[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why do I struggle to follow corporate meetings?
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: Why do I struggle to follow corporate meetings?
Hi HN, I've just got out of a meeting and like almost every non-
technical meeting I have next to no idea what the discussion was
about. I find a lot of non-technical meetings go something like
this: "Hi guys, as you might be aware [Robert Smith] of the
[communications department] has recently released his [quarterly
review] of our ongoing [transformation strategy]. We've received a
lot of positive feedback so far, but I wanted to give you all an
opportunity to share your thoughts in this meeting. Would anyone
like to go first?" Then about half of the team (normally the same
people) will jump into the discussion and somehow seem to know what
the hell is going on. Meanwhile I'm there wondering who is this
[Robert Smith] of the [communications department]? What is the
[transformation strategy] and why does it need a [quarterly
review]? Occasionally someone will ask what the [transformation
strategy] is, but typically it won't be answered in a way that
helps me understand what's going on because even more names and
departments will be dropped and the strategy itself will be
described in such a vague way that it means nothing. I guess a
concrete example that comes to mind was from a place I worked
previously where they would talk about their "omnichannel" strategy
a lot. Whenever someone asked what "omnichannel" meant it was
described in a way that seemed to mean nothing, "a multichannel
sales strategy", etc. About 6 months into the job I finally figured
out we were just using it to refer to some extra functionality that
we were working on that would allow customers to collect and return
online orders from our regional stores. But this was never how it
was referred to in corporate meetings. Am I the only one who
experiences this? I can't work out if there's a part of my brain
that's missing that prevents me from understanding what's being
discussed in these meetings or if this is a common experience. I'm
very practically minded which probably doesn't help, but I worry
I'm not making enough of an effort to understand what's happening
in the business outside my personal bubble. Does anyone struggle
with this, or do you have any recommendations for people like me
who do struggle to understand what's happening in corporate
meetings?
Author : kypro
Score : 206 points
Date : 2022-07-06 16:27 UTC (6 hours ago)
| mym1990 wrote:
| As someone working in consulting, I can attest to the fact that
| most of the phrases you just ran off are buzz phrases that are
| the verbal representation for "kool aid". Leadership has to
| basically put out reports or justifications for the latest
| projects and how they will help drive the company forward(whether
| it will or not is pretty much always in question).
|
| To be honest, you _can_ benefit from it by learning what the
| terminology is and how it translates into actual changes for the
| future of the company. If you can identify the places that
| leadership is putting emphasis in, you can work on things that
| further that initiative and likely catch the flow into promotions
| and bigger roles at the company.
|
| For example: A company says they are doing digital transformation
| by moving their data from Excel spreadsheets into a Salesforce
| instance. This will be a multi year project that will
| hypothetically increase efficiency and raise revenues by 50%. If
| you are working on the Excel side of things, this would be a good
| time to consider learning about Salesforce!
|
| Not everyone(hell, I would say most people) wants to do this, and
| that is totally okay. If you're in this camp I don't see a
| problem of just going about your business and day to day work.
| throwaway413 wrote:
| Just ask questions. If you don't know what something is - ask.
| Forget about everyone else in the meeting - chances are someone
| else feels exactly the same way and is also too nervous to speak
| up and ask for help.
|
| Let the meeting driver keep course, if they don't want to take
| the time to explain, let them say so and ask to "take it offline"
| for follow up.
|
| The whole purpose of meetings is to get aligned. If you're not
| clear on what it is to even be aligned with, that's step one and
| that is totally fine, there is no shame. You have to put yourself
| out there and speak up, otherwise you will get left behind,
| because only you are looking out for yourself. No one is going to
| drag you along besides simply inviting you to the meeting. Take
| the opportunity into your own hands and demand clarity. Either
| you get it, problem solved, or you receive pushback, at which
| point you're clearly not needed in the discussion and so you
| dismiss yourself to more important things.
|
| In your example, "I don't know what any of those things are, can
| you explain?" is a perfectly valid piece of feedback. Rinse and
| repeat until you get clarity or someone tells you it's out of
| scope for the discussion (which means "catch up on your own
| time"). If anything, this is valuable feedback to the meeting
| driver that maybe not all communication is taking place as it
| should be, why are team members not informed? This leads to
| learnings, which is why it's valuable for everyone involved if
| you speak up.
| telchior wrote:
| It's probably some blend of you not being in that domain +
| intentional vagueness.
|
| I used to write about omnichannel marketing, so I love that you
| gave that example. As the "explainer", I spent a lot of time
| trying to figure out what the hell I was explaining. If you
| visited the website of one of the major omnichannel vendors,
| you'd mainly see a lot of inspirational fluff that was almost
| completely devoid of meaning. At the same time -- there was
| actual software being built and actual changes being made to the
| businesses that bought into omnichannel. So it's not nothing, but
| humans are built to deceive each other and a good deal of this
| corporate speak is part of an intricate dance of deception, built
| around advancing careers and justifying budgets and headcounts.
| Any good lie contains a measure of truth.
|
| You can, if you put your mind to it, learn enough of the
| "language" to sit there and blabber to the execs about it and if
| you are, let's say, 60% comprehensible everyone will nod their
| heads and either politely ignore the other 40%, or, like you,
| believe that the 40% of chaff is actually something. But if you
| don't feel like you fit in with the babblers, it'll be harder for
| you than it is for them.
| kradeelav wrote:
| I like your point about the "language" - as you said, there's a
| measure of truth, but there really is quite a lot of
| translation involved that may or may not include a good dollop
| of BS.
|
| (source, designer in marketing. The BS is useful to trojan
| horse actually useful concepts to certain tiers of management.)
| dboreham wrote:
| Organizational theater. Turn down the volume and watch a Jonathan
| Blow video instead? Or fix a bug? Read WikiPedia articles on
| obscure areas of mathematics?
| EddieDante wrote:
| > Does anyone struggle with this, or do you have any
| recommendations for people like me who do struggle to understand
| what's happening in corporate meetings?
|
| I stopped struggling years ago. I've accepted that the vast
| majority of meetings are an excuse for some self-important eloi
| to wax eloquent about shit that is only relevant to _my_ job
| insofar as morlocks like me doing our jobs allows the eloi to do
| theirs. So I just show up, tune out, and if there 's an
| especially attractive eloi at the podium I might fantasize about
| disappointing them in bed. If these morons want to give me an
| excuse to do fuck-all and get paid for it, I'm not going to
| object.
| davidro80 wrote:
| malfist wrote:
| That is an astoundingly cynical take.
| glouwbug wrote:
| It's a hilarious take, and they're not wrong
| ramesh31 wrote:
| It's also correct.
| mpalczewski wrote:
| > Does anyone struggle with this, or do you have any
| recommendations for people like me who do struggle to understand
| what's happening in corporate meetings?
|
| Your brain is functioning well, especially the filtering
| mechanism. There's nothing going on in those meetings. They are
| boring. I don't go, get work done and nobody complains.
|
| In general meetings with more than 6 people(this is already too
| many) are not worth going to.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| If you think the terms might be nonsense, test it. Say you've
| struggled to understand, and press them to define what they
| really mean. They genuinely don't know fairly often.
|
| My first job was at a telecom equipment company. The head of
| engineering listed out a bunch of acronyms as what we'd be
| working on in the next year, and emphasized how critical it was
| we "followed the plan". I raised my hand and asked what a random
| acronym was, and I got "I have no idea". I started periodically
| asking after that.
| underwater wrote:
| That just makes you sound like a stirrer.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Like stirring up trouble? I don't do it very often, and it's
| hard to get mad at someone who emphasizes wanting to
| understand you.
| watwut wrote:
| I think a half your problems would be solved if you asked about
| those terms outside of that meeting. Ask someone technical - more
| senior to you but close in ranks. If you wont understand answer,
| ask "what exactly that means? It is too abstract for me, can you
| show it to me in our app?" or "what does it mean practically" or
| something similar.
|
| To add, this happens because you are not learning about what is
| going on outside of those meetings. The confusion in the meeting
| is just consequence.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| If I don't understand something, I'd ask about it. If I don't
| understand the answer, I'd ask more until I understand it. I
| don't know, may be that looks rude in the west, but that's how
| I'm behaving.
| clcaev wrote:
| Taking and distributing meeting minutes is a superpower that no
| one wants.
|
| First, something you thought of as nonsense may actually click
| when you author the summary. Second, by sending out minutes, you
| have an opportunity to followup for clarifications and then can
| frame the knowledge and deliverables. Third, people often repeat
| themselves and call meetings when they feel they are not being
| heard -- accurate minutes help people grok they are being
| listened to. Fourth, you can cc your boss on it, so their inbox
| fills with meeting minutes, and then you can tell them it's hard
| to work with so many meeting interruptions (tell your manager
| that each 1h meeting is 2-3h because you have to take notes and
| assimilate them, otherwise, why are they sending you to a
| meeting?). Fifth, some participants may change their mind or be
| more informed themselves when reading meeting minutes, improving
| team effectiveness. Sixth, you have a record of soap boxing, so
| you can visibly take a "break" from taking notes when someone
| starts to wax, sort though a hard copy of the minutes, and then
| ask: "Pardon my interruption, but you brought this up on X, Y,
| and Z... has anything changed?". Seventh, the notes provide great
| skimming for team members (and future self), especially when
| things go south.. or you ask to be moved to another team.
| Finally, being known as a helpful person with thoughtful notes
| creates informal power for yourself because as you become the
| expert by assimilating peoples's knowledge. This credibility and
| proof of work creates opportunity.
| kevinh456 wrote:
| This is the most underrated comment on this post. I recently
| started at a large tech company, the largest I've ever been at,
| and taking meeting notes is the most important decision I've
| made. I have a record of everything that's happened and the
| decisions we've made. It helps me focus on the meeting instead
| of getting distracted. I've had issues with dominating
| conversations, so the note taking helps me focus on listening
| too. Really good choice.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I'll provide slightly less cynical thought, may or may not help:)
|
| I was purely technical for first 20 years of my career. I never
| understood meetings like this. I never cared for meetings like
| this. I assumed there's no value or meaning for meetings like
| this. They didn't impact me and people can BS each other as much
| as they want.
|
| I was right? From a personal perspective. I did my technical
| work, and the org changes and sales strategy and client
| relationships and wording on contracts did not seem to daily
| impact my work. You can spend an entire, happy, sane career in
| that way.
|
| Few years ago I ended up what can best be described as middle
| management. It is now my JOB to understand what the heck is going
| on at a certain level, and it is in some way easier. My goal
| becomes less "Build Server to these specifications" and more
| about "Help client achieve this outcome". Just like there's a set
| of language that has developed around "how to build a server" and
| "how to create a webpage", there's a language around "how to
| achieve a business outcome". And they'll sound equally gobblety-
| gook to each other.
|
| A business development manager may believe all techies are
| interchangeable and building servers is the easy part, hard part
| is sales and keeping client happy. A pure techie may believe that
| all managers are bullshitters and hard part is infra/code. I'm
| sufficiently recent to both sides that I can see both aspects if
| I squint, kind of like that optical delusion that's like two
| faces or one vase depending on how you look.
|
| If you genuinely WANT to understand these meetings... you can't
| go in them cold. You won't understand language and background by
| starting from the middle. Talk to your management and ask them:
| what are your goals? What are your priorities? How do we make
| this team, business unit, company succeed, at strategic level?
| This will hopefully give you a framework to then start fitting
| little nuggets you hear into.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| I've not been a dev for very long, but I don't care for the
| "build to these specifications" approach. I like to know what
| outcome I'm helping achieve and why it matters because I think
| that knowledge helps achieve the outcome. This is part of why I
| enjoy software consulting.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I agree, but I have seen people of all kinds and preferences.
|
| I've actually been stopped couple of times when I was
| explaining background - literal line: "Thanks Nikola, but I
| don't need the context - just tell me what the build and I'm
| happy:)". This was a team member who was a sysadmin, then
| tech architect, then decided knowing background and being
| responsible for outcomes was not contributing to his quality
| of life, and went back to sysadmin, and lived very happily
| ever after in carefully managed ignorance. I've seen a number
| of people who have decided their happiness is in scope
| management. I don't work like that, for now, but I fully
| understand that perspective.
| alistairSH wrote:
| _If you genuinely WANT to understand these meetings... you can
| 't go in them cold._
|
| This. If you don't understand any of these corporate meetings,
| ask your direct manager to explain. If you want to keep that
| question private, ask during your regular 1-on-1. Or, if you
| know your teammates have the same problem, ask during a regular
| team meeting. (I'm assuming you have both meetings on some
| regular cadence, if not, run away!)
|
| Hopefully your boss can explain it in plain language. If not,
| run away!
| andruby wrote:
| This is a great answer.
|
| It's easy to assume someone else's job is simple when you don't
| understand it.
|
| I bet we all know a few "Business" people that assume sysadmin
| is just turning on machines, and programming is really simple
| and easy.
|
| But the reverse happens all the time too, where "technical"
| people assume the business jobs are easy. That sales,
| management and marketing are easy.
|
| None of the jobs are easy. Lack of understanding the difficulty
| is not evidence of simplicity.
| [deleted]
| simpixelated wrote:
| Good answer. I'll add that as a middle manager, it's your job
| to take a large umbrella strategy and break it down into
| actionable terms for your team. I think this is the root of the
| OPs problem. These meetings are for disseminating a
| goal/strategy that is set near the top of the organization. It
| has to be broad and generic in order for different groups to
| enact. It's up to the management of each team (whether its
| sales or engineering) to translate the company goals into
| specific goals for the team that are understandable.
