I think a particular problem is likely to be encountered by multiple people and essentially force someone to ask the question in a public channel so I can answer it there and everyone can see it (we have channels like and #new-eng-questions for this). Even if people don't find it via search, there are enough people checking the recent history of these channels that it's a useful exercise.
The other situation "type it out" is useful is when I think a particular problem is likely to be encountered by multiple people and essentially force someone to ask the question in a public channel so I can answer it there and everyone can see it
Agreed. Assuming it's the kind of question that's amenable to being answered in text-exchange format in the first place. I've gotten plenty of Teams / Slack messages where my response was "Can you ask this in the public team chat, so everybody can see it?" for that exact reason. That and it also opens up the pool of people who can potentially answer the question to more than just me, which is also a Good Thing.
But there are still plenty of questions where it quickly becomes apparent that having a call with screen-sharing and everything is going to be a much more efficient way of solving the problem at hand.
> It's also a massive peeve of mine when someone asks a question on messaging, refuses to have a call, and then proceeds to take forever getting back to me.
I agree. When someone asks for help, I want to give them my undivided attention so we can get the stuff worked out immediately instead of having split attention so I'm not helping you as effectively and I'm not able to focus on my work. I want to sort it with a call because it's MUCH faster. Let me call you so I can return my full attention to my own shit.
> I'm one of those people who almost always wants to immediately get on a call to solve a problem rather than typing it out. I get that it's tiring being on calls all the time but it's also much more effective to have a call for most types of work conversations, even as a software dev.
I find it interesting that something measurable like this feels (not saying it is) like an opinion.
It's my opinion (maybe because I'm a semi-effective text communicator?) that handling it "async" on chat is more often than not quicker. Maybe I'm wrong/biased? I wonder how something like this is measured. It does feel like people who want to not accept calls are in the minority based on my experience/the response this is getting.
handling it "async" on chat is more often than not quicker.
I'm sure there are times when it is better, and times when it isn't. I generally find that if a question is REALLY simple, then async is fine. Eg:
Q: What's the IP for the bumblefraxx gateway again?
A: 10.0.14.233
Ok, sure. Done, handled in a few seconds. But for anything that goes beyond about 2 Q/A "cycles", I generally find that a call is faster, because I can figure things out a lot faster when I can see all of the relevant details myself. Eg:
Q: The bumblefraxx gateway isn't working, can you help?
A: Did you make sure the IP is right?
Q: Yeah. Do you think the frozgibbit might be wedged?
A: ...
15 minutes later
Let's have a call so I can see this myself
/me looks at screen. Notices some trivial typo in config for bumblefraxx gateway. Problem fixed in 15 minutes and 15 seconds, when it could have been 15 seconds
I can understand the gripe about people who don't respond promptly during a chat and I too sometimes just call people like that, but in my experience much of the time when someone wants to "hop on a call" they essentially want me to hold their hand through something that can be easily and clearly explained in a few sentences of text (maybe with a link to an article). It seems to be more about personal comfort than any efficiencies in communication. Which is fine ultimately, but it should be recognized as a preference rather than some panacea for communication woes.
So how would you follow up in this situation when its you asking for help? Would you just say no and ask someone else, or try to figure the thing out by yourself?
For me, async conversations are a continuous drain on my attention over a longer period, rather than a call which I can devote 100% of my attention to for a shorter period and then get back to giving 100% of my attention to other things.
Imo when you go with async communication you pay the cost of that context switch over and over, with interest.
But it's not random. The context here is somebody calling person $A for help, and person $A saying "can we have a call to address this?" Saying "no" here is simply declining help from person $A.
My only counterpoint to this is that for some folks, particularly at the junior level, forcing them to write out their questions into text helps them focus their ideas and what they are trying to solve. This process often helps them find new avenues to search and helps them answer their own question
I don't just offer to have a call when someone says "Hey I need help"
My approach is to have them write out the issue in text, and say what they've tried.
Then I judge the urgency and if it's a barn burner I get on a call immediately. If it's a Junior blocked on something that I think they can solve I will tell them we can have a call in a half hour or something and very often they do solve it on their own.
Essentially I use the async communication methods as the gatekeeper to prioritize the incoming requests for my time, but when I do give people my time it's on a call so I can give them my full attention.
The one guy I knew who'd consistently turn a quick async 5- or 8- message Slack between two or three people into a 15-minute scheduled phone call also double-booked a whole lot of his time and didn't seem to do much aside from say one or two not-very-useful things in meetings before leaving in the middle of it for the next one.
I think he just wanted shit to stick on his calendar for the sake of having a (more than) full calendar, which I'm guessing he found useful for advancement or deflecting criticism. Given some of the other stuff he did and said I think an awful lot of his behavior was one kind of career-hack or another.
One advantage with "call communication" is that I can clear the problem in single 'block' of time and then get back to what I was doing know that the problem was put to bed. With "type communication" there is a risk I'll be pinging every 10 minutes with "no that didn't work, got this error message, any other ideas?" for an undefined amount of time, constantly taking me out of my flow.
On the other hand, there exist people like me. I simply can not do research while on a call.
It has happened plenty of times that I had a simple question during my research, and the other person very helpfully decided to help me solve the problem, instead of just answering. The result is always that it takes hours of both of our times to get little done, and the problem actually gets solved afterwards because the research was not all done yet.
It’s “rude” to say you’re busy? I too prefer calls (not with Teams though), just because you can look at code together and also have some interaction with remote colleagues. But if the other person has no time, no problem. Why would that be rude?
I think this misses the point. How do you navigate this if you never want to do the voice call and always just handle it over text? I'd have to lie (every time they want to call me) saying "I'm busy". It's like you accepting the call is insisted/expected.
I'm talking about preferring to never do a voice/video call.
> How do you navigate this if you never want to do the voice call and always just handle it over text?
It's fine to have preferences but to expect your company and team to let you always do things your personal preferred way is pretty unrealistic. I don't think even the CEO of any company gets to have their way 100% of the time (although they almost certainly get their way more than anyone else in the company does)
> It's fine to have preferences but to expect your company and team to let you always do things your personal preferred way is pretty unrealistic.
Another way to say this is "if you work a remote coding job, it is expected that you hop on a video/voice call pretty much whenever one of your teammates/managers/co-workers wants you to whenever they have a question they don't feel like typing out" because it's basically just a socially accepted norm. The majority of people prefer you stop what you're doing, get into a socially uncomfortable/awkward situation, and you're "the victim" until the person on the other end will let you hang up.
Repeat that 4+ times a day on average 5 times a week and that $120k/yr comfortable soft 8am-5am "IT" job starts looking less attractive/more soul sucking/5-10 years in you're dreaming of buying a van and moving into a cabin in the woods.
