No not to the same extent. Meetings proliferate because people love them. LOVE them. Programmers dislike them because of flow but everyone else can't get enough of them. I only realized after enough years outside the tech industry. Meetings are like eating junk food. They make people feel important and like they had a busy/productive day, even if the actual mental effort required was low and the measurable output minimal. Compared to sitting at a desk and focusing on a single task, it's far inferior for most people, who find that quite exhausting or demotivating.

I think that's a bit ungenerous to think that programmers are somehow different in this regard. Everyone hates attending boring meetings. And non-programmers also have heads down individual work they need to / would rather be doing.

However I agree that the extent of it is the key. I think most people actually hate running meetings (it's basically public speaking), but they hate writing documents even more. It's much easier to "voice over" something than to sit and write it out. It's also easier to enforce attendance than to police opening and actually reading documents. So meetings are the path of least resistance/effort.

Well people say they hate attending boring meetings, but when you observe what people do it's normally the coders who actively find ways to skip / who aren't setting up new meetings / are requesting fewer meetings. Other job roles, at least in my experience, tend to jump to a meeting as the first reaction. Developers will say: let's discuss it over email. Others say: let's hop on a call / grab a room.

Now you're right it's obviously not that black and white, I'm generalizing. But I think devs often under-estimate how many people in a typical company perceive meeting other internal employees as amongst their primary outputs.

Something else worth remarking on - a lot of people in sales or marketing roles never seem to use word processors. They communicate ideas by sending PowerPoint decks around, often with a density of words in the slides too high to actually project. Where I last worked there were people whose working hours boiled down to meetings and PowerPoints. They could spend a whole week making a deck, which would only be consumed by their colleagues. I found it odd but maybe the slide templates help them structure their thoughts.

> you observe what people do it's normally the coders who actively find ways to skip / who aren't setting up new meetings / are requesting fewer meetings

Interesting - I actually chalk up that to two things: first, people in SWE roles having historically been given a tremendous amount of latitude for behavior that does not conform to "professional" norms. The freedom to dress however they want, work from home, and skip out on meetings they don't want to attend are all of a piece. And second, I think software engineering work is often (generalizing as well) less cross functional than other roles. Gathering requirements and understanding how it fits into a larger company plan is usually tasked out to PMs or tech leads, which is not something I've seen for Finance, HR, Legal, or other functional roles. So the need to schedule their own meetings is also lessened.

I treasure the meetings where my users surface requests, problems, and observations to me. Also the meetings where I jam with fellow engineers on how to solve specific problems. But the vast majority of the meetings on my calendar are what I would consider phatic [0]: they're about performing or convincing ourselves and each other of the idea "we are a team and we're collaborating" rather than any actual content, decision, or outcome we're collaborating on. The content is on Slack, or in the hallway.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phatic_expression

I was in yet another meeting the other day, and we had more "observers" than actual contributors / workers. Totally absurd. At the end of the meeting, some of the "observers" simply don't understand the meeting, and want a follow up meeting to discuss the meeting, so they discuss it in yet another meeting (presumably to appear intelligent so even more meetings can be scheduled.)

I've also noticed the PowerPoint issue: densely packed slides look ridiculous and don't project well. I think a lot of people wind up simply reading off the slides.

This is true. And the more meetings the better, because if a meeting starts to get serious, you can just drop for another meeting!

About mental effort in meetings being lower than solving a technical issue, it is definitively true (most of the time), even though non-technical people cannot even grasp how much a difference there is.

In a previous software job, I was participating in a trade show. It was meeting after meeting, with both sales and technical aspects (I was paired with a sales guy). After several days like this, I remember vividly the sales guy saying how this trade show was good, but at the same time complaining how tired he was because all of these meetings. I kept it to myself, but for me, this was nearly like vacations compared to the day to day usual work

Which is unacceptable for an engineer who must participate in architecture meetings.

Poor written communication skills should be disqualifying for an engineer who must participate in architecture processes, but it isn't.

does anyone do that anymore?

for me this is the real failure and design documentation being shitty is just a symptom

group design is a really important skill, and people don't even recognize that its a thing

Does anyone do what? Fail to pay attention/retain architecture via meeting? Because yeah engineers definitely tend keep working/browse Reddit during meetings because they feel they have better stuff to do.

> Most people are a) bad at listening and b) hate meetings, but that doesn't stop them...

True, people are bad at both but I think many people view a 30 minute meeting where they can voice over an idea as a lower lift than sitting down and writing a well structured doc (see also: Loom). Plus, it's easier to enforce attendance than to enforce reading a document. So meetings are the path of least resistance.