| jessaustin wrote:
| This suggests OP shouldn't be in this meeting, and instead
| should join a separate team-focused "translation" meeting.
| april_22 wrote:
| or maybe just scrape meetings and sent an easy to
| understand email which summarizes everything in 3-4
| minutes.
|
| Could save a lot of wasted time and energy
| SilasX wrote:
| As a middle manager with that background, I would think the
| lesson is that you should make a better effort to brief the
| engineers on what context they need for meetings rather than
| let them linger in the state of feeling like it's all
| pointless.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Agreed; I don't know the requestor's background, org
| structure, role, and why are they in those specific meetings
| in the first place. There are any number of activities that
| their manager can do and improve, but question as I
| interpreted it was "What can _I_ do / what is wrong with me
| / how can I improve".
| imwillofficial wrote:
| This is my dilbert is funny, you're not alone
| ktrnka wrote:
| If the company is otherwise pretty good, it's good to be candid
| that you don't understand the context or goal and could use some
| background. Usually I find that there are other people equally
| confused but also not speaking up
| synu wrote:
| Some companies have a culture where everything is discussed in
| meetings, and if you aren't in all the meetings none of the
| context is anywhere else to be found.
|
| The best thing to do (if you want to catch up) is ask someone who
| seemed to know what was going on to get you up to speed after the
| meeting. Or, if you don't, just try to get out of the meetings.
| Nobody realised you had no idea what was going on.. they probably
| won't notice if you weren't there at all.
| munchbunny wrote:
| It's because a lot of corporate communications are more like
| strings made of pointers to concepts rather than strings made of
| words.
|
| The exercise that helps me, personally, is to ask a series of
| context questions:
|
| * Who is the intended audience? Why would the intended audience
| care about what's being discussed? Corporate communications tend
| to err on the side of broadcasting too widely rather than too
| narrowly.
|
| * What is the communicator actually trying to get out of this
| communication? It's often not what it says on the label. With
| some people it's _usually_ not what it says on the label.
|
| * When they use a specific buzzword or marketing term, why did
| they use that term and not any other term? It's easy to dismiss
| buzzwords as bullshit (e.g. omnichannel marketing), but they
| didn't catch on out of sheer luck, so why is it that this
| specific person is using this specific term?
|
| There's much more there, but in general I will try to focus on
| understanding the context that whatever is being communicated
| fits into, and once I understand that then things tend to be
| easier to parse.
| GraphenePants wrote:
| Compelling evidence that defining the word omnichannel is within
| scope of this meeting has failed to be presented by your person
| at this time. A re-training activity has been added to your
| queue.
| tootie wrote:
| That's just business. "Omnichannel" is pretty dated buzzword, but
| the notion of reaching users through different mediums (ads,
| emails, push notifications, even paper mail) is still very
| relevant and if you're a B2C it's probably really critical to
| success and a thing that your leadership are investing in at
| least as much as building a platform. I recall sitting in a brown
| bag session early in my career where someone explained a "sales
| funnel" and it just lit up my understanding of the kind of
| science that goes into user acquisition and conversion.
| Developers and product managers spend a lot of time thinking
| about serving their users, but acquiring and retaining users is a
| whole art and science unto itself and you'd do well to study up
| and get at least a cursory understanding. It will open your eyes
| to a lot of what makes a business run. There are a lot of
| technically trivial things that can unlock a ton of value in ways
| that really aren't obvious. Especially, tech savvy people who
| tend to mute notification, run ad blockers and block email
| marketing may not realize how much average consumers respond to
| that kind of thing.
| ghaff wrote:
| >tech savvy people who tend to mute notification, run ad
| blockers and block email marketing may not realize how much
| average consumers respond to that kind of thing.
|
| Or may not realize how much they respond themselves.
|
| But yes, whether B2C or B2B there's a huge amount of marketing
| machinery that's needed to reach customers at various stages of
| the "buyer's journey" through a variety of channels--and to
| make anyone involved in sales more effective.
| Geee wrote:
| I'm the same way. I just assume that they're biological GPT-3:s.
| They run a complex word generation algorithm in their heads, but
| they're not actually intelligent. Trying to find logic in their
| sentences just melts your brain, so try to avoid it and just go
| with the flow. The less you think the better you'll manage it.
|
| The funny thing is, if you're able to generate similar word salad
| non-sense, all of them will nod their heads and applaud your
| thoughts, even if you're not making any sense at all. No one will
| call you out for not making sense, it just has to match their
| patterns for human speech. Try to insert popular words into your
| sentences and talk with confidence. It's quite hard though if
| you're not natural.
| lstodd wrote:
| so much this
| nathias wrote:
| you need more synergy
| ahzhou wrote:
| Sounds like you're getting pulled into meetings without context.
| You should either ask the person who pulled you in to clarify the
| context or ask to be excluded and get heads down time back.
| shirononon_ wrote:
| I suggest a read (or re-read) of the Tao of programming which has
| insight relating to understanding corporate goings on:
|
| https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html
|
| May you find peace in book 7 which includes...
|
| In the East there is a shark which is larger than all other fish.
| It changes into a bird whose wings are like clouds filling the
| sky. When this bird moves across the land, it brings a message
| from Corporate Headquarters. This message it drops into the midst
| of the programmers, like a seagull making its mark upon the
| beach. Then the bird mounts on the wind and, with the blue sky at
| its back, returns home.
|
| The novice programmer stares in wonder at the bird, for he
| understands it not. The average programmer dreads the coming of
| the bird, for he fears its message. The Master Programmer
| continues to work at his terminal, unaware that the bird has come
| and gone.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| From someone much wiser than me: "There are two ways to make a
| living: Take something hard and make it look easy, or take
| something easy and make it look hard."
|
| Read that over a couple times and quietly think about it for a
| few minutes and keep it with you.
| awsrocks wrote:
| tpoacher wrote:
| Ask if this really leverages synergies as effectively as a
| blockchain operated lateralization paradigm.
|
| And if not, why, and how could we therefore proactively think
| outside the box and hit the ground running in a mutiscalable
| fashion?
| joshxyz wrote:
| oh dear i love hearing corporate buzzwords and holding my fucking
| laugh
| colechristensen wrote:
| I have been in plenty of corporate meetings where it was
| abundantly clear that the people talking, exchanging information
| fundamentally didn't understand each other and the meeting was a
| string of people responding to each other in a way that was at
| best vaguely related. Because the people talking were "important"
| nobody wanted to say "I don't understand" and nobody wanted to
| call out anybody for not understanding.
|
| It was not my job to make people understand each other and it was
| not at all possible that it was going to be my job, so the only
| thing to do was to do my best when things were relevant and to
| nod and smile otherwise. And after not so long leave because long
| meetings filled with nonsense are a major red flag.
|
| There is a level of learning the dumb corporate language which
| will help, but focus on keeping people happy with your work and
| accepting that sometimes people in meetings will go on endlessly
| without saying anything of substance.
| silisili wrote:
| I'm fully convinced most (not all, of course) of these people are
| just babbling words they've heard without making any sense. They
| talk a lot, but rarely actually say anything. I hate to paint
| -everyone- that way, so just speaking from my experience.
|
| At my company, a few years back, 'quantify' was the word du jour.
| Every person used it, most wrong, and no-one ever batted an eye
| and said 'what the hell are you even talking about?' I'm talking
| about sentences like 'Let me quantify that by saying, our growth
| initiative in sector x is our leading priority'. Half of them
| were using it as a synonym for clarify or qualify, I think. One
| can never be sure, because the speaker didn't even know. But it's
| a fancy sounding word to mark off the corporate speak bingo card.
| fleddr wrote:
| I struggle with it in the sense that it maddens me. I do
| typically understand what is said as from 20 years of experience
| I developed an internal corporate nonsense translator in my head.
|
| Paragraphs after paragraphs of fluffy academic corporate language
| about some omnichannel strategy could just be: we now also sell
| in stores. Everybody gets that, which is the damn point of
| language.
|
| I blame the schooling system. It's typical business school
| language, but you'll see the same effect in the academic world
| and even in politics. Somehow none are able to speak plain
| English.
|
| Abstract language is not just annoying and inaccessible, it's
| also highly convenient to mask bad news.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| Let me help you put a term to this behavior: Managerial
| aesthetics
|
| And schooling (and higher education) is not the cause, but has
| been warped- by businesses- to normalize this kind of business
| jargon. And can you blame them? Shareholders love to hear
| corporate buzzwords, so companies only hire people who are
| fluent in it.
| fleddr wrote:
| You're not wrong. But why do shareholders love buzz words?
| It's realistically not in their interest at all?
|
| The older I get, the more I'm inclined to join the dark side.
| To just play the game and not fight it. As such, I'm actually
| able to produce such fluffy language myself. In the rare case
| that I'm in trouble, I can use it to bullshit myself out of
| it.
| petercooper wrote:
| I was surprised to Cmd+F and not find "Amazon" mentioned here,
| because they seem to have some interesting approaches to
| meetings, such as distributing a memo and reading it (silently)
| en masse before discussing its contents. Some structure and
| especially some written direction sounds like it could seriously
| help in such confusing circumstances.
| lkrubner wrote:
| This is a bit of advice that I give to all of my clients (who are
| mostly the CEOs and CTOs of startups):
|
| You might be thinking, "What is wrong with group meetings? I love
| group meetings. I get to talk to everyone at once, which is much
| more efficient than talking to each person individually. Group
| meetings save me a lot of time." If you feel that way, I should
| warn you, I'm about to attack your deeply held beliefs. Get
| ready. I once had a client who insisted that the marketing team
| should meet with the tech team once a month, to collaborate on
| the creation of marketing copy that would be informed by those
| who understood the technology. This was good in theory, but
| having less people in the room would have been way more
| productive. As it was, during a typical meeting we had twelve
| people in the room, most of whom were bored. The conversation was
| almost always dominated by the three most opinionated marketing
| people. Imagine this going on for 20 straight minutes:
|
| Amy: Consumers are saturated with advertisements. The only way to
| break through is to connect with them at an emotional level.
| That's why we need to consider long-form advertising. We need to
| tell stories that really reach them.
|
| Henry: I couldn't disagree more! Nobody has time to read a story!
| If you write more than ten words then you've failed. We need a
| slogan that is memorable, something we can use in every ad,
| something that --
|
| Amy: No! Studies show that people don't remember facts, they
| remember emotions. We need to connect with those emotions, which
| is why we need to consider --
|
| Henry: Great, so we come up with ten words that pack an emotional
| wallop, but we don't write a damn novel! Nobody has time to read
| anymore, nobody --
|
| Amy: Well I read a novel a week, sometimes two. Some people crave
| stories and look for narrative structure and we should give them
| ads that they actually enjoy and want to share with their --
|
| Kate: No, no, you two are both wrong! People don't want stories
| so much as they want authenticity. We really need to forge a
| connection with them that feels authentic; if we hit them with an
| idiotic slogan or indulge in some silly fiction, that's just
| going to --
|
| Henry: If we find the right ten words, it will resonate with them
| as authentic. That's our job, to find the ten words that feel
| authentic! What do you think we are doing here? A quick slogan
| gives us quick -
|
| Kate: Authenticity is not a pack of Ramen noodles! We can't
| create it in five minutes, it's something that takes time to
| build and --
|
| Henry: Remember the Budweiser ad, from the mid 90s, with the
| bullfrogs ...??? Busch pulled off a Super Bowl commercial where
| the only word spoken the entire time was "Bud-wei-ser." The
| ENTIRE time! Because the frogs were reciting it! To this day, my
| older brothers still talk about --
|
| Amy: Oh my god, please for one moment try to get your head out of
| the clouds and think about how people actually associate ideas
| and products in ways that might be outside of your narrow --
|
| Does this conversation allow the tech team to have a better
| understanding of the way the marketing team thinks? Yes, maybe.
| And if time was infinite, this would be a fun educational
| exercise for the tech team. Alas, time is not infinite. Such
| meetings encouraged the tech team to offer their non-professional
| opinion on matters strictly relating to marketing. Why would the
| marketing team want that? A bad manager allows these meetings to
| drag on. A good manager ends these meetings quickly and gets
| people back to their real jobs. A great manager never allows such
| meetings to occur in the first place.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| I also struggled to follow corporate meetings for a very long
| time and even went to therapy over them - it feels bad to be
| called incompetent for asking what an Information Summary
| Validation Assessment Risk Actualization is.
|
| Sometime last year I realized that these meetings and terms don't
| have anything to do with rock climbing or mountain biking.
| Hopefully you can find that kind of peace too.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Are you familiar with "The Emperor's New Clothes"?
|
| > Two swindlers arrive at the capital city of an emperor who
| spends lavishly on clothing at the expense of state matters.
| Posing as weavers, they offer to supply him with magnificent
| clothes that are invisible to those who are stupid or
| incompetent. The emperor hires them, and they set up looms and go
| to work. A succession of officials, and then the emperor himself,
| visit them to check their progress. Each sees that the looms are
| empty but pretends otherwise to avoid being thought a fool.
| Finally, the weavers report that the emperor's suit is finished.