I don’t think that’s another way to state that… The original statement is a bidirectional statement. Meaning you should also be able to decline calls and the other party will have to respect your preferences some of the time. It’s just basic balance and social graces, really.
If you are asking someone to take time out of what they are doing to help you with something, I think it is only polite to try to be accommodating to their preferred means of communications, be it calls or text.
> I'm talking about preferring to never do a voice/video call.
That would drive me crazy.
I think you'll have to accept that somethings have to be face to face. And some companies prefer to do things that way.
I guess you adapt or go to a company that can guarantee you'll never have to speak to someone at all.
But face to face is the oldest form of human interaction. Its going to be hard to get along in the real world if you really don't like it.
I'm trying to imagine how you'd do something like a lay off over chat or an interview or a performance review? That just seems like living life on the hardest possible mode.
I for one prefer actually face to face, then text chat, then voice chat, video chat never. Screen shares are almost always a signal that this call will be a huge waste of time, but I suppose it’s fairly necessary if you insist on voice chat.
Video chat is obviously here to stay in the software industry, which is why I’ve left it. I worked started working remotely from 2015 onward, felt ambivalent about it, but the the proliferation of video meetings with the pandemic really made it bad. I worked in office in 2021 and 2022, but once the genie was out of the bottle, you’d get calls all the time. Used to be you could just send a status report to sync up with overseas teams, but now, why not a daily video call? just a bizarrely irritating and draining way to spend your day.
Screen shares are almost always a signal that this call will be a huge waste of time
If you're talking about just sharing images of each other's faces, then sure. But if you're talking about an actual screen, with an editor, and code, and config files, and debug logs, or whatever, then "hard disagree" here. I can't even count the times somebody has pinged me for help with something, made it sound super mysterious and unsolvable while explaining through text chat, and then we had a Teams call and I saw something in (their code|their config|their debug logs|etc) that let me solve the problem for them in like 2 minutes.
That shit is exactly why I agree with the person up-thread who said "I almost always want to jump on a call ..." IME, things get done quicker when I can actually see what's going on for myself instead of having to read someone else's abridged / misinterpreted / whatever version of events.
White lies like "I'm busy at the moment, can you send me a message describing the issue instead?" are socially normal and expected in a professional work environment.
Why? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Someone else could probably explain (or disagree & explain) better than I can.
It's because we've built an industry-wide culture of never broaching a topic of feedback that might be even a little uncomfortable. So it's frowned upon to say the thing that would actually help both the other person and yourself — and, often, the other person would have no idea how to hear such a thing anyway.
What we mean:
"The exercise of writing out what you want/mean will help you clarify your own thoughts and end up saving us both a lot of time. It would make the whole company better if we were all disciplined about doing that first, genuinely trying to make progress asynchronously, and then only jumping on a call if really needed."
Instead, we say:
"My internet has been weird all week. Do you mind if we do this one over chat?"
And then we hope that, after the 25th time we say this, they'll figure out the common-sense basics of human communication and empathy on their own.
With slightly less cynicism, in many cases most folks outside of "the industry" will engage in the same behavior and most folks won't ever be conciously aware of this behavior.
On a whole people tend to do a good job of working together in a way that minimizes instances of anger, dislike, or irritation. Not everyone is good at it, and few people are aware of what behaviors contribute to this cohesion.
I have colleagues who never do calls, no problem. I prefer by video calls (except when I have to use Teams) over voice or text. But if others don’t, that’s okay too. No need to lie about “being busy”, just that you can explain or understand better over text.
The trouble comes where the two groups meet. We can all learn about how to ask better questions and more generally improve our communication skills, but it's vastly more difficult to _make someone care_ to do so. We've all seen and empathized with https://www.nohello.com/, but if you link it to a dark matter coworker who behaves exactly this way, chances are they will see it as an attack, not as a recommendation - and that attack reflects poorly on you, rather than on them.
Well yeah. Simply throwing a link at someone with no context is always going to come across as combative.
I've had a lot of luck with "Hey, I appreciate that you always ask how I am when you're reaching out to me, but when you need something from me you can just ask upfront. You don't need to say Hi and wait for me to reply before asking. That way I don't keep you waiting and I can answer you as soon as I see your message"
You don't have to tell them that you actually want to prioritize them based on their question, and absolutely will keep them waiting if you don't think it's urgent.
I've always seen it as part of someone's profile or status message. But more often, it's just sort of a silently agreed-upon philosophy among our team. "Hello" without context isn't ignored, exactly, but it's automatically the lowest priority. That approach is pretty common across our whole team.
It gets worse in huge orgs, each team tends to have its own protocols.
To talk with "foreign" team, you have to figure out if they are teams / meeting driven, slack driven, use webex, only reachable via email, have their own weird thing, ignore everything that doesn't come through a manager, or only respond to service now tickets, or require a ticket AND and followup (via one of the above methods) to get them to look at the ticket.
Figuring out how to talk to all the different people you need to takes several months and a lot of people leave before working it out.
If you stay long enough you end up with an informal network of people in the company you know and trust and work with them to get anything done. Often these are helpful ICs working around non-responsive management.
My current company uses MS Exchange with Outlook as client, and there's a cap on a recurring meeting occurrences. First I thought it is annoying, but now I believe it is actually a good product decision to force people to re-evaluate the need for those meetings.
It's bizarre to automatically cancel all meetings even if it is just company employees involved. Yes some meetings are pointless, but that doesn't mean all of them are. People are just going to waste more time setting them all back up again.
Perhaps better to randomly select 10% of meetings, inform the participants it will be cancelled next week & that they should discuss whether it's necessary at this week's meeting, and then axe it. If they put it back on the calendar, let them. Then put out a poll asking if this was a useful exercise. Rinse and repeat until people start reporting it's not useful or you've cycled through all the meetings.
The reason I speculate this may be better is that it respects the agency of employees more, isn't such a shock to the system, and allows a buffer time to correct serious issues such as those mentioned in the top level comment.
Even if my meetings were entirely internal, I’d literally quit my job if this sort of techno-micromanagement was trust upon me because someone at the top of the pyramid had a brain fart. How utterly absurd, and a great way to ensure that your employee pool is stacked with cult followers.
Before you comment about how idiotic this idea is, the end of the article says:
> The company said there will be a “two-week cooling off period” before anyone can reconvene a canceled meeting.
The company isn't saying no recurring meetings. It is saying, "hey, we have too many meetings, let's do a reset and think carefully about which ones we really need... and by the way, it's okay to decline a meeting that you don't think you'll gain value from.
I personally think that an occasional reset to figure out which meetings are actually necessary is a good idea. Also, sometimes there are personal/political reasons for joining meetings that you aren't going to get much out of. Having the top management say "try to cut down on unnecessary meetings" is a good way to give individual employees cover.
