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Comment on How to keep engineers out of meeting hellparent

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I’m the meeting sender, but I usually send a few emails before where I say something like “if you’d prefer we can discuss in a meeting”. I try to give people an out of a meeting. You’d be surprised at how many engineers take the meeting rather than spend 15 minutes on the email.

That said the high bandwidth meeting often accomplishes in 30 minutes what would take 10 email turns to clarify.

This is good though.

I honestly hate meetings with a vague agenda and then when you get there, you have ~5 minutes to make up a plan to conquer Europe during German occupation, or else (in a threatening tone). I am starting to just abort and leave that kind of meetings.

Please tell me what you need, and then I can see if this is a simple e-mail / knowledge base issue I can link you to. Or I see this is a bigger thing, but then I can prepare options, ideas and workarounds how to approach your problem. And then we can send it around to all required people and then we can have an interesting discussion about our points in a meeting after everyone has had a bit of time to think and brainstorm.

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