| They mime dressing him and he sets off in a procession before the
| whole city. The townsfolk uncomfortably go along with the
| pretense, not wanting to appear inept or stupid, until a child
| blurts out that the emperor is wearing nothing at all. The people
| then realize that everyone has been fooled. Although startled,
| the emperor continues the procession, walking more proudly than
| ever.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes
|
| In the corporate world, the emperor has clothes, but they are
| underwear and everyone pretends its a full suit and tie.
| Basically speaking, in order to sound more important people say
| "Omni channel sales strategy" but what that actually is a small
| Salesforce integration.
|
| One way to not have to attend those meetings is ask questions
| like "by Omni channel sales strategy do you mean..." and remove
| the fluff from whatever they are saying, basically be the child
| in the story.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| The not attend meetings trick boils down to: if other people
| don't like me, they won't bother me.
|
| Not the best strategy in my opinion. There are far better ways
| to slip out, but they require more careful maneuvering.
|
| My typical strategy is asking the right questions to the right
| people. I try appear helpful, while indirectly pushing to make
| the meeting more relevant or my presence less necessary.
|
| I've often made the offer to be available when they need my
| input. Helps smooth things so people see me as busy, rather
| than deliberately avoiding them.
| willcipriano wrote:
| It really depends on who is in the room. In my experience
| founders and people who are busy (C level folks, IC's) tend
| to prefer my style of commutation, it's middle managers who
| end up not liking me. Career wise that tradeoff appears to
| have been a pretty good one to make, but caveat emptor of
| course.
|
| Sometimes you can be surprised with this question and they
| will explain a actual strategy with multiple moving parts and
| everyone is better off by having it explained. Often you can
| catch a technical gap or two during this explanation and
| improve on the approach.
|
| It's really only the incompetent that get offended.
| brad0 wrote:
| I think there's two things here. The easier one to explain is the
| "omnichannel" bit.
|
| It reminds me a lot of dev teams creating a microservice and
| giving it a code name. Imagine someone from business joining
| standup and hearing a bunch of microservice code names and
| acronyms. They would be really confused! Maybe the same thing is
| happening here to you?
|
| The second thing you mentioned is their explanation about Robert
| Smith etc. You came out more confused after the explanation! To
| use the same standup example: the business person asks in your
| standup what does the "Odin" micro service do? It might be quite
| hard to explain what a single microservice does to someone
| without prior experience in that field.
|
| Long story short: the best way you can get an understanding for
| what they're talking about is to build a background in it. Feed
| your curiosity! Read a good intro book on business or economics
| to get a good foundation. See if you can setup some kind of
| regular 1:1 with a business person over lunch to learn more, etc.
| orwin wrote:
| > It reminds me a lot of dev teams creating a microservice and
| giving it a code name. Imagine someone from business joining
| standup and hearing a bunch of microservice code names and
| acronyms. They would be really confused! Maybe the same thing
| is happening here to you?
|
| Yes, and now, imagine someone from business joining our sprint
| starter meeting and having it explained in clear and concise
| way, as well as discussions over potential caveat/blocking
| points because we have two hours to give details and not
| fifteen minutes.
|
| Imagine being marketing (so not business, not tech) and being
| invited at a corporate meeting, then at a PI planning from a
| big (50-100) dev team. I guarantee you will understand way, way
| more from the PI even if you are just being around and not
| actively asking questions (and actively engaging with adjascent
| team will make you understand more).
| setgree wrote:
| Looking at some of the reasons that Tyler Cowen proposes for why
| meetings are so bad [0], it seems you don't like meetings whose
| purpose is any of the following:
|
| > to instruct everyone in the nature of an idea...."We need to
| get everyone on board." Ho hum.
|
| > to flex muscles and show a demonstration of power/support for a
| person or idea
|
| > so that everyone can feel involved in a decision
|
| And all of these can be frustrating.
|
| To quote another Cowenism: "context is that which is scarce" [1].
| I've had exactly one corporate job and I had absolutely no clue
| what we were talking about at meetings and I typically tuned out.
| But when I tuned in and asked questions -- things like, "you
| mentioned [some person] i've never heard of, who is she?" or
| "what was that acronym you just used?", my coworkers would
| typically pause and explain what they were talking about, and
| sometimes, I got the sense that they were made aware of how
| inscrutable their evolved conversation was to newcomers.
|
| I don't think it was malice or a deliberate power move, I think
| they were just not actively thinking about how scarce context is
| and how, if we want to clue people in, we need to make an active
| effort to do so.
|
| I left that job after about 9 months and found a place where the
| stuff that people say at meetings generally makes sense. It's a
| sign of culture fit.
|
| [0]
| https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/01/wh...
|
| [1]
| https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/co...
| Ancalagon wrote:
| This sounds like Walmart Ecommerce. Do/did you work for Walmart
| Labs?
| jandrese wrote:
| One very important corporate survival strategy is to learn who
| your actual bosses are. If the CEO has an hour long all-hands
| about "corporate strategy" then that's not something you need to
| worry about. The only reason that meeting was an all hands is
| because the CEO has an ego to feed.
|
| If your department head has a meeting about your department's
| priorities then you need to pay attention because they are the
| ones who are actually going to be observing and evaluating your
| work and how much they solved the problems that the department is
| being graded on. Pay attention to the people who pay attention to
| you.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| those meetings, and epic emails are sometimes useful for
| getting a read on where things are headed. But if you're busy
| yes, you can safely ignore
| FinanceAnon wrote:
| Pro-tip: if you have to say something in a meeting, but you don't
| know what to say, just ask "what's the timeline on this?"
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It's kind of deliberate. there's bullshitters, and bullshit-
| takers, and you are in the latter group. Setting the agenda and
| defining the terms is a way to exert power, in many ways far more
| important than any substantive outcome to the meetings. That
| said, quite a few managers are just high on their own supply and
| chasing a fashionable idea or doing a poor job of trying to
| explain whatever they were told in their last meeting. You don't
| have to assume malice.
|
| You can try using some BS of your own; for example, say modestly
| 'I love [the strategic thing] but I've struggled to communicate
| it effectively to my team. How can I make it easier for them to
| understand?' which flatters the person running a meeting enough
| that they might be tempted to show off. Don't have a team? Invent
| one, just evoke the existence of some confused and dissatisfied
| co-workers who you are eager to motivate.
|
| Keep notes on different people/ideas and give them a BS score out
| of 10 (nothing complicated). After a while you'll get a sense for
| what actually impacts productivity or business outcomes vs what's
| just the corporate cheer squad.
| 734129837261 wrote:
| "I really love your strategic approach, and I think we should
| seamlessly impact our intrepid cloud-ready technology with
| another meeting to go more in depth. I would like you, or John
| Smith from Marketing, to restore backward-compatible
| partnerships between our team leads. That way we can
| continually seize efficient human capital. That will really
| synergise with our stakeholders. What do you think?"
|
| And you can respond to whatever they say with a thinking nod
| while stroking your chin. And street-kids would say "bet", you
| simply say "hmhm, very agile."
|
| You'll be CEO in no-time.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Goddamit I cringed so hard. I just had flashback from my
| previous job.
| codegladiator wrote:
| > That will really synergise with our stakeholders
|
| This is so 2010s. You need to update your vocab. Let me FTFY
|
| > That will really decentralize our stakeholders
| watwut wrote:
| Based on post, those sentences had actual meaning and OP just
| did not understood. Take multichannel thing - it was real
| existing functionality. OP just had no idea what it refers to.
|
| You are doing people disservice here. If op followed your
| advice, op would look like idiot to teammembers.
| jollybean wrote:
| Please stop this. This is the worst kind of technical cynicism.
|
| Tech people are not the people with 'real jobs' while everyone
| else 'bullshits'.
|
| Terms are above your head because they generally relate to
| operations outside the scope of your knowledge.
|
| (Edit: 'omnichannel' could mean a lot of things, it's
| definitely a bit 'buzzwordy' but it almost assuredly refers to
| some cross functional project of some kind that the OP is not
| aware of. This immediate implication of 'things I don't
| understand are bullshit' is antisocial and a bit glib - maybe
| understandable for some young people (?) but still, it's a
| problem to default to this posture.)
|
| The biggest 'bullshiters' tend to be on the tech side, who go
| on and on about technology that is not needed, this is because
| they can very easily talk past others on domain knowledge.
|
| I sit on both sides of the fence, and as soon as I get on the
| business side, I immediately see it - tech people 'controlling'
| the schedule and much of everything else because of their
| domain knowledge, often without the self awareness to recognize
| what's going on, operating with the implicit assumption that
| their need to push back 2 months for some refactor is
| inherently more important that other needs.
|
| And yes - a lot of effort is filler and inefficient - that is
| probably the real culprit here.
|
| Do not heed any of this ridiculous Machiavellian advice (aka
| 'keeping notes on people'? WTF?). Assume the best, do your
| jobs, obviously some people will BS, oh well, move on.
| watwut wrote:
| > Assume the best, do your jobs, obviously some people will
| BS, oh well, move on.
|
| The reason this is common sense on business side and much
| less on tech side is that tech side is much cleaner in terms
| of relationships. Otherwise said, bullshiting is less common
| and people are not used to it.
|
| As you said, the moment you cross to in between or to
| management, bullshiting and lying becomes normal. Moreover,
| sales and management gets rewarded for lying and their words
| are rarely checked for accuracy. I have seen them lying with
| straight face about our progress or capabilities of our
| software one too many times. I have also seen them lying to
| damage other employees. The worst stab in back, lying about
| other people or situation I have seen were not coming from
| tech. Sure, I have seen tech people lying, but it is visible
| for higher up more quickly - and they are not in situations
| in which they can do as much damage in the first place.
|
| Second thing, tech people controlling schedule is a good
| thing. Writing from place where tech people often dont
| control that and the delays and pissed off customers caused
| by that refactoring not being done are very very real thing
| too. Everywhere where tech people did not controlled schedule
| was hot mess - and even relationships got much much worst.
| Because business then blamed tech for consequences of
| unmaintainable software (meaning absurd amount of bugs,
| deadlines not really met etc) and tech people resented
| business for causing it all.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Tech people (or anyone) controlling the schedule is good in
| the sense that absolute monarchy is good... if the leader
| happens to be good.
|
| Tech teams are just as capable of dicking around or diving
| down bullshit rabbit holes that don't deliver value as
| anyone else.
|
| To parent's point, I find a productive skill is humility:
| the person on the other side of the desk/screen is assumed
| to be trying to say something useful, albeit in language or
| concepts I don't understand.
|
| And specifically, humility whether it's tech or non-tech
| controlling the schedule: each know something the other
| doesn't.
| watwut wrote:
| > Tech teams are just as capable of dicking around or
| diving down bullshit rabbit holes that don't deliver
| value as anyone else.
|
| You can dock around even when business controls schedule.
| It is just different dicking around - you make it seem as
| if you have done work, but skip on parts like "checking
| whether you broke something" or "testing it" and waste
| rest of time in discord.
|
| Nevertheless, if actual issue is laziness then it is not
| that hard to eventually figure it out and address that.
| Even when tech co tools schedule, business tend to have
| way more control including political one. And genuinely,
| both dicking around and rabit holes are minor issues
| compared to what can happen when people bullshit in
| software development.
|
| The question of schedule control is not about who
| bulshits tho. It is about systematic motivations and
| consequences either arrangement has. And business
| controlling it is in my experience as disastrous as
| having programmer to do sales.
| galdosdi wrote:
| It depends on the company. Some companies really are this
| bad. If you haven't been in one, you're lucky. If you are in
| one, it can be hard to recognize for a while (see OP) but the
| key is to recognize it so you can get out of there.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| Refactors of course come down to a tradeoff. I've always see
| it come down to, "do you want it on the deadline you set, or
| do you want it maintainable after?"
|
| "By the deadline" is always chosen, and then management gets
| to complain about the incompetent developers who are just
| trying to deal with the hackathon-quality code they've been
| forced to write.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| This seems good but I've never seen a manager who allows
| their subordinates to complete a two-phrase sentence. How
| have you trained yourself to speak fast enough to get this
| question out?
| mmcnl wrote:
| I completely agree. So many tech people defending their
| domain with some technobabble that most people are afraid to
| challenge because they think it'll make them look stupid.
| convolvatron wrote:
| this is true. its also the case that the various 'business'
| people have very different goals, very different terminology,
| and a much squishier sense of success.
|
| alot of the 'business' conversation is carried out largely in
| subtext. you can learn quite a bit about the internal
| machinery of the company where you work by just learning to
| read that.
|
| there _is_ quite a bit of useless sleeze on the business
| side. but to believe all of it is, and that somehow you have
| a better view of inter organization struggle and market
| response than all of those who do it full time is naive and
| counterproductive.
| mmcnl wrote:
| This advice is wrong on so many levels. All the engineers do
| the True Work, everyone else is just bullshitting. Yeah sure.
| Could it be that you don't understand their jobs in the same
| way "they" don't understand your job? Who knows.
| kube-system wrote:
| Alternatively, this could be a comment written by management
| about developers, who when asked about why they are missing
| their delivery date, rattle off a list of microservices which
| need to be refactored, which they refer to by their Lord of the
| Rings code names.
|
| Sometimes when people don't understand something else, it isn't
| bullshit, it's simply something they don't understand.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > 'I love [the strategic thing] but I've struggled to
| communicate it effectively to my team. How can I make it easier
| for them to understand?'
|
| That is very transparent, by the way. If your goal was to hide
| that you don't understand it, you didn't achieve it.
|
| You will probably get a better answer if you are honest,
| anyway. If you never worked with [the strategic thing], you
| should not be expected to know it.
| projectazorian wrote:
| I'd also add that the purpose of a lot of these "consultation"
| meetings is not consultation at all - they exist to announce a
| decision that was already taken before the meeting, or to give
| exposure (and thus clout) to the people who convened the
| meeting. Seems like the latter is probably the case here.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| David Graeber wrote a whole book about this called Bullshit
| Jobs
| ianpurton wrote:
| After 30 years in the industry I can confirm that this is
| indeed the case. They only generate BS.
|
| I would only add that you should try to avoid these meetings if
| at all possible.
|
| Just say you have a pressing deadline that requires your full
| attention. Then continue coding.
| daveslash wrote:
| You see, I try to efficiently build stand-alone opportunities
| to enthusiastically architect frictionless adoption of our
| Turbo Incabulators, thus creating compellingly extended
| multidisciplinary potentialities across our interactively
| strategized low-risk high-yield web-readiness platforms.
|
| C'mon, I'm not the only one here who uses " _The Corporate
| B.S. Generator_ " for all their meetings, am I? _Am I?_
| https://www.atrixnet.com/bs-generator.html
|
| You may also appreciate
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXW0bx_Ooq4
| 0xbadc0de5 wrote:
| > Don't have a team? Invent one, just evoke the existence of
| some confused and dissatisfied co-workers who you are eager to
| motivate.
|
| ah, Tibor...