> The company said there will be a “two-week cooling off period” before anyone can reconvene a canceled meeting.
That sounds even worse. Talk about infantilizing your employees. "No, you don't know your job well enough to know that you need to do X, even if you think you do, we're not going to let you..."
It's also for sure going to be worked around. If team X is in crunch mode to release project Y next week and you're like, you can't do your daily standup for another two weeks gang - they're going to do the standup, it's just not going to have a calendar event and people's workflows will be interrupted, some people will be late because they're in the habit of getting notifications, etc.
At an organization this large I imagine somewhere there is always a team X with a project Y.
I recently discovered that the most successful slide decks that I've pitched to upper management are eerily similar in style and verbiage to my kids' cardboard books. The higher up I go in an org chart, the lower down I seem to go in grade level. More pictures, bold primary colors, little text, etc. It's likely just some strange coincidence of my evolving style in .ppt, of course
I've been told by folks at a Big 3 management consulting firm that everything for the c-suite has to be in Powerpoint—no matter how inappropriate that is for the material—and written like it's for a child, or they flat-out won't read it. Yes, read it. The decks mostly aren't intended to ever be presented, just read.
Dall-E and thenounproject.com have been such a boon for me.
Simple, colorful graphics really add that little bit of spice to the presentation.
GPT-3 and the grade-reading-report feature in word also help hone in on the right style.
I wonder if execs think that running companies is so easy because they get such a dumbed-down report about the company all the time. They know it's all at such a limited reading level, but think that their underlings are actually that stupid.
This is also a good way to do nothing for two weeks because teams can no longer efficiently coordinate. It's an incredibly childish approach to reducing unnecessary meetings, and I'm highly skeptical that it has any benefits at all other than making Toby feel special.
If a team requires a synchronous meeting to coordinate that feels like an opportunity to replace the meeting with something else that is more efficient.
I don’t know these circumstances but I completely agree with the premise of not allowing indefinitely recurring meetings. Perhaps it’s better to simply limit them to say 10 occurrences before they must be reconsidered, participants reevaluated and so on.
It is completely normal, acceptable, even desirable for a team of people working on a project to meet regularly to coordinate their efforts. That is how groups of people have worked together since time immemorial. It is unreasonable and dogmatic to expect that every team will naturally reach peak efficiency by working fully asynchronously.
If people don't have 2 weeks of stuff they can do without a video call, those people are at best being kept on incredibly short leashes. At a certain density of meetings you aren't "coordinating your efforts," there are no efforts, all you're doing is having meetings. There has to be a space between where the efforts being coordinated actually take place.
This kind of heavy-handed approach feels like the kind of thing I'd do if I read HN religiously and took everything as gospel. There are few things more reviled in these realms than meetings and MBAs.
This feels like the tech news equivalent of eavesdropping on the couple sitting at the next table at a restaurant, and then concluding that because they're having an argument, their marriage must be in trouble.
As you pointed out, it's not as strange as the headline makes it out to be. "Big organization finds effective communication difficult; tries something new" ... big deal?
>> Having the top management say "try to cut down on unnecessary meetings"...
... sounds a lot like "make sure you're taking your vacation; we want employees to be recharged and energetic!", aka a feel-good CYA. My pointless, time-wasting, huge audience meetings are all owned by the top-half of management.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. There's an inverse correlation between the usefulness of a meeting and how senior the most senior person there is.
> "hey, we have too many meetings, let's do a reset and think carefully about which ones we really need...
it's automatically assumed/implied that this is an attempt of cost saving / reshift in priority. They'd rather have staff focusing on delivering products (code/completed projects) that will increase revenue.
I wonder what they are struggling to ship (or if you can make the assumption that, the only time you'd cut meetings is when you want to prioritize shipping and the fact that you need to cut meetings means you're struggling to ship based on XYZ standards/opinions (CEO thinks things could get done/out the door faster/quicker?))
I wonder what's on their internal roadmap that's exciting + going to "sizably" make a difference/grow the company/that they are "itching to ship".
In a similar vein, I think all managers should be periodically idled for a week or two (maybe rolling blackout style). If it turns out the value created by their group remains the same (or even goes up!), then the manager has apparently done a great job of rearing their employees to be self sufficient and the manager can be retired/recycled.
Shopify is a highly dysfunctional company when it comes to management. What you are hoping for in your comment is the command control style model where you have very highly independent teams that own their area and can move without outside interference (though note that this childish no meetings thing would still negatively affect the ability for even small efficient teams to coordinate well).
However, from what I can tell shopify has the opposite of a command and control culture. They believe "everyone is an owner" which is another way of saying that no one is an owner. The result is that dozens of people need to approve every little change because there is no clear ownership structure and you can't just tell an adjacent team's manager to buzz off. In addition to getting sign off from adjacent teams, you need approval from your manager, their manager, the manager after that, all the way up the chain often to Toby himself.
Everyone is afraid of being shit on from the level above that they all need to review. This behaviour is explicitly encouraged. In the end you get a bureaucratic and political nightmare where everything is designed and developed according to the loudest consensus opinion.
Making things even worse, making data-based decisions is explicitly discouraged, I guess because it makes things more difficult for the loud opinions of main product drivers.
This is perfect if we optimize for short-term value gains. Less so if we're looking for something long-term.
Also, I remember a similar anecdote about an executive who gave his assistant two weeks off, took their responsibilities himself, and concluded he didn't need their services anymore.
> Having the top management say "try to cut down on unnecessary meetings" is a good way to give individual employees cover.
It is a good way. Shopify should have considered doing that, and let managers make the call, instead of summarily killing all meetings remotely and leaving managers to reschedule everything from scratch.
Because of status quo bias, "do I need to create a 1 hour sync meeting for this" is a very different question than "should I cancel the 1 hour sync meeting for this". I'm generally on a very low meeting team, and I still have 2.5 hours a week of meetings that I don't expect would be recreated if some calendar glitch deleted them.
It worked for one meeting. For the others, everyone I talked to had a vague sense that someone else might be getting value out of the meeting. I don't mean to criticize, I've had that vague sense too, and I bet I'm wrong about some of the meetings I do think are useful.
An excerpt from the book Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams.
Status Meetings Are About Status
A real working meeting is called when there is a real reason for all the people invited to think through some matter together. The purpose of the meeting is to reach consensus. Such a meeting is, almost by definition, an ad hoc affair. Ad hoc implies that the meeting is unlikely to be regularly scheduled. Any regular get-together is therefore somewhat suspect as likely to have a ceremonial purpose rather than a focused goal of consensus. The weekly status meeting is an obvious example. Though its goal may seem to be status reporting, its real intent is status confirming. And it’s not the status of the work, but the status of the boss.
