I say this with the perspective of someone who has slowly had to have many more of these meetings added to his calendar over the years.
Some are very important, some are reasonable but often bloated, but so many are a waste of time.
At the very least: they’re 5-10 mins of work spread over an hour. It’s occasionally maddening.
When I was really junior, I'd go to meetings and think that the vast majority of the time was wasted. As I became more senior, I realized that a lot of that wasted time is for providing context, relationship building, and alignment. You may not need those things for your current task, but your leadership and partner teams may need these things.
Yes, a lot of meetings could be emails, and a lot of meetings could be better run (agendas and objectives in the invite, action items assigned at the end), but unless you're working somewhere awful, most meetings probably have a reasonable purpose and aren't all filler. Lots of jobs require way more meetings, and probably aren't filled with context relevant to you.
Looking down on non-engineering positions is a personality trait I associate with inexperience. It's absolutely something I'd consider when denying a promo.
My entire point was that there is a major difference between the two & that while the instinct to look down on others for this organizational symptom is immature, it’s not unfounded or without basis to highlight the issue: they’re blaming the wrong thing however.
And I often find that in those types of meeting communication & relationship building is the absolute last thing that is happening. Most of these meetings are CYA, checklist, type meetings.
Meetings that literally only exist to allow someone to demonstrate they had a meeting about something.
Worse, the actual communication that is happening is usually in side channels.
Having good meeting culture requires everyone involved to improve it. If you want meetings to be better, set them up, add an agenda and objectives, and run the meeting so that it's effective. If you can't run the meeting, if it doesn't have an agenda or objectives, ask the person who created it for them. Ask for action items at the end of the meeting, if no one is calling for them. If it's mostly status meetings, propose a better process to track and communicate status.
If you're working through side channels, you're part of the problem.
Calling people assholes, rather than improving the situation, is an indicator of inexperience.
I’m actually impressed.
Call me in 20 years, maybe you’ll have learned something.
Assuming people are assholes, and blaming them for situations is just run of the mill toxic. Working through side-channels rather than addressing a problem is also run of the mill toxic.
Just because Joe or Judy "feels" a certain way doesn't mean it should actually have bearing on anything. Really...
Enough placating those with the least logic and self control.
People's feeling matter in the long term, because it's the difference between them wanting to work with you, and them being forced to work with you. If I had to pick between a genius coder with awful people skills, and an average coder with exceptional skills, I'd essentially always pick the average one.
Do you not see the difference?
Well that's absolutely not the place for it.
If your little fee fees get hurt you keep it to yourself and focus on the task at hand. Then after the task is complete you either pull the offender aside to address the problem or you bring it to a superior to be addressed. It in no way should have any bearing on the work at hand.
This is basics of work place decorum, right?
A lot of that seems to be about office politics, which historically been something which engineers and office workers in general has disliked. It is a generally unhappy fact that relationship building and office alignments is what dictate who get promoted, who get raises, who get the desired assignments and who don't.
It might be true that those who refuse playing that game is associated with inexperience. In my experience, employees who get tired of it generally leave large companies, which leaves behind only inexperience employees or those who enjoy the game.
100% agree. In early or IC roles, it's easy to think "just let me go do X" (or worse, "talking about X or Y is a waste of time when X is the obvious answer") without seeing the bigger picture that there's tremendous value in making sure other teams are aware of what X is, why it's important, and having a chance to weigh in or ask questions. Certainly there are valid complaints about some people's meetings, but those shouldn't overshadow the alignment/communication value meetings can have.
What an ironic comment.
Sorry, any early-career worker looking down their nose at anyone else (or pretending to have any idea what their job entails, especially because they “looked at a calendar”) might as well go back to middle school. They definitely need to grow up.