Meetings Q&A and Videos

Agile heavy team, team is 75% data scientists / product analysts.

As an engineer, I find myself often pulled into meetings that are categorized as a “team” meeting but end up being mostly discussions about business logic and how to do things (rather than the engineering implementation of the solution). Is it reasonable to expect engineers to attend all meetings and contribute to business logic discussions? It’s almost like the solution has not been decided yet, and I’m watching a PowerPoint with graphs and spreadsheets and 2 or 3 people going back and forth about a specific topic that I don’t have any opinion on because it’s very business oriented.

The other engineer isn’t even attending these meetings because time zone does not overlap.

I feel like this is so not worth my time. Especially if I’m not involved with the specific product they are discussing. (the team supports several products)

I'm on a team of 10 people, including my manager. During our weekly meetings, I struggle to pay attention to what's happening when other people give their updates. I only work closely with 2 of my 8 coworkers. For those 2 coworkers, I already have a weekly sync with our manager on a different day. For the time being, I don't have much to do with the other 6 people on my team.

I have 2 questions:

1. Should I try paying attention to others' updates or should I try and reclaim this time and do work during the meeting? One can make an argument that long-term, it's beneficial for me to know what's happening with the other people on my team, but in general, I'm under the impression that the greedy (short-term) approach is best.
2. If I should try and pay attention to others, does anyone have tips for doing so? I'm not sure how normal/abnormal I am in being able to pay attention to people, but I've always been a big day-dreamer. In elementary and high school, I was a good student in spite of day-dreaming during class because school was pretty easy and I was self-motivated to learn from the textbook. In university, I was still a big day-dreamer, but I was no longer a good student because school was hard and I couldn't just learn from the textbook. Now, post-school, I am motivated to pay attention to things that really count. e.g. when my boss wants me to do something, you better believe I'm motivated to pay attention closely to what he says. But by default, my mind doesn't want pay attention to anything unless it knows I need to do it. I can try taking notes, but often times there's so much additional knowledge and context the people working on the tickets have that my notes are kinda useless.

Ultimately, this team meeting is only a half hour per week, so it's a huge deal either way, but I'm leaning towards trying to continue working on my tickets during them (i.e. what I know counts).

I had a post-offer call with a hiring manager to go into the role in more detail. It's easier to ask questions after you've gotten an offer and you're less worried about trying to impress.

I often find myself struggling to listen to the other person talking, take notes, and formulate my response/follow up question. One solution to this is to record calls. AI note takers further allow us to transcribe calls in real time and then get summaries of them.

Is it feasible to use an AI Note Taker in future scenarios like this? My strong guess is no - I am not even part of the company yet and most people are wary of being recorded (understandably).

When are AI Note Takers appropriate then? Presumably in situations where everyone agrees beforehand and where the organizer of the meeting thinks it's appropriate. Is this happening in company meetings? I haven't encountered it at my company yet, but I'm not at a cutting-edge Tech company.

Thanks!

Hello Taro!

I'm working as tech lead in company of approximately 500 people, we are creating tech products both internally and for external clients with a data-science focus.

As part of my yearly objectives, I'm working on improving technical architecture decisions across the company, and I'm looking for best practices, advice and references on the subject.

In the past we have faced some issues such as:

• tech lead looking for feedback on a target architecture not finding anyone willing/ready to do so
• an internal product whose code was so poor it had to be almost completely rewritten.
• teams struggling to solve a problem that had been already solved in other part of the company.

Actions I have been considering:

• encouraging the use of Architecture Decision Records
• set-up a team of senior technical profiles that could be mobilised to review an architecture

In general I'm weary of any solution that would:

• remove accountability from engineers
• create coupling between unrelated projects
• add a lot of meetings

Thanks a lot!

Throughout my career as an engineer I've often not spoken up for fear of not saying the right thing or looking dumb in meetings. I'm wondering what are some effective tactics to have "good" opinions in meetings and become a leader?

I've been working at this company for almost 2 years now and we recently started doing kick-off calls for big features. Before this, management would come up with features in private meetings and assign engineers tickets. We expressed our frustration with this approach so management started doing "kick-off calls" recently but would only invite 1 engineer or 1 data scientist depending on who they think should lead the feature/project. This is a 10-person company, and it feels like I have no room to be creative/propose solutions etc. I brought this up during retro and 1:1s with my manager and the answer I always got was "we don't want it to be a democracy" or "too many people/questions would drag the meeting longer than it has to" etc

I can understand this reasoning if it's a big team/company, but we're a really small team and it feels to me like they're not interested in hearing about other engineers' input, ideas etc at all. This causes me to think engineers are just here to do grunt work/grind. Am I being too cynical?