When bosses are particularly needy, the burden of ceremonial status meetings can grow almost without bound. We know of one organization, for example, that runs daily two-hour status meetings. When participants are off-site during a meeting, they are expected to call in and participate by speakerphone for the whole duration. Nonattendance is regarded as a threat and is subject to serious penalties.
Generally speaking, it is important for a well functioning team to have a status and sync-up meeting. When well run, it provides a way to batch what could end up being lots of individual ad-hoc interruptions throughout a week to a single point.
Again, generally speaking, no one should have more than one of these meetings a week unless they really have a good reason to be actively involved in multiple independent teams.
The real meeting-smell is when people have lots of weekly recurring meetings. If you're not a manager then two would be expected for most people, a 1hr team meeting and a 30min 1-1 with whomever they report.
I disagree. Most status meetings are useless at best and harmful at worst. If there really are blockers then people should be raising them immediately, not up to one full week later in the next scheduled sync. And if all blockers are addressed promptly as they should then what is the point of a delayed status update?
Like the parent post mentions these kinds of meetings are for the benefit of managers and executives, not people working on the project. And this validation shouldn't come at at the expense of everyone else's time.
Not every issue/question/complaint is an immediate blocker. Status meetings are great to queue topics or issues that do not need to be immediately addressed but if left ignored too long could snowball into a more serious thing.
Don’t you think that blockers affecting long term timelines will have ripple effects for higher level planning? Not everyone involved in that communication will be clued in to the day to day messages.
If status isn't being communicated well enough through general chatter and the multiple status tracking tools ("what do you mean, multiple?" everyone almost certainly uses at least Git and some kind of issue tracker, and it's not Git's main purpose but that definitely should convey some amount of status-related info) we're supposed to use daily, for the project manager to have what they need with nothing more than a couple impromptu "hey, what's up with X?" questions to the right people per week, something's seriously fucked up.
Granted, more often than not, something's seriously fucked up.
LOL. Well I'm very against 6am meetings. >10am or bust :)
But actually IME it's not uncommon to actually chat about stuff. What'd you do this weekend? Did you see X movie? How did you solve that issue? But that might only work if it's not 6am.
But why do you need a status meeting to do that? If you have blocker why not just raise the blocker when you have it instead of waiting for a status meeting.
Rarely is anything "needed" :) and there's usually multiple ways to do something.
But, for example, maybe the person isn't blocked yet so they don't know to ask, but they're going down a road that a coworker knows will be a dead end, and by overhearing it that coworker will speak up and offer a suggestion.
Maybe a senior dev is a 'curmudgeon' who doesn't follow public slack channels, but if you put them in a room with everyone else then they'll contribute.
I think the benefit of status-meetings/stand-ups are not for the status so much as the forced recurring interactions with teammates for humanization and collaboration (a la the infamous "water cooler chats").
(Also FWIW I'm pretty against these sorts of meetings every day. But I think 2-3 a week is a nice balance.)
Sorry but that's nuts. Teams that work together on the same project should regularly get together in a synchronous conversation. Doesn't have to be everyday or anything but this is ridiculous and extreme.
It would seem reasonable to me if it were "no meetings with more than 5 people" or something, depending on how their product and development teams are structured. But... three is verboten?
> Teams that work together on the same project should regularly get together in a synchronous conversation.
This generalization is clearly not strictly true, but people stick to it anyway without thinking.
Who should get together, exactly? When should they? Why? What is the goal, and are they meeting that goal?
Almost every single recurring meeting I've been in has not considered these things seriously. It's just generic people making a generic meeting to talk about generic things to make it feel like work is getting done, when usually, at the end of the meeting, you realize the entire meeting could have been an e-mail.
The only useful purpose of a generic, purposeless, recurring intra-team meeting is to reinforce social working relationships. They aren't going to solve a bug or ship a new feature or solve a design decision in one of these meetings. They exist solely to talk about work without doing work, because the interaction between humans smoothes the social dynamics of doing work. But nothing actually gets done.
Anyone who does Scrum remotely will probably have a standup as a daily recurring multi-part meeting. No one loves those but I think they can be useful.
In my experience, a standup bot in a Teams/Slack channel can often replace those. If there's a blocker or nuanced issue that would benefit from in-person discussion, then hopping on a call makes total sense. In contrast, having a meeting by default makes no sense to me.
I agree. I've been a manager for almost a decade now and I've swung to both extremes on meetings. Some recurring team meetings are a good thing. Personally, one of my favorite recurring meetings is the retrospective meeting after a sprint. Yes, we could just toss all of that feedback onto an online retro board, but the interaction in the retro meeting is where the real gold is.
Specific to retrospective meetings, they're also kind of therapeutic. There's a lot to unpack after a really stressful project, and its nice to have an outlet to direct some of that energy (ranting, celebrating, venting, whatever). Getting to bond with a coworker over a shared struggle is an important but often overlooked part of a healthy work life.
The argument is usually that sprints just add overhead on top of picking the highest prio work from the backlog. Ie, sprints don’t have to be replaced with anything since there are no benefits.
If you keep your product backlog groomed, your team can use Kanban and always be working on the top priority. Sprints add overhead to create a separate backlog that, in my experience, seems to roll over sprint to sprint.
The benefits usually amount to “it’s not waterfall” - a line which really hasn’t been relevant in decades.
I get the sense most managers stick to scrum and all the unnecessary overhead mainly because they are creatures of habit. Pushing a non-scrum system in an organization that fully embraces it is hard (especially when senior leaders enjoy the micromanaging aspects of it).
The benefit is a social one of being able to tell "stakeholders" that their shit's getting bumped to the next sprint if they keep trying to toss extra junk on the pile this sprint. The time cut-off is helpful for keeping jackasses up the org chart at bay, when it's done correctly and you're actually allowed to say things like that, and follow through. The chunked time makes it easier to justify a larger time-cost to monkeying with the short-term schedule, which makes stakeholders be more considerate.
That's in the unicorn-rare case that you're in an org that can do "agile" right, but still has the problem of clueless stakeholders shitting everywhere and no discipline or expectation that PMs are empowered to tell them (politely) to fuck off without the support of this kind of framework. Otherwise, yeah, they're not that useful. You can track velocity and such without them, so that's not a good reason to have them.
I’ve been on the stakeholder side in similar situations. Rather than saying that they were very busy and that it can take a while to get my task done, they strung me along (“we’ll take it up in next sprint planning”, “oh we missed your task, but it might be added to next sprint”, etc). Granted, this is an anecdote, but if a team can only plan a couple of weeks ahead, how should stakeholders be able to plan?