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| I have also found that people use [strategic thing] as a way of
| keeping something at a higher level without going in to the
| details. Because once they get in to the details the grand
| plans start to break down.
|
| I have been a part of a number of these high level strategy
| type efforts at my company. I have often found that I seem to
| be the cynical one against an onslaught of relentlessly
| optimistic people.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| "Everything is easy to the one who doesn't have to do it."
| ethbr0 wrote:
| One of the best planning exercises I've heard is asking every
| attendee to think of a way the suggested plan could go awry.
|
| The genius is that failure scenarios are, by definition,
| detail-oriented.
|
| Consequently, it's an easy bridge into the discussing the
| details that actually matter (i.e. those that could threaten
| the entire plan).
| benji-york wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-mortem
| 88913527 wrote:
| The most important thing here is buttering people up. I've
| never seen any more of an effective strategy than that. Just
| being kind and saying you like their ideas is an incredibly
| effective way to influence their next steps.
| xbar wrote:
| Precisely.
|
| Consider this recommended reading:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| This is a painfully cynical worldview. If you find yourself in
| a company where management is this ineffective, get out. Or at
| least move to a different department where people are genuinely
| working together. Companies (or departments) wouldn't actually
| last very long if management teams were as bad as you
| described.
|
| > Setting the agenda and defining the terms is a way to exert
| power, in many ways far more important than any substantive
| outcome to the meetings.
|
| No, setting an agenda is a way to give people a chance to
| prepare for a meeting and to keep the meeting on track. A
| meeting with an agenda sent out ahead of time is far more
| efficient than a meeting where people just show up and think of
| things to chat about.
|
| > You can try using some BS of your own
|
| Please don't do this. Believe it or not, it's actually really
| easy from the management side of the table to tell when someone
| is just laying on the flattery and trying to say all the right
| things to butter people up.
|
| Engineers who try to "play politics" usually overestimate their
| ability to manipulate other people and underestimate other
| people's ability to see right through it. You may think you're
| just playing the game, but I guarantee it's coming off as
| patronizing to the genuine employees around you. Those genuine
| employees are the people you need to build trust with, and
| these political manipulation games will only do the opposite.
|
| > Don't have a team? Invent one, just evoke the existence of
| some confused and dissatisfied co-workers who you are eager to
| motivate.
|
| Now this is pure keyboard warrior fantasy material. Doing
| anything resembling this will destroy your reputation at the
| company in short order. Chronic liars and manipulators may not
| be called out in public, but their negative reputation will
| spread quickly among people in the know.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| You are quite right that it is a cynical outlook, but (it
| seems to me) OP is describing an environment where buzzwords
| take precedence over making sure everyone understands the
| goals and path toward them, and has made extensive good faith
| efforts to figure out just what corporate is trying to say.
|
| My suggestion is not that OP should play politics (which s/he
| would likely neither enjoy nor prosper at) but rather do some
| very basic tests to get a feel of what is actually going on
| and avoid possibly ending up as a convenient scapegoat if a
| manager's grand plans don't pan out.
|
| I fully agree that anyone stuck in an actually dysfunctional
| corporate environment should look for an exit where they can
| focus on actually working as a team.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| > Companies (or departments) wouldn't actually last very long
| if management teams were as bad as you described.
|
| I take it you've never worked for a FAANGM.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| > Chronic liars and manipulators may not be called out in
| public, but their negative reputation will spread quickly
| among people in the know.
|
| I desperately wish this to be true, but the years spent
| watching them get promoted and rewarded tells me otherwise.
| willcipriano wrote:
| > it's actually really easy from the management side of the
| table to tell when someone is just laying on the flattery and
| trying to say all the right things to butter people up.
|
| How do you know you didn't just catch the people who are bad
| at it?
| hitekker wrote:
| I think most managers are afraid to think how the people
| who like them are using them. That fear is intensified by
| past decisions around liking: when you've promoted someone
| who was good at manipulating you, terrible at the work, and
| now everyone associates their success with your success.
|
| One reason why good judgement becomes essential the higher
| up you go. If you just "believe in management", managers
| below, above and across from you will saddle you with
| likeable and incompetent people.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I have observed that even when all parties know someone is
| full of BS, it can still be quite difficult to fight against
| it. It takes much more energy to debunk than lie. Lies, once
| spoken take on a weird truth of their own.
| bckr wrote:
| This is such an important, lucid point. One of the most
| important skills I have had to develop is to see through
| "reality control", which constitutes a much larger part of
| communication than we're comfortable talking about in most
| settings.
| g051051 wrote:
| > No, setting an agenda is a way to give people a chance to
| prepare for a meeting and to keep the meeting on track. A
| meeting with an agenda sent out ahead of time is far more
| efficient than a meeting where people just show up and think
| of things to chat about.
|
| I go so far as to reject meetings that don't have an agenda
| specified. Either that, or (if I'm feeling generous) reply to
| the meeting invite with a "Maybe" and ask specifically for an
| agenda.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| ^ This.
|
| If a meeting doesn't have an agenda, then it has no
| terminating condition, and is therefore an infinite loop
| until it times out.
|
| Don't go to those meetings.
|
| And more constructively, don't _create_ those meetings.
|
| An agenda takes ~3 minutes to add; there's no excuse for
| not having one.
|
| E.g. Agenda for this comment: (1) express agreement, (2)
| clarify what's toxic about agenda-less meetings using
| computer science analogy, (3) appeal to reader to improve
| their own behavior, (4) preemptively rebut complaints about
| suggested behavior. Done.
| monkeydust wrote:
| I wish this was enforced in meeting systems across
| corporations unless all participants elect not to have
| one (appreciate certain sensitive or perhaps social
| meetings might not need this)
| time_to_smile wrote:
| Have you ever been management at a Fortune 500 company?
|
| I have and, while the parent may be a _bit_ on the cynical
| side, you 're take is boarding on dangerously naive for
| anyone who wants to understand the non-engineering part of an
| org.
|
| My experience is that the real path to success is to do
| cynical things naively. That is, if you cynically see things
| how they are, and act accordingly, you won't get very far.
| Management in large orgs (and many small ones as well)
| requires "true believers" so to speak.
|
| Meetings _are_ a lot about asserting power, but the most
| successful people in large orgs genuinely believe that those
| people asserting power are better than them, and hope to one
| day be as powerful.
|
| Flattery works insanely well, but it works better coming from
| a true sycophant, one who genuinely aligns their personal
| success with your opinion of them. I've been the object of
| flattery many time, and to be honest, it does feel good and
| work even when you know it's some what BS.
|
| > Now this is pure keyboard warrior fantasy material.
|
| I literally laughed out loud when I read this, since I was
| more or less told to engage in this type of behavior to
| succeed by senior leadership when I worked in a large org.
| Inject yourself into projects that didn't need you, find ways
| to make yourself relevant, do whatever it takes to grow your
| team (because your authority is directly proportional to the
| number of people under you).
|
| Personally I think that entire culture is reclusive, so left
| that role very quickly and stick to IC work and smaller
| leadership roles on teams that do more resemble the world
| you're describing. But make no mistake, parent is accurately
| depicting the realty at the majority management roles in
| large corporations.
| galdosdi wrote:
| > Companies (or departments) wouldn't actually last very long
| if management teams were as bad as you described.
|
| That is only true for companies in a highly competitive
| market. There are all kinds of markets, some are very
| competitive (e.g., the market for a commodity like gasoline
| or flour), some are total monopolies or oligopolies (e.g.,
| the market for smartphone operating systems, or for
| electricity or water in your city) and many are some hybrid
| somewhere in between.
|
| The less competition a company has to face, the more they are
| able to grow dysfunctional while still staying profitable,
| thus avoiding any serious pressure to curb the dysfunction.
|
| See https://open.lib.umn.edu/exploringbusiness/chapter/1-5-mo
| nop... or any intro microeconomics text for more.
|
| Also, even in cases that are more competitive, managers are
| human and make mistakes, and the feedback cycle might be so
| long that a lot of dysfunction can happen before it's time to
| pay the piper and a whole division has to be sold off or laid
| off. This is most likely to happen at companies huge and
| diversified enough.
|
| I think you have been fortunate enough to never work at a
| place like the one OP described. I have, although only once.
| If you find yourself in such a place, yeah, take it as a sign
| to get out.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| > Please don't do this. Believe it or not, it's actually
| really easy from the management side of the table to tell
| when someone is just laying on the flattery and trying to say
| all the right things to butter people up.
|
| Actually it's been shown that ass kissing and flattery are
| quite effective unfortunately.
|
| > Engineers who try to "play politics" usually overestimate
| their ability to manipulate other people and underestimate
| other people's ability to see right through it.
|
| Actually, engineers are often quite adept at manipulating
| social systems to their advantage. If you think engineers are
| just heads-down nerds without personal agendas they promote
| ruthlessly, you're the patsy.
|
| > Chronic liars and manipulators may not be called out in
| public, but their negative reputation will spread quickly
| among people in the know.
|
| Seriously? Politics over the last 10 years come to mind. Bad
| behavior is often rewarded. Doesn't mean you should partake,
| but I don't call it cynicism as much as realism.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > > Chronic liars and manipulators may not be called out in
| public, but their negative reputation will spread quickly
| among people in the know.
|
| > Seriously?
|
| Why do you doubt that at all? It's literally _what the
| parent comment suggested doing_ : Keeping track of
| different people and getting a sense for who impacts
| business outcomes versus who is all talk. This is what
| people do in general. It's not some magical skill that only
| engineers can have. We all observe who gets things done and
| learn who can't follow through over time.
|
| These ideas that only engineers can see how things work and
| that once we're promoted to management we just become dumb
| robots incapable of seeing reality is ridiculous.
|
| > Politics over the last 10 years come to mind. Bad
| behavior is often rewarded. Doesn't mean you should
| partake, but I don't call it cynicism as much as realism.
|
| Politics isn't the workplace. If you're using hot-button
| public politics spanning the country as an analog for teams
| working together in a workplace, you're going to end up
| with some deeply flawed mental models of how management
| works.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _Politics isn 't the workplace. [...] you're going to
| end up with some deeply flawed mental models of how
| management works._
|
| I mean, I sort of agree... But on the other hand, it's
| literally called 'office politics' and is generally
| pretty analogous with 'public politics' (e.g. balancing
| diverse viewpoints to achieve a common goal). It's not
| really as binary as you are implying.
| andresp wrote:
| You are not promoted to manager. It is a different career
| choice, but the fact that you see it that way explains a
| lot about your position.
| haswell wrote:
| > _You are not promoted to manager_
|
| This seems like a statement you could use to describe
| one's own path, but not the path of others.
|
| People absolutely are promoted to management positions.
| This cannot be disputed.
|
| Whether the individual transitions into the role
| effectively and becomes a good manager is a separate
| thing.
|
| I've worked with managers who started as devs, and took
| naturally to the role.
|
| I've worked with horrible managers who started from the
| same place.
|
| > _but the fact that you see it that way explains a lot
| about your position._
|
| What does it explain? You are implying it's meaningful,
| but it's impossible to engage with your position until
| you articulate it.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Ouchie, that's pretty nasty and uncharitable
| interpretation and feels like a needless attack to the
| poster :-/
|
| There are people who decide early in their career to go
| technical and never change their mind.
|
| There are people who decide early in their career to go
| management and never change their mind.
|
| But there are a LOT of people in the middle, and that's
| been the overwhelming majority of people I (anecdotally)
| know in management roles - they were good at what they do
| so they were promoted to management - junior dev, senior
| dev, tech lead / architect... whopsie, now you're manager
| and you don't know how you really got there; or you found
| you are good at talking to customer, understanding their
| pain points, and are also good at helping and supporting
| your team, so you accept a promotion you never thought
| you would a decade ago. And any other number of
| permutations. But I do know any number of people who did
| not "make a different career choice". They simply were
| doing a good job and ended up a manager. Inertia is a
| more powerful career drive than many people acknowledge.
| oblio wrote:
| It's a different career choice that leads to a higher
| salary ceiling and a higher status and power position in
| a way that is much easier to achieve than an equivalent
| individual contributor.