As I work remotely from UK, I have some co workers in US who are in some meeting room discussing things together. I feel it’s difficult for me to contribute from Zoom. What can I do better to get more involved?

I recently gave my first presentation ever and I was so confident about how to do it but when I saw so many people looking at my screen for the first time and going through my work with a fine-tooth comb I just froze and didn't know what to do. I've been on the team for a year and 6 months but never had to present before because I'm so used to coding heads-down.

Lots of "ums" and "buts" and a few awkward pauses and I just wanted to crawl under a table and hide. I feel so defeated because everyone will judge me and my calibre and hold it against me as an L3 who doesn't know what he's talking about. I could feel 50 eyes looking directly into my soul.

How do I recover from this? Are my chances at promo delayed? Did you experience this early in your career?

Pre-covid I used to do a bit of public speaking internally at work and sometimes at events on behalf of work.

Now I'm super rusty but have some opportunities coming up that'd also involve a technical talk component (which I have even less experience in).

What are some ways you've improved your public speaking as well as the quality of your presentations as a whole?

With all the remote work, more people are opting to not use cameras in meetings. On one hand that means you can not have to worry about looking put together, but on the other hand it makes remote work more painful

Questions for the community:

• do you prefer cameras on or off?
• if your team is primarily a camera off, do you think its worth it to ask for camera on?
• Do you find meetings more effective with cameras on?
• How does this change if you are fully remote vs. hybrid/in person

When I say meetings, I am referring to small huddles/quick zoom call with your coworker(s) to help or ask for help on some bug or brainstorm stuff. By large no one really pays a ton of attention in large more formal meetings anyways

Hey Taro members,

Since in most companies, I believe the 1:1 with Managers is biweekly or weekly I was thinking about what to communicate in every meeting. At times, I run out of things to discuss. We cover topics related to how tasks are going, feedback if any, and after that, there's not really anything else. Given the fact these meetings are recurring, I want the communication to be more natural. Any advice for that since I do realize the importance of 1:1's and would like to make the most of it?

Also, any other topics besides the ones mentioned above that should be discussed in 1:1 something I can initiate a discussion about as an Entry Level Engineer and make the most out of these 1:1s?

Thanks.

My org VP holds office hours every week. Also he sometimes does AMA sessions. I'm usually not sure what to ask so I don't avail those sessions as I don't want to ask any stupid questions.

I am onboarding at a new company. Sometimes, I feel I am completely lost when my teammates were explaining something to me. The reasons I can find may include

1. I am lacking the understanding of the architecture or the context
2. Their explanation uses phrases I do not know what they mean or how they work

In this situation, how should I respond to my teammates? Thanks in advance!

In lot of meetings I am feeling I am less knowledgeable than others and unable to add value a lot. All my peers are very smart.

When analyzing critically I feel maybe I am spending a lot of time learning and lesser doing.

What works for me is => having focus blocks. Catch is that I am getting too comfortable sometimes not having meetings. This leads to missing lot of context sometimes.

What tips does community have to to handle this pressure?

I am been working as a Senior software engineer for quite some time now. To move to the Staff level, one feedback/pointer I got was to start developing opinions on how to do certain things. When people start respecting your opinions, they start to see you as a leader.

The problem I have is, in many cases, I don't have enough relevant experience for the problem at hand. Also, I find, that in discussions I am listening more than I am speaking. Having no opinions, and finding it hard to express opinions for fear of being judged and losing respect in case my opinion is wrong, are the problems I am facing.

Is there any advice on how to develop these skills?

I would like to understand how can I drive an effective Tech discovery session (just had a PRD walkthrough) with the team (remotely working) before we start writing a detailed system design document. The engineers are mostly L4 and are still learning how to effectively collaborate instead of full blown meeting.

Big companies have multiple teams across. There will be a team just for the login, a team for backend logic, etc. There are so many teams and microservices and internal jargon all around.

Problem is during team meeting, seniors have more in depth discussion where I'm unable to provide value as good as them.

How do I get familiar with them fast? Or am I focusing on the wrong idea and should just narrow down what I'm working on and just let time do its thing?

Thanks