Sure, I hope I made it clear that in general I don't think sprints are especially useful. They can truly be useful in the specific, narrow case of organizations that have independent, well-run teams but also inept or inexperienced-with-software-development stakeholders who've got a dysfunctional relationship with those same teams, and when for some reason that problem can't be addressed directly rather than relying on sprints as a boundary-setting and communication tool. Probably this combination most often happens in-the-wild when the developers and the stakeholders aren't even in the same organization, in fact (think: development agencies).
The dysfunction can certainly go the other way (the stakeholders are competent and reasonable, but the teams are broken) in which case I'd not expect sprints to be helpful, and possibly abusable in the ways you suggest.
> if a team can only plan a couple of weeks ahead, how should stakeholders be able to plan?
When it's done right (ha, ha, ha) there absolutely is long-term planning, but adjustment of priorities sprint-to-sprint (which should be happening due to stakeholders and product managers and such making decisions, since they set those priorities) can affect that—the flux in long-term planning should be a reflection of the reality of choices made sprint to sprint that differ from the original plan, not due to a lack of planning, so that no-one's surprised when the mark that's hit in six months differs—for the good reason that the direction of the project was modified in-flight—from the one that was originally targeted. The entire point of sprints is to allow flexibility without day-to-day thrashing, while also capturing the effects of each sprint's work on that longer-term planning to avoid big surprises farther into the project.
Again, that's all if it's done correctly, and if the situation even warrants using sprints in the first place. Which, every now and then all that's true, but I'd not say it's the norm. I don't think most orgs even think very hard about what the point of having sprints is, before imposing them.
There’s nothing preventing them from meeting multiple times in a day if they want; they just need to have a purpose for meeting rather than having a standing meeting whether or not they have things to discuss.
I'd prefer to talk to my co-workers when necessary, and not any more than that. That could mean slack messages to discuss a certain issue, or even the occasional status update team-wide. Anything beyond that is a farce imo, and just shouldn't be shoe-horned into remote working or software dev culture if it's not there organically. I get no value out of it, and wish others would rely less on that for socializing.
I'd like to know about the bigger picture in a way that helps me appreciate it, and only if there's a way I specifically can be involved in getting there or the possible positive or negative outcome of me knowing or not knowing about it. Most of the time though, "knowing about the bigger picture" is actually just some arbitrary executive who wants to hear themselves talk to everyone simultaneously, inevitably saying nothing of substance, and about things I don't and will never likely have involvement with. It's a ludicrous burden to subject myself to, viewing my day to day work through the lense of some specious company-wide objective, especially if the only people who gain are the people at the top.
Like seriously, I don't even have stock or stock options, if the company makes more money, it's someone elses choice whether I get anything more out of it, or whether I get fired because my role doesn't fit within their new structure.
Presumably they can still schedule the synchronous conversations one at a time. They just can't set them to "recurring."
I have no idea how they make policies like these work with business partnerships though. I could live with a rule like this internally, but it's hard to get time on a client or partner's calendar and, when you do, recurring meetings let you reserve it.
That's part of how recurring meetings get out of hand. They'll get scheduled as an 'easy' way to maintain a cadence when people have a busy schedule, regardless of any particular instance's necessity. If someone works with a dozen different groups, this sometimes results in evenly spaced 5 minute status updates interrupting someone's workday every half hour.
The alternative is spending all day coordinating with 10 different people's secretaries to schedule time on their calendars with them. It's much easier to cancel instances of a recurring meeting than to have to schedule each one each time.
Of course, if it's just a 5 minute status update you should just send a memo.
That's right. But I find that meeting organizers are reluctant to cancel instances of a meeting even when they don't have much to share, because they are unsure in advance if others on the meeting may have something to bring up.
I always send a "I am good to cancel today's meeting unless someone has something they would like to discuss." Takes no more effort than just cancelling.
I do that for internal meetings where the members are on the same team. But on meetings across teams or organizations, I've found things often get more socially complicated. Especially if the incentives for engagement are not aligned.
One-on-ones are the reason for that. Two people mean both are actively involved. Either listening to someone speak to them directly, or talking to someone directly.
> Teams that work together on the same project should regularly get together in a synchronous conversation.
This doesn't prevent that. It seems that it only prevents you from automating the decision on when to do that. If you need to synchronize, you can. However, if you don't, there is no need to hold a meeting. But people tend to make meetings opt-out rather than opt-in. This seems to enforce an opt-in approach first.
Any team member thing suits few dominant or extroverted personalities. But people who are not comfortable socially won't propose whole team meeting.
Also, I would expect the management to be the ones to care the most about hoe team functions overall. They should be the ones to notice communication is dying or that we are splitting into subgroups or that someone is isolated work wise (unable to get answers to questions or whatever).
Team dynamic is literally work of leadership, so they should be able to decide on meetings.
Hey, "in perpetuity" isn't right. We have done this multiple times before and it's part of the culture. One culture value is "Thriving on change" and the recurring meeting GC run is one opportunity for people to discover if they do!
Historically we did this event in `rand(600)+300` days anniversary of the previous run (to make it somewhat unpredictable) but we had enough chaos during COVID so that we queued this run to get a fresh new start this year.
Banning recurring 3 person meetings initially sounded overly reactionary and reductive to me. It does sound like proliferation of meetings has become a growing problem and I wonder how much the video-off-zoom-attendance is a contributor.
The article implies that they previously had multiple 50+ person meetings per week(!!)
"Big meetings of more than 50 people will get shoehorned into a six-hour window on Thursdays, with a limit of one a week."
As someone who has never worked a company larger than ~300 people, can anyone enlighten me on what kind of meetings would have that many attendees, outside of say a quarterly all-hands?
The one company I worked for over 300 people that held a weekly meeting made it entirely optional- it was an end of the week, end of day Friday meeting where someone would give a demo of either something cool they built or a success story for a client. I don't believe more than half the company showed up on a regular basis, but it was a really nice social hour for people who wanted to partake.
This predated COVID by many years, and remote work was only just becoming a thing, so we had custom built video streaming software once we opened additional offices so that the whole company would see the demos, if not so much the in-person chatter and snacks before and after.
I really like this, especially when overlapping/doubling as a social happy hour. A former company did something similar, I always enjoyed seeing what other parts of the company were up to.
Department all-hands, business unit all-hands, product line all-hands... Every level of a large business feels like they need to do all-hands with some regularity. If you don't do them people complain that they feel "disconnected" and don't know what everyone else is working on. One problem it's that depending on your team and product some higher-level orgs matter a lot or not at all. The folks running those orgs of course also get mostly to interact with people to whom other efforts in the org matter most.
Then you have central efforts liked software supply chain security, DE&I, etc
> Department all-hands, business unit all-hands, product line all-hands... Every level of a large business feels like they need to do all-hands with some regularity. If you don't do them people complain that they feel "disconnected" and don't know what everyone else is working on.