|
| That's a lot of words to say "it's a promotion".
| antupis wrote:
| It is often rewarded but generally people will remember it
| much longer than good things and it will show at marginals.
| pkulak wrote:
| > You can try using some BS of your own
|
| Oh man, I would never start playing some sitcom-style
| communication game. That seems like it could go very wrong, and
| be stressful and annoying even if it goes right.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Great analysis. Also, the level at which the OP is
| understanding the situation means that he is never going to
| leave the world of the bullshit-takers. Thus his best strategy
| is to work on continuously improving his technical competence
| so that he can be a higher-compensated bullshit-taker.
| globalreset wrote:
| This.
|
| Most bigger corporate meetings could have been an email with
| some bulletpoints on top with most important things everyone
| must know, and later then details for people that are
| interested.
|
| But if it wasn't a meeting, where else would the management get
| a change to flex, pat their backs, do some ritual sucking up
| and self promoting and generally justify their existence?
|
| OP: Just focus on your real work and responsibilities, ignore
| the corporate meetings as much as you can get away with. Unless
| you want to join management, in which case you have to start
| clapping loudly and play the game.
| mmcnl wrote:
| The fact that you're talking about "management" as some
| separate evil entity and not you coworkers who just want to
| help you and live their lives happily ever after, in the same
| way as you do, tells me a lot.
| corrral wrote:
| Tells me the poster has work experience.
| allenu wrote:
| Some of this might be a function of your seniority, experience,
| and overall care about the business.
|
| When I was a more junior dev, I really didn't care about any of
| the specifics of business decisions. I cared about high-level
| things the company was doing, but when it came down to the
| specifics, I just was not interested. When we were updated on
| where the business was going, of course I cared about how
| successful we were, but how we got there, in terms of marketing
| was uninteresting.
|
| Over time, I started to care more about those specific business
| decisions, because I had enough experience seeing failed outcomes
| in previous teams & companies. So, naturally, I started paying
| more attention about what "Robert Smith" was doing in the
| "communications department". I still didn't fully understand it,
| though, and this is where you can either believe what they're
| doing is kind of bullshit, or, more charitably, what they're
| doing is really hard to quantify.
|
| I believe in the more charitable interpretation now. I've quit my
| job and am working on my own project, trying to structure my
| efforts, and I'm realizing that once you start thinking about
| business beyond just what code you're working on, what you're
| trying to do is very much ill-defined.
|
| It's not as simple as coding work where you know you are trying
| to write a specific feature or refactor some code. Instead, at a
| business level, you have to come up with initiatives and goals
| which are very hard to quantify. You have to start thinking "I'm
| working on feature X and I'm hoping this will feed into improving
| the marketing of Y, and it will attract user Z." But, it's still
| very hard to measure if those efforts are actually making any
| difference. So naturally, IMHO, a lot of those goals and
| decisions start feeling a little bullshitty, but it's hard to
| avoid because the domain you're working in is so imprecise.
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| I experience this in my non tech, corporate job. Its mostly non
| pertinent information to my actual job which is why I think I
| generally tune out, but of course all the suits think it's just
| the most important info so they hold meetings. And all your peers
| that do know what's going on when they don't actually need to,
| are suck ups who probably are not good at their job and want to
| get into management. I wouldn't worry about it unless you have
| dreams of becoming a suit, but that is just my 2 cents.
| tru3_power wrote:
| I think you just don't care and that's OK. Corporate stuff can be
| a drag.
| rglover wrote:
| You might enjoy the wisdom of Kapil Gupta:
| https://soundcloud.com/i-am-sovereign/sets/kapil-gupta
| francisofascii wrote:
| > Does anyone struggle with this
|
| Not since I started skipping these types of corporate-speak
| meetings, usually held over lunch. I don't mean to sound too
| cavalier, but I found skipping some of these meetings has had a
| net-neutral effect on my career, and net positive effect on my
| well-being. Skip the free pizza go outside for lunch.
| system2 wrote:
| I will say it again. 99% of the marketing people are just posers
| with little to no skill. This post's example/company might be
| different but majority of the marketing departments of the
| companies I've worked in the last 20 years all replaced by new
| posers. They usually last 6 months, and within that 6 months,
| they talk as much as they can to look like they do something.
|
| Managers depend on the new hires to do tasks and brag about them,
| while new hires or marketing department don't know jack about
| what they are doing because they are 20 year old kids with
| instagram and tiktok knowledge thru their own phones. It is a
| joke but part of corporate culture.
| forinti wrote:
| I was once tasked with writing a very important system and so
| started to attend meetings with higher-ups to discuss what had to
| be done.
|
| I had no idea what they were talking about 90% of the time.
|
| After 5 or 6 very long meetings, I decided to propose what I
| think should be done in the hope that their feedback would give
| me some insight.
|
| The result was that the final product was exactly what I had
| proposed.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| No decisions will ever be made in a meeting like this. That's not
| the point. The purpose of these is to disseminate decisions that
| have already been made through side channels, and to consolidate
| the power of those making them. Anything you do or say in one
| these meetings beyond nodding politely can _only_ hurt you.
| Remember, the decisions have already been made. So just be
| present, smile, and wave.
| busyant wrote:
| > Meanwhile I'm there wondering who is this [Robert Smith] of the
| [communications department]? What is the [transformation
| strategy] and why does it need a [quarterly review]?
|
| IMO, whoever is running the meeting isn't doing a good job of
| giving everyone the requisite background to understand the the
| purpose & content of the meeting. The only exception I can think
| of is that if it's _expected_ that you repeatedly interrupt the
| meeting to get yourself up to speed (i.e., you 're expected to
| aggressively get the relevant info).
|
| More often than not, what you describe is due to someone running
| a shitty meeting, which is more common than not.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Certain words, which get used a lot in our industries, mean
| different things at different companies. Many of the
| conversations are the same, but depending on where in the cycle
| things are, the topics tend to be either expanding or
| contracting, heading towards a decision or updating people of a
| decision. Or collecting to see if anyone knows if a decision has
| been made or is pending.
|
| There are people who will speak up immediately, and people who
| will wait until those people have spoken.. to speak up. I'm of
| the latter sort.
|
| Not everyone has to say something at these meetings, but these
| meetings will usually have at least one person who heard
| somewhere, from someone, that you should never go to a meeting
| and say nothing. If that person is one of those people who speaks
| up immediately, your meetings will necessitate a follow-up
| meeting.
| solardev wrote:
| Have you tried asking your supervisor, or a friend at work, to
| explain these to you? It sounds like nobody bothered to onboard
| you properly and give you the low-down on your business.
|
| Omnichannel just means "all the channels". A "channel" in this
| case probably means a particular sales path, e.g. website, app,
| brick-and-mortar, maybe phone, fax, distributors, resellers,
| whatever. Sounds like your company sells the same product/service
| through many avenues.
|
| As for the reviews and strategies, eh, that's just the corporate
| world at work. There are people whose job it is to figure those
| kinda things out. If they're good at it, those are the sort of
| visionary changes that guide the company over the long term. If
| they're bad at it, then it's just the bureaucracy keeping itself
| busy with nonsense.
|
| I dunno what your particular role at your company is, but if it's
| some sort of hands-on/in the trenches stuff, like you're a dev or
| designer or some such, you can just ask your supervisor "So all
| of that strategic stuff is a bit above me. Is any of it critical
| to my work or our team?" If not, then you don't have to worry
| about it.
|
| Oftentimes, it goes the other way too... you show those folks
| what you've been working on and their eyes glaze over because
| it's not their area of expertise. It's OK. Big companies have
| different specializations of labor and you don't need to know all
| of it to be a valuable contributor.
|
| If you do ever want to move into management or similar roles,
| though, you might want to pay more attention and get more
| clarifications from the people around and above you. It's OK to
| ask questions, but it's a trial and error process to identify the
| people who have the time, patience, and knowledge to give you
| useful answers.
| [deleted]
| johndhi wrote:
| A lot of interesting responses.
|
| I sit in a ton of different department meetings and I find most
| departments (most people) don't set clear agendas or define terms
| up front. This is the fault of the meeting organizer (hopefully
| there is one!).
|
| For the discussion itself it sounds like a lot of very specific
| company specific vocabulary is being used. This feels comfortable
| because these people have probably had a lot of discussion using
| this term but it's hard for new people because it requires
| specialized knowledge to collaborate.
|
| Technical teams are also capable of bad meetings but at least
| they are usually building something specific rather than
| describing general strategy.
| tomhallett wrote:
| Find someone from [communications department], and ask them after
| the meeting - hey, can I pick your brain? Tell them you don't
| understand and ask them to teach you. When they use high level
| buzzwords, ask "can you login to that system and show me?". From
| my experience, they will be excited to teach you about their
| field and super interesting things can come of it.
| josefresco wrote:
| There's a lot of "pretending to understand" in meetings. Most
| people when presented with an unfamiliar term, or concept will
| just nod along and hope they'll be able to "backfill" the details
| and understanding later. I'm one of those people. My wife is not.
| She asks questions, lots of questions. Some of them are obvious
| and embarrassing but you know what? She gets answers and
| therefore understanding and often times the "obvious" question
| she asks actually has a non-obvious answer.
|
| TLDR; Don't be afraid to ask "dumb questions" the rest of the
| room is probably thinking the exact same thing as you.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| I have much the same struggle. I have no advice for you, other
| than to follow along and hope clarity emerges.
| mac3n wrote:
| much of this is to give recognition to people. The
| [communications department] is working on something
| incomprehensible, but [Robert Smith] is doing good work that was
| approved by the higher-ups, so they'd like everyone to know.
|
| Now, imagine that you and upper management agreed to convert all
| space-indents to tabs - you might be up there getting recognition
| too. But since management has no opinion on the matter, you
| aren't.
|
| That's about the significance of most company meetings. Sometimes
| you can get a sense of the power dynamic by seeing who's there,
| but most of it is irrelevant.
|
| If there's something that directly affects you, it won't be
| stated explicitly, but your immediate manager will call another
| meeting immediately afterward. Then watch out!
| austinjp wrote:
| It takes effort to understand this stuff. Don't worry: that's
| normal. If you want to understand it, treat it like anything else
| you want to learn. Make notes, review them, and prepare before
| the meetings.
|
| A simple way to begin is to start a cheat-sheet. Names, projects,
| dates, a glossary of unfamiliar terms, etc etc. Bring it each
| time and keep it updated.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Try this: think about what you do, then abstract it up into a
| named thing with inputs and outputs, and add a measure of how it
| changes over time.
|
| A thermostat takes measurements and sends signals to the furnace
| and fans to optimize for a given temperature, and that
| temperature is a commitment to a habitable and comfortable home.
| That's what a manager does. They are thermostats.
|
| The meeting you've described is a bunch of thermostats talking to
| each other about the temperature they affect, and the furnace and
| fans looking at each other and asking "wtf? just say more or less
| and past a point I need more fuel or electricity."
|
| They're using abstractions to talk about relationships and power.
| What affects it, who has it, what the factors are. A channel is a
| category of potential customers with some common way to relate to
| them. A brand is a category of feelings strangers associate with
| your company and products. mono-/multi-/omni- means, "one, some,
| or all."
|
| Managing something means extracting value from it. If you are an
| individual contributor who does work, at best you are managing
| _things_ from which you extract value and pass it to your team.
| Managing people means extracting value from the work the team
| does and passing it along as commitments and outcomes to your
| execs. Managing relationships means extracting value from the
| interplay between different desires, needs, opportunities and
| possibilities as they change over time. Managing money means
| extracting value from assets that produce money.
|
| Strategic anything means doing things that influence the balance
| or equillibrium of the things you manage. Multiple things
| happening at once is called a "dynamic." As a category, all
| management is extracting value from a dynamic. All dynamics are
| the relative equillibria of stuff that changes, and managing them
| requires sustaining the equillibrium of a dynamic - or
| influencing it without disrupting it so as to cause it to yield
| its value in a particular way.
|
| Very few people are actually dumb, but most average people can
| manage, because it's a knack for a very specific human ability to
| play things off each other. Writing code and building things is
| not managing, but running code and services is. Building doesn't
| scale well, but managing dynamics scales almost infinitely.
|
| The reason managers usually earn more money is because they
| extract value from more sophisticated _dynamics_ of things than
| an individual simply solving problems and operating on things.
| Further, sometimes solving problems reduces their ability to be
| leveraged in a larger dynamic, and solving problems can even
| destroy value.
|
| This is why I often tell clients in large organizations, their
| stuff isn't broken, you just can't see who it is working for.
| malfist wrote:
| Are you a junior engineer? Or someone without a lot of years
| under your belt?
|
| That's probably why. A lot of these discussions don't really
| pertain to you, and that's okay. Those types of meetings are more
| for your PMs and your high level staff engineers to understand a
| project more holistically. To a new engineer, it's 100% fluff
| they don't care about.
|
| They'll make more sense in time, but don't worry about it for
| now. You'll learn more the business and grow in responsibilities
| and then those meetings will both make more sense and have more
| interest.
| thex10 wrote:
| 100% this.
|
| I struggle with this too. But I also know I'm low enough on the
| corporate ladder (senior dev! not even junior!) to know it
| pretty much is all irrelevant to my day-to-day work, so I show
| up, tune out, bill the time (and eat the free food if offered).
| robonerd wrote:
| You have a soul. That's a handicap if you want to keep up with
| bureaucratic bullshitting.
