In every company I've worked for, the biggest fans/lovers of meetings/let's "touch base" have always been: The most useless members of our team.
And I truly mean that, whether PM/TPM/or even SDM/SDE. The common denominator is they were always absolutely useless, adding no value or no true technical contribution, and their only value add was siloing information and claiming to be in "meetings" to lead some effort forward.
Their entire job function could've probably been replaced by a wiki or Google Doc. They intentionally made themselves the only points of contact and did not introduce people cross team because people would probably immediately realize how useless they are.
I've seen this multiple times, multiple roles, L5+, earning 100s of thousands of dollars a year at big tech companies.
Yes, I will waste 45 minutes of my time explaining word for word to you, exactly what is written in this design document, and none of it will be documented, no AIs will come from it, so you can look "busy" for today and tell your manager you did something. Woohoo collaboration!
Their entire job function could've probably been replaced by a wiki or Google Doc.
I'm an Engineering Manager these days and I suspect this is true to an extent for my role. All I seem to do is relay information from one group to another, translate from one jargon to a different jargon, figure out who to talk to in order to get someone to be able to push a button, and, more often than I'd like, sit in meetings and remember things when someone else has forgotten. If my teams and the teams they work with wrote things down in discoverable and organized ways I would be out of a job.
However, due to the fact my teams are made up of fallible, disorganized, and very human people, my job seems pretty safe, and I get a great deal of satisfaction from knowing I help a lot of people get a lot more done than if I wasn't around.
I'll give you a big reason why this behavior exists: people refuse to write high quality documentation regarding their systems/processes/etc. Or they are willing do it, but do an extremely poor job and are oblivious to its low quality. This will necessitate meetings to "Clear things up". And sometimes your documentation ticks all the boxes, but people get pissy about updating it because it's not in their preferred format and it rots away into irrelevance.
When I became an engineering manager I invested a ton of effort into providing solid documentation where people expect it: Swagger docs with real examples for our RESTful services for devs, confluence documentation for wider audiences, various guides and FAQs, and even in-repo ADRs. It probably saves us about 15 labor hours of meetings a week and maximizes my team's hands-on-keyboard time and minimizes interruptions.
Hard to say what situations you have experienced because the details are scant, but in my experience usually those people have helped, in one way or another, to ensure that my pay check has the specific number that it does.
Simply put: they use the information they gain to justify the utility of individual team members to the overall effort and thus the proportionate compensation.
No my friend, the people who ensure the paycheck has the specific number it does are some drones in HR far removed from you. They determine reasonable bands for your role based on industry standards and how the company wants to position itself in the market.
Then your individual contribution and performance determines an additional +-10%.
Don't know which company you work for but this is unequivocally not true at mine. HR are subservient to Engineering (our CEO started as a senior SWE ~15 years ago). I am also one of those "useless" EMs that barter for the comp packages of my most valuable SWEs.
From my experience there's a lot more wiggle room in those pay bands than you'd think. Along with that, at many orgs your EM has to haggle on your behalf with their boss and every other EM that shares their budget ~yearly for your share of a limited pool of incremental dollars. I've specifically requested not to be under certain EMs in the past for that reason.
I don't think meetings or OKRs are inherently bad, I have worked in organisations where these kinds of things are actually done well. Equally no OKRs and no meetings can be fine as well.
Where the problem exists is when the systems and processes business use start to become calcified into the organisation's way of working, and compliance is used to control the work people do.
RACI, RASCI, DACI as an example are all fine mental models for thinking about how people or teams should work on a project. But if I'm planning a project and propose a DACI, and then my project ends up getting derailed because some other manager thinks we should use a RACI instead it's probably game over.
> Yes, I will waste 45 minutes of my time explaining word for word to you, exactly what is written in this design document
And they will misunderstand you, turn around and butcher the explanation to some higher up, indirectly claiming credit for your work as the messenger of its result. If something goes wrong with the project, they'll definitely make sure to emphasize your involvement in the failed initiative, strategically distancing themselves.
The kind of momentum maintaining alignment can provide is unreal. I hope this topic and HuggingFace and other doing it keeps getting more attention and details being shared. Nothings perfect, but it sure seems like it would work well for some people :)
Having a team of thoughtful and professional self-directed learners and creators sounds amazing if you can get a space for a team to come together around it.
Companies that have to, or choose to compromise on their labour force, either from a competency or salary perspective often have to put more supports in place to keep people longer.
It’s kind of crazy you’re describing the person that made me leave tech to the last detail
The weird part to me is I’ve worked with PhD folk, DARPA hackers, FAANG folk and they were so kind to me even when I said dumb things the person on the other hand was just idk how to describe it made coding just painful idk why though to this day
And I truly mean that, whether PM/TPM/or even SDM/SDE. The common denominator is they were always absolutely useless, adding no value or no true technical contribution, and their only value add was siloing information and claiming to be in "meetings" to lead some effort forward.
Their entire job function could've probably been replaced by a wiki or Google Doc. They intentionally made themselves the only points of contact and did not introduce people cross team because people would probably immediately realize how useless they are.
I've seen this multiple times, multiple roles, L5+, earning 100s of thousands of dollars a year at big tech companies.
Yes, I will waste 45 minutes of my time explaining word for word to you, exactly what is written in this design document, and none of it will be documented, no AIs will come from it, so you can look "busy" for today and tell your manager you did something. Woohoo collaboration!