The best setup I've seen required only managers to attend such meetings, and those managers could open up invites to team members if they wanted them, or if they had something worth presenting. The meetings were all recorded anyway, so if someone felt like they missed something after the fact or couldn't attend, they could watch it at a more appropriate time.
The only real "all-hands" meetings we had was off-site, in person, and bi-annual. The only department that had more frequent all-hands meetings was sales with their quarterly kick-offs.
Zoom-video-off has been the best thing to happen to crappy meetings since forever. Now you don't even have to drag a laptop down to a meeting room and roughly pretend to pay attention like you're in a boring 101 lecture class again.
My company has around 3000 people split in to six legal entities and sub divided in to a further 18 operations most people would call "companies"
A 50+ person meeting could be the global team brief (monthly), the regional team brief (weekly), kick off or milestone meeting of any project branching across multiple legal entities, change to global policy such as HR or finance, further meetings for IT to plan and implement these changes.
The list really goes on.....
I tend to mute myself and do some housework. I find i can get 99% of the detail from 5 minutes with the slide deck and the minutes.
At one point at a previous company of 300-400 we had UI demos that invited 100+, sprint demos that invited 50+, a weekly all-hands that invited everyone, a bi-weekly departmental all-hands that invited 150+, and a Friday social hangout that invited everyone in the same office. Add monthly departmental retros (100+) and group learnings/feature enablement (50+), quarterly trainings (150+) and off-sites (50+) and it was a bit much. And this was all pre-pandemic with most of the company in one office/location — we already saw a lot of each other even without these meetings.
At the client I work for we have 2-3 meetings every other week that are frequently attended by 50-100 people. One is a "demo meeting", where teams present their work, the other one is called "architecture guild", where people discuss the system's architecture, how to improve it, recent changes and developments etc. Attending the meetings is not strictly mandatory, though.
All-hands happen, as you say, approximately every 2-3 months.
That seems incredibly counterproductive to me. If its more for face-time and getting-to-know people fine, but if its supposed to be an actual _thing_ with actual impact then I'm skeptical.
If the meeting requires your attendance but you have little to no input and are learning nothing from it, a fun game to play is do the math of how much that meeting just cost the company.
I had a product manager at my last job, who took the feedback from a retro, “we have too many meetings, we have no time to focus”, and created a new recurring meeting, “how to effectively manage your time” (30m, weekly).
What people don't give enough credit to is that a lot positions, I call them "email jobs", need meetings like how we need meals. Spaced out over each day, constantly. If they don't, then their irrelevance becomes more obvious. Higher ups also do this is well. I made a shirt for all of my friends who do this https://www.customink.com/designs/im-in-meetings-all-day/mjx...
The comments here seem to misunderstand dynamics at big companies. Engineers often find themselves in meetings with 10s of people where there is no one person who could unilaterally reevaluate the usefulness of the meeting.
Everyone in the meeting may be thinking "this is a waste of time", but each person doesn't know that everyone else is thinking that, so there is no natural processes to discuss ending the meeting. Worse, there is sometimes a perverse incentive to keep meetings going to maintain control or power.
This change shifts the equilibrium from "default on" to "default off" in a way that probably would not happen organically at a big company.
Meetings are how humans share state. Most people’s writing skills are not up to replacing the back and forth synchronization that happens in meetings. And big meetings have value in avoiding games of management telephone.
Canceling all recurring meetings may work for awhile, but I imagine it won’t be long before there’s a permanent action item for every meeting to schedule the next one. And it also won’t be long before senior management is made exempt.
Maybe others have different experiences, but I've never found state sharing sync meetings to be very good at accomplishing their intended goal. There's inevitably too much that goes on between meetings for the meeting to cover everything, and even if it could, decisions and communication have to happen outside of the regular meeting for things to actually get done in a timely manner. This tends to lead to such meetings being incomplete and/or redundant. In theory a regular sync meeting could be used for things that both benefit from real-time back and forth and are low enough urgency that they can wait for the next meeting, but that's hard to coordinate and one of the downsides of having a recurring meeting is that it encourages low effort agendas and pre-coordination.
Maybe this isn't so bad for a small number of meetings or in a very small organization, but the other problem with regular sync meetings is that they tend to proliferate, especially as you go higher up the management chain. If you don't just work exclusively with a single group of people all working on the same effort, your entirely calendar can fill up with sync meetings. It can even become comical in cases where the Venn diagram of who is working on what significantly overlaps and you end up seeing many of the same people over and over again with a slightly different audience and topic each time. No joke, I have seen this lead to the creation of another sync meeting with all the people from the other meetings, but then the other meetings also stay on the calendar because people also want that smaller group discussion. Very easy for it to get out of hand, so I tend to like the idea of a regular reset to cancel all those meetings and then add them back as needed.
> I tend to like the idea of a regular reset to cancel all those meetings and then add them back as needed.
I also approve of this kind of house-cleaning. Calendars, like any other storage device, get a lot of built-up cruft too. Mine have even had some absurdly long-interval meetings with people no longer with the company.
But I think that Shopify took it a bit too far by banning them all going forward as well.
Every meeting should have someone running it, covering the points that are outlined in the meeting notes, and guiding the conversation to make sure it's on point. At the end, they should be able to read what the meeting accomplished in under a minute.
Maybe other people share useful state in meetings somehow. To me they're annoying background noise I zone out for until some key word like my name triggers my attention. I must not be missing much because I'm recognized one of the top performers. If I'm ever in need of a career change I might consider Shopify.
I find it is very true that recurring meetings often have low-value content but nevertheless the discussion manages to fill up the time. Given that meetings with an actual agenda are not banned I could see this potentially being an improvement.
We've just found better ways to share state, like emails and chat apps. They don't require synchronous attendance, they allow more space for thought and correction, and they are naturally part of a record that you can reference and copy.
These forms don't share emotional state as well as synchronous presence and so don't completely replace it. But the modern workplace has less use for sharing emotional state than other things.
I go back and forth on this. On the one hand, I detest excessive standup meetings and sprint retros. On the other hand, people do tend to pay a little bit better attention during them compared to "everyone post your status in slack at the end of the day".
The threat of a meeting helps me make sure I get my shit done beforehand. Sounds childish but it works for me. 10 minute standups first thing in the morning ensure that I get to work on time. A couple jobs ago the company said they wanted people to literally stand at the standups to encourage a quicker status share. Everyone did for a couple days, then eventually I was the only one standing and then the fired me.
I think a synchronous meeting should only be scheduled when there is value in being synchronous.
Else, every synchronous meeting should be possible to be replaced with other forms of asynchronous communication.
Status meetings are the simplest one to replace: just add a bot that asks everybody what are you working on and then sends a summary with all the answers to the team.