| jollybean wrote:
| You're just out of the loop on that. Probably someone who doesn't
| get the memo on omnichannel should not need to go to those
| meetings.
| dieselgate wrote:
| Yeah i'm assuming there is some foundational context missing
| for OP. If OP were to go to all business meetings they'd likely
| have more to go on - rather than one off
| boredemployee wrote:
| I struggle to understand what's happening in corporate in
| general, not only in meetings. The state of things are so broken
| that I get in total desperation sometimes.
| soared wrote:
| ITT: Sour technical people shitting on business people who they
| see as lesser. ("Business people are smart but their job is easy
| so they make it complicated", "they're being vague on purpose",
| "they're bullshitting")
|
| You will not good get answers here. Perhaps asking in a subreddit
| specific to managers, project managers, agile, etc would be
| better.
| rpmisms wrote:
| The simple answer is that it's code-speak, and it's designed to
| make people feel better about their jobs and salaries. Speaking
| in plain English makes many things seem childishly simple--which
| isn't good for anyone's ego.
|
| Obviously many fields are specialized and technical, and
| complicated language is the simplest way to get ideas across, but
| I think we can draw that line pretty clearly.
| kube-system wrote:
| Business and marketing disciplines have mature fields of study
| with many concepts more complicated than a few word phrases.
| rpmisms wrote:
| EBITDA is a meaningful term that communicates a lot of
| information. "Synergy" is useless, and is essentially an SEO
| tag for an idea you want people to pay for.
|
| I'm not saying that different disciplines don't have jargon
| that is useful, I'm saying that a lot of jargon is not
| useful.
| g051051 wrote:
| Speaking as someone who experiences this, it's because you're
| tuned out. It's non-technical, and you fundamentally don't care.
| You haven't invested (wasted) the time to learn all of this
| trivia because you don't feel it's pertinent to your actual job
| function and getting real work done. In many ways, you're
| probably 100% correct. You're a tactical, hands-on keyboard type,
| and all of this high level strategy means exactly nothing to how
| you do your day-to-day job. It's the flavor of the month, and the
| next time a new executive shuffles in, they'll lift their leg and
| spray out another "transformation strategy" to mark their
| territory. All while you still have to get stuff done.
|
| The problem is that the non-technical people think this stuff is
| important. They're so invested that they feel the need to call
| big meetings and talk about it, instead of letting you get actual
| work done. And they notice that _you_ don 't care about it. So,
| be aware that this could hinder your career.
| mirntyfirty wrote:
| Over time I've recognized that certain managers will focus on
| certain things and their messaging gets somewhat repetitive,
| making it easier to understand what they're saying.
| robbyking wrote:
| This used to happen to me a lot, and after seeing a therapist for
| something I thought was completely unrelated it turns out I have
| adult ADHD.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| Make friends with folks on the business side, and ask questions,
| as many as you can, including 'I didn't understand what this
| meeting was about, could you please explain? ' and 'who is this
| guy and what is his role?'
|
| This has practical implications for you beyond corporate meetings
| : it will allow you to prioritize what's important in a much
| better way, will allow you to prevent bad things happening later
| on because you'll know when to say no early in the process , and
| will allow you to make better technical decisions because you'll
| know the business implications or what you're working on.
|
| It takes time (I've been there), and the key is essentially to
| learn your environment, and what the people outside your bubble
| do. You won't find the answer in books, so you'll have to ask.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| > Am I the only one who experiences this?
|
| No, everyone experiences this. This isn't a non-technical vs.
| technical thing either: I've certainly talked to non-tech people
| who left meetings unsure what the point of it was or what was
| even being discussed.
|
| There are several reasons why this happens.
|
| The first reason might sound cynical. There are people out there
| that do things that don't really need to happen, or need to
| happen but you shouldn't really need to worry about.
|
| Sometimes this stuff matters, but it matters to the business but
| not to the tech team, or the way it affects those of us in more
| technical roles is maybe not apparent unless you've seen that
| sort of thing before. To take the example you provided: to "allow
| customers to collect and return online orders from our regional
| stores" probably requires changes to several different systems,
| some of which your team might be responsible for, but some of
| which might be a different technical team, or might require
| putting manual processes in place. Return handling by itself
| opens all sorts of process questions, and some of those processes
| will be automated in code.
|
| Sometimes this stuff matters, but it's explained poorly. [Robert
| Smith] should be able to articulate the "So what?" in his
| [quarterly review]. If not, hopefully he gets appropriate
| feedback to make it more clear next time. In this case, it's not
| you, it's the person communicating who failed to communicate, but
| often everyone is too afraid to look like a dummy to ask the
| obvious question to explain what's going on.
|
| Some specific tactics you can use:
|
| 1. Ask why should I (or if you'd rather, my team) care about
| [transformation strategy] or omnichannel strategy or whatever
| other thing gets raised. No one person can know everything, and
| your boss should be able to tell you what part you care about and
| why.
|
| 2. Rather than worry about [transformation strategy], worry about
| the metric that project is trying to drive. Tech and non-tech
| people alike use "SMART" (specific, measurable, actionable,
| relevant, time-bound) goals for projects. If the organizational
| stuff disinterests you, look instead at the metrics.
|
| 3. Hopefully you have permission from your boss to not attend
| meetings that aren't pertinent to you. If you did (1) from above,
| and your boss's response is, "oh, don't worry about that," then
| you should feel like you can ask your boss "Next time we have a
| meeting on that topic, can I decline and focus on my own project
| instead?"
| ragebol wrote:
| Risky move but if it's really just BS being spouted, propose some
| truly wacky idea that sounds coherent with the BS words involved
| and see the reaction. If they laugh, fine, it's a joke /s
| sbf501 wrote:
| I'm pleased with how many replies here acknowledge that business
| and marketing is a legitimate domain of expertise. I was
| expecting HN, which skews "young programmer" demographic, to just
| call it all BS. It's not, it is just another area of important
| expertise.
| kube-system wrote:
| People working in early stage companies often get more of a
| first hand experience working on both sides of the
| business/tech fence.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| I don't expect management to understand the codebase, so why
| are coders expected to understand management buzzwords and
| such? Looking at the comments here it seems like people are
| pulled into these meetings unwillingly and subjected to the
| managerial nitty-gritty, and expected to participate, but it's
| a one-way street because the management is never subjected to
| the technical side of things. I think that's where the
| sentiment is coming from.
| sbf501 wrote:
| That's unfortunate.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| If you work from home, just tune BS meetings that don't involve
| you out and do something else.
|
| If I had to go to the office and attend these things in person
| I'd quit for sure.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| A lot of cynical, businesspeople-are-full-of-shit responses here.
| But omnichannel is a very simple thing to understand. Customers
| want to be able to be able to reach businesses in a variety of
| ways: more extroverted people may want to have a phone line for
| customer support, more introverted people may prefer text
| messaging. Each line of communication between the company and a
| customer is a channel: omni- is a prefix which means "all".
|
| It's obvious to me that software engineers are smart enough to
| understand these things, but I think many purposefully turn their
| mind off when there is something "businessy" about a subject.
| grayclhn wrote:
| You're definitely not the only one who struggles with this. I've
| tried a lot of different approaches for what to do during the
| meeting, but tbh what I've settled on is:
|
| 1. Avoid meetings that I'm not going to get value from OR am
| unlikely to add (sufficient) value to.
|
| 2. In some meetings I'm going to add more value by facilitating,
| etc., than by just saying whatever's on my mind.
|
| For 1: I decline a lot more meetings than I used to. Sometimes
| it's a straight decline, sometimes I'll email the organizor or
| other people who will be attending and say, "I don't think I have
| a ton to contribute, but ping me if you need me to jump in,"
| sometimes I'll decline and suggest meeting to provide feedback
| offline or in a smaller meeting if I actually have suggestions on
| the topic, etc.
|
| For 2: sometimes you can't get out of going to these meetings. :)
| If I don't have anything to contribute on the topic of the
| meetings, taking notes (usually just to share with people on my
| team who couldn't attend... hopefully the organizer has planned
| on taking notes as well but :shrug:) or helping ensure that
| quieter people get a chance to speak is still a way to add value
| to the meeting without being on top of the subject matter.
|
| Edit: one nice thing about these strategies is that you can apply
| them regardless of the reason/blame for not following these
| meetings. It works the same whether it's complete BS or something
| you really "should" be up to speed on already.
| aartav wrote:
| Honestly what you're saying is not fundamentally different from
| what a marketing person is thinking in your technical meeting.
| Basically its just stuff that you can decide to not care about.
| It has relatively small impact on your day to day work. To be
| clear that's not a judgement on whether its meaningful or not.
|
| Can you figure it out? Of course! If you were really interested,
| then after the meeting you would go and find out the answers to
| your questions. It will help you understand the business better
| and that can turn into better understanding the the reason for
| some of the software requirements.
| mansilladev wrote:
| A well-maintained document of abbreviations and acronyms is very
| useful. Go ahead, make fun.. but man alive, it's great to know
| what the hell people are talking about.
|
| I've been at companies where a lot of mysterious/cryptic team
| names are employed. Big save here is using the internal URL
| shortening service (7 times out of 10 it will link to
| team/project page).
|
| But honestly, if you're at a complete loss, it could mean that
| you're just not in the lines of meetings and plans where that
| jargon/terminology is thrown around. If you find that you're at a
| disadvantage (after learning what those topical discussions
| really mean), talk to your manager and ask for more context or
| who/where to go for more context. Perhaps there's a quick summary
| page/doc that someone put up on your internal knowledge base
| system that can give you the TL;DR/elevator pitch.
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| alfl wrote:
| Functional business vocab is about a thousand words that comprise
| a domain-specific language. If you really want to master it,
| simply take notes in meetings (generally, this is a hack for any
| "boring" meeting that lets you actively choose to digest the
| material).
|
| Words like "channel" simply have domain-specific definitions, and
| the domain isn't that hard to master. It's not as hard coding.
|
| Eventually you can go semi-pro and either share your notes or
| simply refer back to them ("Thanks Bill, wondering how this
| relates to what we talked about last week with regard to X?").
| This will probably help advance your career.
|
| When you're ready to go full-pro, start rejecting invites to
| these meetings. This will rocket you up or out of the company.
| oumua_don17 wrote:
| I would first check if I am required/optional in these meeting
| invites. If optional, skip it and if any of these meeting
| subject/agenda piques your interest; watch a recording (assuming
| it's recorded). Make questions and ask your manager in your 1:1.
| dougmwne wrote:
| As a technical person, you have a natural moat around your
| castle. Technical work is difficult, complex and requires years
| of training and experience.
|
| Business and management work is... not nearly as complex. But the
| people doing that work have the same highly complex brains as you
| do. They can handle the same deep complexity as you. So with all
| this extra mental space, they add layers and layers of complexity
| to seemingly simple business processes. This complexity builds
| the moat protecting their turf from others. It creates the
| irreplaceability that you get for free.
|
| Most of this complexity has no clear business purpose
| (bureaucracy). Some of this complexity is fiction or invented
| languages (bullshit). It is all designed to exclude outsiders and
| prevent anyone not on the inside from being able to tell what is
| going on or easily get anything done.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > Most of this complexity has no clear business purpose
| (bureaucracy)
|
| Bureaucracy has a very clear purpose. In business, politics, or
| otherwise.
|
| Bureaucracy makes change difficult and slow.
|
| Bureaucracy should be applied when you have a working solution
| to your problems and you don't want anyone (new devs, new
| managers, external forces) to change it.
|
| Bureaucracy is often prematurely applied, in an attempt to
| "bring order." This cannot work. Bureaucracy applied to chaos
| cements the chaos into place.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Sure, not all bureaucracy is misused, it can have a good
| function in governance. But it absolutely can be used to
| extend and protect power as well. It is a tool, plain and
| simple.
| mancerayder wrote:
| Bureaucracy is organization. If you build something complex,
| you need a lot of humans to do it. But the humans need
| organizing principles, common goals, divisions of labor and
| leadership.
|
| To not understand that, and like some of the comments above
| to place technical work of an IC above that is ridiculous
| folly. Skyscrapers and bridges and big complex things like
| software requires human organizational structures which we
| view as 'bureaucracy'.
| orwin wrote:
| Yes! Bureaucracy is helpfull. Sometime, bureaucracy prevents
| more bureaucracy. The issue is that it is hard to understand
| how or why it was set up, and to differentiate bad
| bureaucracy from good bureaucracy. Both look the same and
| feel the same. Both can be simplified. Only, when you
| simplify bad bureaucracy, you can get whatever. If you
| simplify good bureaucracy, you will definitely end up worse,
| at least for a time.
| civilized wrote:
| This is absolute poetry. It's like the Zhuangzi meets
| Dilbert.
|
| The bureaucracy that can be changed is not the true
| bureaucracy.
| Thursday24 wrote:
| One way to really understand the organisational BS phenomenon
| is to study the really old books on administration. Read
| China's Han Feizi, Legalism; India's Chanakyan Arthashastra;
| Perhaps even Machiavelli (less recommended - since he was not
| really a hands-on leader dealing with issues of the day
| actively). In these works you will see naked desires of
| individuals expressed clearly.
|
| The men who established bureaucracies truly saved humanity from
| collapse, from utter chaos; by establishing laws and
| regulations, they restrained the animal within man, even
| without having any technology. I consider the establishers and
| enforcers of law the least appreciated in human history. It is
| a humongous task, to take up utter entropy and convert it into
| a semblance of civilisation, where the animal in man is kept
| within limits.
