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Comment by VectorLock | Hacker News Reader

Its hilarious how much people still cling to synchronous meetings, even in an increasingly "Remote", globally distributed company.

Far too often "this could have been an email" meetings end up forcing some people in some other time zone (usually the people in APAC people) to stay up late. I just can't figure out what the fixation is. Maybe they just like talking better than typing. Perhaps getting people to embrace dictation software (call it AI and they'll jump all over) could get them to break this habit.

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My experience is that for some people, the physical act of speaking is required for them to think through an issue. Think rubber-duck debugging, but applied to most aspects of their lives.

For whatever reason, typing does not seem to serve the same purpose for these people, or doesn't serve it nearly as well. I don't know if the important part is the actual verbalization or if it's the direct, low-latency synchronous conversation with another person, but folks like this strongly prefer and are much more productive in meeting settings.

They are also often frustrating to interact with, but that's orthogonal...

I wonder if using a low-latency conversation with a reasonably effective LLM as a “front end” for documentation will be a big productivity boost for folks like this.

I have been using ChatGPT as a rubber duck (who is also a pathological liar!) for working through code issues with good success. What if you just ramble on for five minutes and ask it to summarize what you just said in README form? (Hmm, I’m going to try it!)

LLMs already make amazing rubber ducks! I would bet you're right -- when we have really good voice UIs for LLMs so it's even more like having a real conversation there are a lot of people who are going to start unlocking considerably more value from them.

I've had some success using Gemini 1.5 to take a recorded Teams meeting of a debugging session (with screen share), extract an audio transcript with Whisper, upload _both_ the video and the transcript, and get a summary of what was done. I'm still working on how to get the right amount of detail and organization without losing the high level flow, but even in a basic state it's better than anything I've had previously.

This. Some people are just not great writers, but when you ask them “what do you want to say?” they say it well. The next step, “okay, just write that”, never happens. They just use the 50-person all-hands weekly sync to do the saying part.

What we really need are something like internal podcasts.

It’s ridiculous how a few hundred millisecond lag can make communication difficult and frustrating but certain people on the internet pretend an unpredictable lag between minutes and days for every step of a conversation is exactly the same as an in person chat. It so obviously isn’t.

Yeah. It is basically impossible for 3 thoroughly confused people to align on a topic they don't fully understand asynchronously. There can be dozens of questions, unknowns, clarifications, ect.

Email is great for instructions to do X with Y requirements.

It is terrible to figure out what needs to be done and what the requirements are.

I wish there were a better way, but I havent found it. As a result, I spend probably half my day in cross functional meetings with 10-15 people.

Now would you describe that as synchronous or asynchronous?

16 hour delay for me to reply "Would I describe what as syncronous or asynchronous?".

If you have a point to make, make it. Better yet, you waste your time writing out a lot of detail so I can one-line ignore it with plausible deniability (because this "should be an email" stuff often turns out like a power play in that style).

> I just can't figure out what the fixation is

I see this happen over and over: there's a new system change, some things don't work as well, so people revert & try to cling to the old system.

This is a bit of a fallacy that comes from looking at only what is lost, and not the total tradeoff of what is gained & lost. I think it's not unreasonable to fixate on sync meetings, because your procedures & culture have been built around it. But I think it'd be more productive to "roll forward" and figure out how to make the best use of the new system, and plug in any gaps it has.

It isn't just remote work. I worked with an engineering manager that took a mandatory engineering-wide meeting, including hardware engineers and honest-to-god tradesmen, every two weeks. Each team lead sent a bulleted list of pre/post Scrum goals, with those goals read out from Microsoft Word on a projector. Imagine an hour long standup where only team leads talked and you get the idea.

We have that weekly. I don't go but we do that. It gives management a summary. It wastes everyone else's time

My retort to “this meeting could have been an e-mail” is usually “but do you read/respond to your e-mail?”

I don’t default to synchronous. I prefer E-mail too, and I reach for that first. But if you’re ignoring me, I’m going to drag you into a synchronous session.

And I’m probably going to decline future meeting requests from you. Your project probably is only incidentally related to mine. If you give me time, usually a few days, I can probably help, when I get some free time. But if you are pushy, well, your manager can talk to mine, who will probably tell you no.

They do it because they are (generally) not as interested in the success of the company (or even themselves) as they are in the look of success for themselves. You are overestimating people here.

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