Don't ask people if they are blocked or if they know what to work on next day. Teach/support/grow/encourage them to announced when they are blocked as soon as that happens and to know to whom to announce that. Teach them to ask for help when help is needed and ping a colleague to discuss the matter.
Support people asking their PMs/Business/... about priorities. Don't set the culture of waiting for priorities to be announced at fixed points as priorities should be able to be changes quickly and each team should have info boards where the priorities are cleary expresses.
It is very easy to create a culture where everything is fixed by a meeting. Thus everybody belives the meetings are the only answer to communication. You can see this in some comments here where people are asking: if we don't do a daily meeting how can we work as a team?
If you ask this you are putting an equal between communication and meeting, but that is not true.
A team cannot work without _communication_, but synchronous meetings are only one of the many ways to communicate.
I agree with many here that this is heavy-handed, but my experience suggests that the symptom it's treating is very real- once a recurring meeting is created it never really goes away (in my experience sometimes it does if the meeting owner leaves the company or moves to a different job function).
So I like the idea of throwing all meetings into the "konmari" method of tidying, where you completely empty your closets and then decide what should be kept, rather than trying to pick out which things should be discarded.
This seems rather extreme, and likely to cause a lot of backlash due to how disruptive calendar manipulation is.
At my company, we have started "async weeks", where, basically once a quarter, we try to basically use async communication instead of recurring meetings.
First, this is executed without a lot of shock. You know it's coming and plan around it. But two, it does help promote writing - teams experiment with doing one or two things differently. It's a slow roll, but I'm seeing a bit more adoption of written tools, like doing reviews in Google docs instead of just reading them, etc.
Importantly, the lame "status update" meetings have become much more tighter and focused. We used to pack things into these generic one hour sessions, and now more meetings are starting to have better focused agendas, people get used to saying "you know, maybe only two of us need to discuss this...", etc.
Taking a week 2-3x a year to iterate and experiment with process changes like this feels pretty useful. Teams _should_ be doing this frequently if they're "agile", but I've rarely seen that actually pan out in reality. But it's a lot easier to take than the CEO surprising everyone electronically the first week back after a break.
IMO the better long-term solution is to educate everyone on the concept of preparing and structuring a meeting adequately in advance, to only invite the people who should really attend, and not be afraid to say no when you believe you don't need to attend when justified.
IMO the person creating the meeting has that responsibility to prepare and structure the event to minimize the time required.
I personally include a document in the meeting invite containing the talking points in advance, which gives the time to those who participate to prepare their content and add more points if relevant. I guide the discussion through those points while also taking notes, and when the meeting is over I share a meeting summary to all those who attended so that we all have that info written down, easy to Ctrl+F if needed.
So far I think everyone enjoys the effort I put in these.
The rest of the work is documented through our incident management system to keep everyone in the loop, and wr have our group chat for the ad-hoc discussions.
What I found an interesting approach at a company I worked was that I think every quarter everybody has to empty their calendars completely and should schedule meetings not on specific weekdays
My last gig dropped my contract and then needed me a month later because their engineers weren't able to do anything. I told them I will come back but I will only golf every day. I ignored almost every meeting and had all my email go in to a folder title "C. DUMPSTER BOX". I got dumber by the day but got my 3 wood slice under control.
Sometimes having a lot of meetings is not due to poor process but poor culture. If teams have to seek consensus and buy-in, mostly due to fear of having failures, every step of the way, then they will have tons of meetings. If every single design has to go through a 20-person committee, then there will be tons of meetings. If a company value so-called "coordination" over engineering, then there will be tons of meetings.
On the other hand, if a company assigns a huge chunk of responsibility to every engineer and value "show and tell" or "freedom and responsibility" in general instead of "get permission first", then there will be very few meetings, just like Netflix did in the early 2010s, or as AWS did with true 2-pizza teams. The question is, does the leadership in your company has the stomach or means to cultivate the culture of encouraging individuals to carry out big enough tasks?
Maybe I just don't work in a toxic workplace, but I love speaking with my colleagues over video. Keeping comms going in slack and speaking face to face are not mutually exclusive. You don't work with avatars, you work with humans.
As a practical matter, this seems like it will only cause meeting makers to spend a bit of extra effort scheduling “non-recurring” meetings periodically. As someone who occasionally does schedule meetings, this really is not that challenging, especially if meeting volume is overall low; no conflicts, it takes seconds.
Wouldn’t it be better to measure outcomes and sentiment, and allow teams to adapt to what works for them? “Hey your team isn’t really enjoying all the meetings you call, maybe try having fewer to improve your team’s morale?” vs. “No recurring meetings for anyone!”
You're saying this like any and every meeting is a waste of time, it's nonsense.
I don't like meetings, I constantly try to remove meetings from my team's process, but that doesn't mean that I think the ones we have are not useful and a waste of time.
This is just another flavor of the Musk-esque belief that the ratio of delivered production code to man hours is too low. Engineers should be coding, not in meetings. This is a plausible thought for anyone with 1-2 years experience, and a frightening thought from anyone else
Yes there might be some fat to cut but this approach just sounds terrible
In reality projects will go in random unwanted directions, or TBs that used to be recurring will be manually created one at a time, and things will continue just like before this decision
Engineers enjoy getting updates and then delivering those updates to someone else who, in turn, puts them in some project management application that overflows within days. Software engineers prefer to discuss things rather than doing them. That's why they send a lot of emails with a bunch of people on them and always reply-all to make sure everyone knows they exist. They also use the printer a lot, especially for putting signs around the office about how to handle basic objects like the coffee machine.
At least thats what it seems like email job people think.
I used to be on the board of a national political organization. We met monthly, on the phone, for two hous once a month. We made our decisions using consensus. We had 30 people, opiniated activists mostly, on the call
On the five years I served We went over time twice. Once by five minutes and once by 90. We had a very good facilitator
In business I have almost never been in meetings that well run.
Good on Shopify. But the problem is not "meetings". The problem is those meetings
When a company does this, it's generally a knee jerk reaction to engineering telling product that development pace is slow because of "all the meetings."
Meetings absolutely need to be more scrutinized. In every last organization I’ve worked for, I’ve endured countless meetings wasting my time and others time with no agenda, endless fodder about staffs’ kids hockey games, etc. which could have been used for productive time. Kudos to Shopify for recognizing this and hopefully instituting a sea change.
I’ve worked at companies where they’ve done a “spring cleaning” like this, I guess no one thought to turn it into a branding pitch and call up the media though
I wish the company I'm at would do this, I have a mandatory daily morning meeting that gets longer and longer, now 45-90 minutes with tangential discussion.
I recently quit a company where we were having daily morning meetings of 30 minutes or longer, plus weekly sprint check-ins and weekly sprint reviews, and quarterly PI planning events that were several days of 6-8 hrs/day.