|
| These things were invented long back, 2000+ years ago, and the
| formations have stood the test of time. They are still in use,
| the same ruthlessness is used to control human impulses.
| However, at a shallow level, our language and our "aspirations"
| have moved on. So we like to speak in more flowery language,
| hide the animal in man in public, and have forgotten why were
| the laws and regulations put in place by our ancestors.
|
| I believe human regulation, through means other than
| bureaucracy is on the way. This alone can help humans get rid
| of the need to BS. With technology there is a way to combine
| both education/training & laws/reguations. In place
| education/training allows for "kind correction" while automated
| punishment will ensure "harsh correction". Both are needed for
| successful existence of human civilisation.
| pratik661 wrote:
| Just got Arthashastra. It's amazing. Han Feizi is next on my
| list.
| refurb wrote:
| Disagree on business and management work not being complex. It
| often involves a lot more uncertainty and you often don't have
| enough data.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Businesses are quite complex. A lot of bureaucracy starts as an
| attempt to organize and simplify the problem space.
|
| There are simply too many decisions for one person to make and
| informal processes fall apart at scale.
|
| This is also where things take on a life of their own. Without
| strong guidance, you end up with the rules becoming more
| important than reality.
| ineptech wrote:
| This is seductively true-sounding but I don't think it's true.
|
| Imagine a business person saying, "Oh, programmers protect
| their work by making it needlessly complex. Every few years
| they invent new tools and insist that the old ones are broken,
| so that they can re-implement the same features over and over.
| Today they say it's vitally important to switch to the new
| thing, jquery or docker or react or whatever it is this month,
| and five years from now they'll say it's just as important to
| get rid of it. That's how they make sure they'll always have a
| job."
|
| That's the mirror image of what you're saying. Perhaps some of
| those "layers and layers" really are useless but most of them
| are probably to satisfy auditors or something similarly opaque.
| tremguy wrote:
| It is true. What your imaginary businessperson is saying is
| also true.
|
| It's bullshit jobs all the way down.
| dougmwne wrote:
| You're absolutely correct. Of course this phenomenon applies
| to exactly the framework and platform musical chairs that the
| industry plays. Politics is human and exists in all areas of
| life. Many things on the technical side have absolute reason
| to exist, because it would be impossible to build a complex
| system without them. Some things are BS. On the flip side,
| some things on the management side are absolutely essential
| to the profitable functioning of a company, but there is also
| a huge amount of room for BS to thrive. It's possible for
| profitable companies to exist basically due to the law of
| large numbers, but this is not possible on the technical side
| unless you are training ML models.
| SilasX wrote:
| That businessperson would be correct too.
| scottlamb wrote:
| > Imagine a business person saying, "Oh, programmers protect
| their work by making it needlessly complex. Every few years
| they invent new tools and insist that the old ones are
| broken, so that they can re-implement the same features over
| and over. Today they say it's vitally important to switch to
| the new thing, jquery or docker or react or whatever it is
| this month, and five years from now they'll say it's just as
| important to get rid of it. That's how they make sure they'll
| always have a job."
|
| Would they be so wrong? The state of the art is advancing,
| and these re-implementations can be huge improvements...but
| aren't always. The tools/techniques often seem to be used
| outside the domain where they're important (e.g. Big Data
| tooling used on data sets that can be processed on a nice
| laptop) or are so short-lived the switching cost is never
| reclaimed (e.g. always using the trendiest Javascript
| framework/tooling). This hypothetical business person
| certainly wouldn't be alone in wondering if the reason isn't
| sometimes job security, resume building, and/or to make a
| boring problem interesting rather than an attempt to find the
| most straightforward way of solving the business problem.
|
| I can easily see the same applying to these business ideas.
| They sometimes make sense but often (usually?) don't.
| ineptech wrote:
| Sure, but I don't believe anyone advocated switching to
| jquery (or, a few years later, getting rid of it)
| consciously thinking it was a useless thing to do; and
| similarly I don't believe any biz person introduces a
| process thinking, "haha this will help widen the
| bureaucratic moat around my team".
|
| The truth is, a lot of those people spend a lot of time
| trying to streamline processes and remove bureaucracy, and
| if they didn't, it'd be even worse.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I returned to an office that I'd worked at, in the exact same
| role, 15 years earlier.
|
| It's interesting to see the differences. The work is the
| same, the same people do it, but there's much more of it,
| there's slightly better tech, and they have correspondingly
| less time to do the work. There's much more middle
| management, but ostensibly the systems are all doing very
| close to the same thing.
|
| The thing is they've been through 3 complete reorganisations
| of the ~1200 people. If they'd left it exactly the same
| structurally then it would seem to be in the same shape as it
| is now.
|
| They've been through 2 renamings, 3 rebrandings, they
| definitely did nothing; the placement of the business is
| entirely unrelated to the brand image but each new CEO came
| from outside of the company seemingly used it, rebranding, to
| make the organisation "their own".
|
| One of the experiences early on in my second tenure was a
| group doing a Myers-Briggs type activity, just like they
| would have been 15 years earlier, just with a slight
| difference twist. People there in the interim described a
| third-style of the same process they'd been through.
|
| Maybe you're not wrong.
| wmeredith wrote:
| > each new CEO came from outside of the company seemingly
| used it, rebranding, to make the organisation "their own"
|
| This is the hacker equivalent of wanting to do a greenfield
| refactor of the code base. There's an erroneous assumption
| all the problems that exist within the current code base
| will be avoided when rebuilding. These efforts are
| occasionally successful, but mostly end up being just sound
| and fury with little measurable results.
| [deleted]
| scottyah wrote:
| How does this trope still get repeated so often? It has been
| debunked time and time again: strategy and management are
| infinitely more complex than almost all technical work.
| Assuming a group is incompetent just because you don't
| understand what they're doing (even when they dumb things down
| to just a few buzzwords for the desperate hope that talking
| like a third grader will enable you to follow along), is such
| an obvious folly that it should at least raise some red flags
| in your head. Even if you feel this way you should at least
| consider how repeating it is of no help to anyone.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Business and management work is... not nearly as complex. But
| the people doing that work have the same highly complex brains
| as you do. They can handle the same deep complexity as you. So
| with all this extra mental space, they add layers and layers of
| complexity to seemingly simple business processes. This
| complexity builds the moat protecting their turf from others.
| It creates the irreplaceability that you get for free.
|
| This is one of those fictions that engineers love to believe
| about management because it imbues a sense of superiority. Who
| doesn't like feeling like their job is better or more important
| than others'?
|
| Having been an IC, middle manager, upper manager, and back to
| IC a few times, I can tell you this is a false notion. Business
| and management are different problems, but they're not
| necessarily "easier". As an engineer-minded person by nature, I
| honestly found the technical problems easier to handle than a
| lot of the management problems I had to deal with. Managing a
| computer program is generally easier than managing people.
| People are hard.
| beckingz wrote:
| Computers are hard, but do precisely what they are instructed
| to do even (unless actually defective). Correctly translating
| what you want to instructions the computer understands is
| hard and complex.
|
| Humans are hard, and cannot be forced to do anything no
| matter the instructions. Individuals may be coerced or
| motivated or bargained with in specific ways. Correctly
| translating what you want to instructions the human
| understands is also hard and complex.
| topkai22 wrote:
| There is "complex" and there is "hard" and they aren't
| necessarily the same thing. A good strategy is rarely complex
| and often very straightforward, but consistently executing to
| it is hard. A technical problem may be complex, but it might
| be easy to actually implement against and especially easy to
| make sure it stays implemented.
|
| Many management and business problems fall into the
| "straightforward to understand but hard" category. The
| apparent "unnecessary"complexity around these problems is
| sometimes self important fluff, by far, far more often it
| represents individual or organizational learning about what
| is actually necessary to solve these "simple, but hard"
| problems.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I agree that people are hard, but they are hard specifically
| because of what I said, they need to protect their turf and
| conquer new turf. Management problems are difficult because
| of politics, and at the root of politics is self and tribe
| interest. Having management meetings be a bit impenetrable is
| a symptom of politics.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| I disagree and think you have a cynical take. The root of
| politics is resource distribution. Because this is complex,
| humans do a job that is a mix of self-interest, Compromise,
| and (hopefully) some vision.
|
| When it works, we don't even see it. When it fails, we do
| what our brains love to do: over extrapolate incidents to
| patterns and lock it into our confirmation bias.
| octokatt wrote:
| The trick is that not all of the complexity is protective
| politics -- some of the complexity is carefully created
| diplomatic language to keep together a coalition of cranky
| managers who managed to agree on _this very specific
| version of The Plan_.
|
| And unless you're savvy, it's difficult to tell which part
| is which, thus the problem OP is having.
| bloat wrote:
| You're lucky he was referred to as Robert Smith. In my company
| they'd just have said 'Robert', and I wouldn't even be able to
| look him up in the directory to find out what the hell his job
| is.
| teeray wrote:
| Usually in these "all-hands" type of meetings, nobody considers
| the "all-hands" audience and instead crams their presentation
| full of jargon and acronyms. This is usually because they recycle
| decks from other meetings.
|
| Your audience isn't going to know specific finance, marketing, or
| engineering jargon, so use it sparingly and make sure to define
| it. The new-hires and interns (and even senior people) will thank
| you as they learn a little bit more about a field that isn't
| their own.
| arafalov wrote:
| Remember: "if you are not the buyer, you are the product". Here,
| it looks like you are the product.
|
| Specifically, "Robert Smith" needs to say to his superiors that
| the "quarterly review" was discussed (socialized!) in various
| stakeholder groups. They already had a previous meeting with a
| different group and whatever was said there (useful or not)
| translated into "We've received a lot of positive feedback".
| After this meeting, they will say "We've received a lot of
| positive feedback from round-table meetings with 2/3/4/15 groups
| within the company".
|
| The "same people" group is just playing this game to be visible.
| If you stay in the company long enough, you can play bingo with
| what they say, regardless of the specific discussion topic. Don't
| play this game, if you don't want to. And if you don't know who
| you are sucking up to (or nobody), you probably don't want to, at
| least in this particular way.
|
| The real questions, in my opinion, are: 1) Why were you in the
| meeting at all? If it is "All Staff", then maybe you can skip it
| (especially if it is recorded for "those not able to be
| present"). If it is a specific group, then which group (your IT
| team, group one-above your IT team, etc). Are you a member or a
| representative of the group? The further away, the less it
| matters. 2) Are they asking for written feedback, actively? By a
| specific date? If not, the meeting is not relevant. 3) What is
| the related timeline (on feedback and on document itself) and
| where the document goes? That's a question you can totally ask.
| "Hi, I admit I am not super familiar with the subject. Where does
| this document goes next? Is there a specific deadline for it?" 4)
| If you are not there once, does anybody notice? E.g. a direct
| follow-up for "comments from you or your team?" Have a
| medical/whatever appointment once and pay attention.
|
| One book you may find interesting is "Political Savvy: Systematic
| Approaches to Leadership Behind the Scenes Hardcover" by Joel R.
| DeLuca. It is not a perfect match to the situation, but it
| certainly helps to think about it in the way that's more aligned
| with developers' mindset. Unfortunately, it may be hard to get
| new.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Here, it looks like you are the product.
|
| I dunno. It looks a lot like somebody is trying to push the OP
| into a senior role, but he is not ready yet.
| patchorang wrote:
| It's abstraction, but for things you don't care about. I was an
| engineer early in my career and I felt exactly as you. All that
| stuff was in one ear and out the other and I couldn't for the
| life of me make sense of it.
|
| I moved to product and finally got it. A PM can't explain the
| same concepts/ideas/initiatives/etc every meeting because the
| whole meeting will be spent doing that. They give it a name.
|
| Take the strategy example. In the early stages of forming this
| strategy, part of the PMs job is to communicate it lots of groups
| of people. They have the same meeting 1-10 times depending on the
| size of the company. Then everyone who needs to know about this
| strategy has an understanding of what it is. Then the PM gives it
| a name. The next meeting, rather than having to explain it from
| scratch, they call it by its name.
|
| You're either not paying attention when it is first explained (I
| don't blame you, a lot doesn't matter to an engineer), or you
| weren't invited to the meeting it was explained.
| mmcnl wrote:
| You are absolutely right. Also on the part that it makes sense
| that you don't know since a lot of the information you receive
| isn't necessarily relevant to you as an engineer.
|
| If something is unclear, the normal path forward is to ask a
| clarifying question. I wonder why OP hasn't mentioned or tried
| this at all. In my experience people are happy to answer these
| kind of questions because they don't want to lose their
| audience.
|
| I also wonder why engineers are OK with the concept of
| technical abstractions, but are somehow in despair when
| business people use business abstractions. Most people here
| understand how abstractions are useful.
|
| Why would anyone hold business people to higher standards than
| yourself? Do you really think that if you would explain a
| technical abstraction everything is immediately clear to anyone
| outside your domain? Surely not. Then why expect better from
| coworkers from other domains who are just people too?
| [deleted]
| kypro wrote:
| I do ask questions. If it's a smaller meeting within my team
| I'll always ask questions if I'm not following. It's when
| it's department-sized meetings that I struggle. In these I
| find it harder to follow what's being discussed and I also
| need to balance my need to ask questions with the need of the
| meeting to proceed smoothly.
|
| I think you're right though. There have been a few occasions
| in my career when I have seen corporate narratives form
| around projects I've led technically. In those instances I
| know with certainty that what's being said is mostly
| corporate BS that dances around the specific what, whys and
| how's of the problems we're solving. But to your point,
| that's probably for practical reasons. A lot of the time the
| details I'm concerned with from day to day just aren't that
| important as you move up the org structure.
|
| I guess what I'm confused about is how other people seem to
| follow along in these meetings. I don't understand how some
| people seem to know everyone and about every project. Even if
| I have some awareness of someone or some project, I rarely
| know enough to follow much of what's being said, and
| certainly not enough to contribute anything useful.
|
| I know I'm doing something wrong, I just don't know what it
| is. I do try to pay attention, but that doesn't seem to help
| me much. I'm worried it's more to do with the fact that I
| struggle with vagueness and corporate discussions are full of
| vagueness.
|
| Sometimes I wonder if I'm following along more than I realise
| and it doesn't really matter that I don't know all the
| details about some project. Perhaps it's not that I can't
| contribute to a discussion if I don't know any details, but
| that the only contributions I care enough to make would
| involve details. For example, you don't need to know what
| [project xyz] is to ask who's leading it or if there's
| documentation on confluence.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| > For example, you don't need to know what [project xyz] is
| to ask who's leading it or if there's documentation on
| confluence.
|
| Bingo, there is a pattern to most business problems (not
| that the generic corporate template for problem solving is
| right solution) and if the know the pattern, you can engage
| with it. You only need a few high level details to have
| enough context, so some people can go really wide and have
| a superficial view of wide breadths of corporate
| initiatives.
| outsidetheparty wrote:
| Would you expect to be able to walk into the middle of a complex
| technical discussion on a long-running project you're not
| familiar with, and immediately understand every bit of jargon and
| shorthand?
|
| Why, then, would you expect to be immediately able to grasp every
| detail of a complex _non_ technical discussion about a long-
| running project you're not familiar with?
|
| The real issue here seems to be that you're being invited to a
| lot of meetings you shouldn't be wasting your time attending,
| because you're not being properly prepared for them so have
| nothing useful to contribute. Talk to your manager about making
| more productive use of your time; if they need you to contribute
| ideas they ought to be giving you the necessary context ahead of
| time.
| [deleted]
| jedberg wrote:
| It sounds like a mix of you being invited to meetings that you
| don't need to be at, and you not being interested in learning
| about the business.
|
| To solve the first problem, just stop going. See if anyone
| notices/cares.
|
| The second problem isn't really a problem depending on your
| career goals. You can be a fine engineer if you don't understand
| the business, but you'll never get to the highest levels. At the
| highest levels, even as an engineer, you need to understand how
| your work fits into the greater business goals.
|
| If however you are worried about career advancement, then you
| need to figure out a way to understand the business and the
| business needs.
|
| The best way to do that is to just ask. If someone says something
| you don't understand, make a note to speak to them about it
| later.
| raverbashing wrote:
| This right here
|
| If you don't know what's the subject of the meeting, why are
| you attending?
|
| Regardless if it's BS or not, if you literally couldn't care
| less about what Robert is doing and his latest report, and it
| doesn't concern your job, you shouldn't be on that meeting.
| Period.
| hintymad wrote:
| If you read the history of Soviet Union and Chinese communist
| party, you'd find that they had lots of meetings similar to what
| you described. The trick, though, is that people made decisions
| _before_ the meetings, all the negotiations, schmoozing,
| threatening, cajoling, betrayal, cliquing... They all happened
| before the formal meetings with more than 4 or 5 people. You use
| those large meetings for formality, and for observing: who gives
| you surprises, who is pulling threads, who is bullshitting with a
| purpose or not.
|
| It's a nasty game. The good news is, you may choose not to play
| it.
| mmcnl wrote:
| If you don't understand something, just ask questions. You'd be
| surprised how often you'll get a useful answer if you ask a
| relevant question!
|
| If someone hosts a meeting about a transformation strategy, it's
| probably because it's their job to work on it. They are likely
| working on this topic for 40 hours a week. Most people will not
| understand a thing about what you're doing for 40 hours a week
| too, so it makes sense if someone else works on a topic for 40
| hours a week not everything is immediately clear to you as well.
|
| If you feel like you don't understand, then you probably don't
| understand. Like you would maybe understand Kubernetes, these
| people don't know a thing about it either and don't have any clue
| what you are doing in your job as well.
|
| Assume positive intent. If you do, it will make everyone's live
| more enjoyable.
| needs wrote:
| It all boils down to the fact that people need to feel useful.
| This is part of the society as a whole. During this meetings,
| look at who need attention, and praise their propositions.
|
| On some rare cases it is a power move, in such cases either you
| can play the power game or you can't.
|
| Regarding power games, the real fight happen before the meeting,
| so if you feel unprepared and you know someone in power is going
| to pressure you: don't go.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| After working in large companies for a while, I've come to think
| that meetings are a checkmark for moving forward because you can
| point back to them and say XYZ was decided therefore what you did
| was justified. But beyond that they're basically useless and more
| impactful as a way to show off and get visibility
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's very, very easy for the audience for a corporate meeting to
| be too broad.
|
| Depending on how big the company has gotten, odds become high
| that the piece of the elephant you're holding is nowhere near the
| pieces that the CEO / owners / etc. care about on the day-to-day,
| but what they care about on the day-to-day tends to shape the
| contents of corporate meetings.
|
| If you want to derive more value from these meetings, it can be
| useful to switch context from the _what_ is being discussed to
| the _who_ is discussing. Those are the _people_ at the company
| that the operator of the meeting thinks are doing things worth
| telling you about. They have the ear of top-level management on
| their projects, and it might be worth keeping tabs on them if
| your goal is to increase your impact in the org. But if your goal
| is to heads-down improve your piece of the elephant day-to-day,
| don 't stress too much about these above-your-paygrade
| conversations.
|
| Now, how do you find out more about the stuff discussed? That
| depends on your org. The first conversation I'd have is with my
| immediate manager. A lot of companies have an internal wiki of
| some kind to track this info, and you can read up on the topic
| from the meeting there. If your boss doesn't know how to know
| more, then it might be a good skill for you _and_ your boss to
| learn. Now, if it 's not possible to know more, than your company
| might have a comms gap and these meetings might _actually_ be
| wasting your time.
|
| (Just as a side-bar: I was in a site-wide meeting once where a
| team had succeeded in making one system much faster. Site lead
| wanted to celebrate their achievement, but he knew a lot of folks
| would have no idea what they did or why it mattered... So he
| bought some cheap tape measures, pulled one out to one foot, and
| then had the team that did the thing stretch the additional five
| around the room over and over. "This tape measure represents how
| many queries per second we used to support, and these..."
| _gestures around the room_ "Are our new capacity. Big round of
| applause."
|
| Keep an eye on folks who can do that... They know how to
| communicate to people who aren't in the loop, and that's a key
| leadership skill.)
|
| p.s: One final thought on this topic: don't get discouraged if
| the company's doing something big that doesn't make sense to you.
| It is the nature of big companies that nobody can wrap their
| brain around the whole thing... That's why they are multi-person
| projects in the first place. Nobody at a large enough company,
| not your boss, not the VP of your org, not the CEO, actually
| knows everything that's going on.
| dhd415 wrote:
| I feel like a lot of the criticism and dismissals of management
| and corporate meetings like this unfairly and naively denigrate
| the value and importance of corporate strategy and processes in
| nearly the exact same way as engineering work and processes are
| often denigrated and misunderstood by non-engineers.
|
| Early in my engineering career, I had the privilege of being
| personal friends with the older CEO of my company who was very
| much a business/corporate type but valued engineering as well
| though he was not an engineer himself. He was able to help me see
| through several product cycles that sales and marketing was, in
| many (or even most) cases, more pivotal to the success of a
| product than engineering. That's not to say that engineering does
| not matter -- it does, especially when it comes to scale and
| technical debt that affects release velocity, but the end
| customer in 99.9% of cases does not care about the engineering
| behind a product, only whether it solves their problem. The
| business and corporate meetings (when done properly-- there can
| be complete BS business/corporate stuff but that's a matter of
| incompetence) should focus efforts on delivering what customers
| need. Seeing that first-hand gave me a much greater appreciation
| for other disciplines within successful companies as well as some
| humility around the magnitude and importance of my contributions
| as an engineer. It takes all kinds and the talented business
| types who can proverbially sell ice to Eskimos are force
| multipliers akin to the mythical 10x engineer and worth their
| weight in gold.
| gipp wrote:
| Absolutely this. While of course there are true bullshitters
| out there, HN's consistent snarky dismissal of any possible
| value to non-technical business processes, while simultaneously
| getting self righteous about management's lack of understanding
| of engineering practice, is kind of embarrassingly un-self-
| aware. The fact that other fields in the business have their
| own jargon does not change that fact.
|
| It also sounds like OP is just not the actual audience for the
| meetings they're in. Either someone at their company needs to
| rethink how wide such meetings need to be, or OP needs to
| figure out what parts of it are actually relevant to their
| role, and not worry too much about the rest.
|
| (I am a SWE btw)
| paulcole wrote:
| > Meanwhile I'm there wondering who is this [Robert Smith] of the
| [communications department]? What is the [transformation
| strategy] and why does it need a [quarterly review]?
|
| You're not prepared for the meeting. This is on you to fix.
| diamondap wrote:
| I think part of the issue is that developers and engineers tend
| to think in concrete terms because to make things work, they must
| be concrete. People in sales, marketing, and management often
| speak in jargon and metaphors that cover for a lack of
| substance... though, to be fair, many of them don't know they're
| doing it because they don't really implement things themselves.
|
| Years ago, I worked at a company where the head of marketing gave
| a 40-minute presentation to management about the new marketing
| strategy to drive growth. Her presentation was such a success
| they told her to present it to engineering, thinking it would
| whip up enthusiasm about what great vision the company had and
| how fast we were poised to grow.
|
| The woman presentated to a sea of bewildered faces. None of the
| software devs could figure out what she was saying, and that's a
| problem, since marketing's job is to convey a clear message.
|
| Finally, we started peppering her with questions. Not in a rude
| way. We were genuinely trying to pin down some concrete meaning
| behind the flood of jargon. After ten minutes of questions, one
| dev finally summed it up: "So we're going to run more ads and let
| people know we offer a broad selection and good prices?"
|
| "Yes," the woman said. She seemed frustrated and defeated, though
| all the devs were happy to finally understand a message that made
| sense.
|
| Then she blurted out, "God, I hate talking to developers!"
| markus_zhang wrote:
| That's why companies need middle men such as BA and PM who can
| do the translation.
| upwardbound wrote:
| That seems like a waste of headcount if you have middle men
| just to "do the translation" between different people. It
| sounds like the marketing person needs to understand their
| audience better and make a better-crafted presentation for
| the audience.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Usually there are a lot of things to translate so sometimes
| it's valuable to have a dedicated middle man. The middle
| man should also work on writing up technical wikis and
| shield engineers from constant requirement changes.
| Translation is just part of his job. He can perform other
| tasks too if he has the capacity, e.g. working on some
| early analysis for the engineers.
| saq7 wrote:
| "I have people skills. I talk to the customers so the
| engineers don't have to."
| marcosdumay wrote:
| What is perfectly fine if them you can talk to the
| engineers better than the customers can.
| beckingz wrote:
| It's more cost effective to have one person do it all.
|
| ... until that person can't do it all and you have to replace
| them or can't grow more.
| april_22 wrote:
| or dev evangelists
| therealplato wrote:
| Before the meeting starts I confirm there is an agenda present,
| and ask the organizer to provide one if it's missing, and skip
| the meeting if no agenda is provided
|
| I also usually ask at minute zero for the organizer to state the
| desired outcome of the meeting
|
| I drop if I am not providing or gaining value
| quartesixte wrote:
| First, I find it really bad on an org's part to throw people into
| meetings like this that requires context and some prior knowledge
| without prepping them. I assume from your post that you are in an
| engineering role of somesort. I would ask for some training or
| perhaps a brief prep session on your company's business side. Get
| lunch with someone in sales and ask tons of questions. Imagine if
| someone without any knowledge of front-end dev got thrown into a
| technical standup? Same thing is happening here.
|
| That being said, one tip for meetings like this is to not get too
| hung up on the exact details in the moment and just soak it all
| in.
|
| >Meanwhile I'm there wondering who is this [Robert Smith] of the
| [communications department]? What is the [transformation
| strategy] and why does it need a [quarterly review]?
|
| Like this should happen AFTER the meeting. In the moment, your
| brain should trying to follow the flow of narrative:
|
| "Someone did a thing to accomplish a goal and it seems like
| people are happy/sad/angry/frustrated/etc. about it. These people
| say this. These other people say that. I don't know who that
| someone is, or what that goal was, but people seem pretty
| opinionated and seeing how everyone got thrown in here I guess
| it's important. After this meeting I should go talk to Bob
| because Bob seems to have a lot of insight into this, seemed
| pretty level headed about the whole thing, and is a nice guy who
| answers people's questions. I can utilize him to find out more."
|
| You will still feel lost, but you will at least walk away having
| a good idea of generally what happened and how people felt about
| it.
|
| The other key to meetings like this is to not take every term at
| its absolute denotative value. Words will be thrown around that
| are suggestive of some general idea that is specific but pretty
| loose about the exactness of the term ("omnichannel strategy" for
| example. Complete goggbledegook.)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-06 23:01 UTC)