I like technical work, design and coding and interaction with customers to understand their needs. I'm okay with approximately weekly status updates and ad-hoc quickie get-togethers to figure something out, but I hate stand-ups (so-called) that feel more like justifying one's job or trying to sound productive (I knew for a fact some of those fancy updates people were giving were just covering for watching Netflix and Youtube 4 hrs/day) :)
It seems to me Shopify's approach might have some merit, even if it seems heavy-handed and clumsy.
Standups first thing in the morning are a great way to get the day going with some hot coffee. Each status should be 5-30 seconds. Keeps people honest. The shittier employees always go on and on about what they're doing and start asking questions about their personal tasks and if the bossman/bosswoman allows it, the meeting can take up valuable time. I always have a sheet in front of me where I start drawing and the more the drawing progresses, the more the project is digressing.
Others could go on for nearly limitless time until the mgr finally shut them up.
I suggested to the mgr, a nice enough guy, about splitting the team into smaller groups with 15-minute limits on morning stand-ups, and he responded that he had already proposed that but had been shot down.
For years I've been hearing about how Agile is an effective methodology, but I have not been able to verify this personally. On the contrary, I've come to believe that poorly executed Agile is much worse than nothing.
Now I'm contemplating my next steps and many if not most employers do list Agile as a "skill" or a requirement. Not sure if I should just smile and make nice about it, or be honest and say "Yes I've used Agile but it was at best a waste of time."
My last company had a similar daily meeting that often went over an hour . Any actually useful workers were just working through it while having it in the background and the useless would talk and talk about minutia probably feeling very productive. The most common reply to a question was “I’m sorry I wasn’t listening”
People who call meetings should have to pay for the time of everyone present out of an annual budget. This would result in fewer, more useful meetings. The fact that they’re ‘free’ in some minds (usually those whose job largely consists of discussing things) is the problem.
They introduced Facebook Workplace today, as well, for “async things”. Public slack channels now have a membership cap. All the “social channels” have limited posting permissions and people were mass-removed from other work channels. Slack is supposed to be just for DMs, I guess.
I guess I’m not entirely mad, Slack has a lot of downsides. But feels like they only half-assed solving for that set of problems.
I used to work at Apple and for a very long time we used email for most things, and iMessage for anything urgent.
IMO it worked great, and I prefer that to slack.
Email is much more linear and more permanent so it’s much harder to lose things. It’s also much easier to search for things in email IMO. The extra friction invoked with e-mail can also be good for cutting down on unnecessary communication.
Apple also uses Radar which is more effective than other bug trackers.
You can file a bug with some product and someone from the other side of the campus will typically reply within days.
I think part of it is a user interface issue, interacting with Jira is such an unpleasant affair that often only PMs in a company will interact with it in any depth.
Nope. If a thread was getting long we would just schedule a meeting to make a decision.
I can’t remember ever seeing a thread of just 1 line back and forths (although I have seen this on slack). The 1 line emails I remember were usually from some higher up person who was signing off on some decision and that ended a thread usually.
Not the worst thing in the world. I'm not saying it's necessarily better than a meeting, but at least you have a paper trail and automatic log of decisions made.
(A collaborative doc would probably be a better venue for that, of course.)
Bots that can't be completely muted, for example. The best you can do is disable notifications for messages created by bots (except slackbot) but as far as I can tell you can't stop the dreaded "red dot" from appearing.
I use the browser version and override favicon, notifications are also disabled and I have some greasemonkey scripts to modify behavior. It’s a moving target though
I agree - many people said "email sucks!" and then pushed communication ideally suited for an email into slack. We'd do so much better if we taught people how to pick the right channel for the intent vs. big, dumb generalized rules.
The reality is that many people don’t want to talk to anyone else, and ultimately want to be paid to do little or no work at all.
So many folks are completely disconnected from the performance of their group (whatever structure that group takes), that stuff like this starts to sound appealing.
Nobody who wants to get things done (that actually benefit the group) would advocate for not collaborating with other members of the group, but folks who want to maximize extraction with minimal effort would.
Thoughtful people who want to get things done recognize that other people's time is a scarce resource that should be allocated deliberately, not routinely.
No, that's not it; you can both understand how scarce time is as a resource and still accurately believe spending it with others is more productive than spending it alone, depending on the work (and software engineering falls into the "time more productively spent together" set).
Periodicity is an arbitrary line upon which to draw acceptability, so when one draws it there's usually a reason other than, "I want to maximize effectiveness."
I don’t know many great alternatives, but usually people will point to email in this case. And great documentation (wiki/FAQ/Readme) to preempt a lot of potential questions. I find those work well for me and it’s what a lot of people like because it reduces the amount of urgent but non-important interruptions in their work.
Call me crazy but I would like to occasionally talk to and see the faces of my teammates in real time. We're not robots in factories. We're humans. I love remote work but a workplace is different from, say, an Internet forum.
One thing I've noticed is that people are less prone to personal discussions over a conference call compared to in person meetings. We only rarely do in person meetings now because of how quickly we can get through a meeting. One thing that contributes to this is the fact that you are sitting at your computer with plenty of other things to work on other than the meeting. When you're sitting in a conference room, there's no work distractions so people find other things to talk about, whether it's what they did that weekend or other work discussions that are unrelated to the meeting. One other thing is that since a Teams meeting feels less "official", we can have multiple status meetings a week where it's not mandatory to call in for every one of them. Our in person status meetings were once a week and would go for at least two hours since it was easier to get people together for a long time once a week than a short time multiple times a week. A status meetings once a week was simply not enough because of how quickly things changed throughout the week so by Wednesday, the plans for the week could have changed or someone's progress may have been halted due to a problem. Very inefficient!
IRC + email + VCS system works fine for FLOSS projects.
tmux can also be used for screen sharing, if anyone needs support or wants to pair on something.
One nice thing about using this comms stack is it doesn't exclude people who are on slow internet connections. Video/audio is grossly inefficient for transfer of some bytes of raw information versus text.
I hope this is additive and not too much of a tangent, but the folks at 37signals (Basecamp) have a similar philosophy. A couple links below to some good articles on their philosophy. Honestly I've never worked anywhere where 1:1s and synchronous stand-ups aren't the norm, and any attempts at async stand-ups I've had have been really bad ("Slack stand-up today!"). But I'm intrigued by it.
I won't comment on the merits of this at large, but it was annoying for me at the time because I had several recurring calls with external partners, which were all summarily axed. The bot didn't discriminate between meetings with 3+ Shopify employees, or 1 Shopify employee and 2+ external contacts. Hopefully they fixed that this time, because it was embarrassing having to explain to partners why all of our recurring meetings had gotten deleted.