Imagine thinking that “pre meetings” are fake work, but the meetings themselves are real work
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Chapotraphouse
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this is what I thought too.. so you want to keep calling all those meetings but just don’t want to prepare for them? ok..
My boss does this shit where he calls me and tells me to schedule a call with people so he can discuss things with them. Then he shows up 15 mins late to a 30 min meeting with nothing planned.
If we got rid of pointless meetings and PowerPoint presentations, that would kill the entire consulting industry!
i love the term "surrogate activity" to describe these jobs. it was coined by the unabomber tho afaik. between all his ramblings was a bit of profound knowledge after all.
meetings are fake anyway, I've never seen a meeting where it couldn't have just been a bulleted memo or 1 on 1 exchanges
My daily meetings could be reduced to our boss pinging a group chat and saying "Let me know what you're working on and if you need 15 minutes with me or the senior dev to work on a blocker."
So many times its 15 minutes of nothing. Then suddenly, lets let X person debug their issue for 30 and by that time I've zoned out and forgot what I was going to say.
Even cooler when a middle manager joins and goes down the list of stories one by one for updates and acts concerned when we're all working on 1 each. Like brother, I have to refresh what I was doing after a long weekend, no way I'm tackling 3 tasks at once. And we're good about closing stories (and removing them from his list) so it isn't even a "is this done?" check.
International company with big name customers anyone would recognize btw. Its wild how inefficient actual business is. Anyone saying otherwise is outright lying or hasn't done real work in 20 years. I could write a full essay on shit I've seen/done/not done that would be a good argument for firing me. And not even misconduct or anything, just like, why the fuck are you paying me to do what I'm doing.
pinging a group chat and saying "Let me know what you're working on and if you need 15 minutes with me or the senior dev to work on a blocker."
This is exactly what we’ve done in place of a morning standup meeting for years. Works great
I know its a meme but in 9 out of 10 cases a meeting could have been an email.
I'm glad I'm a cook so I don't have to deal with that shit but they keep trying to call me to morning meetings and it's like, ALWAYS on a day where I've solidly planned on doing all of my actual cooking, panning out, etc, in a very narrow window from 10:30am-10:50am, right before we open at 11, to maximize the freshness and quality of my food by minimizing how long it's sitting in the vapor cabinet keeping warm
and it's like, they could mention it earlier so I can plan, or they could DO THE MEETING earlier, like, 10? so I'm not imminently and urgently busy
but I keep having to just be like "i do not have time for this, sorry" to my boss's boss, because i do not have time for it, I have pans of shit in the oven, plus other shit I'm actively doing, and it needs to be done
I guess it doesn't matter because he gets it but like come on, learn from this and like try to work it out with me
anyway it's always for some stupid shit like "here's a company motto we need to remember this week "be nice to people," wow. Also did you guys know it's important to wash your hands?" that i honestly find insulting to be asked to attend a meeting for
i think the last one I came to the end of it and they were saying something about like, working hard on making quality food and stuff? and it's like, again, insulting, I am already doing that for my pure love of the game, I don't need the company to tell me to make stuff better when I'm already making stuff the best
I love how a CEO of a company what makes a product designed to propagate fake work points this out and it's seen as keen insight, but if I point it out during a Slack meeting, it's seen as 'not being a team player' or 'not engaged'.
God I don't care just keep signing those checks
Yeah no shit, where the fuck does this guy think the resources go? Capitalism has allocated capital capitalistly, those are the rules, it has nothing to do with work
It's on managers, the people who invented PowerPoint presentations and pre-meetings, to make sure these useless things don't occur.
The more workers and CEOs are stuck doing unproductive work, the more tired they are in their free time, and the less they will want to spend this free time to truly learn about important issues like white genocide in South Africa. These "bullshit jobs" do have a purpose: they are yet another cog in the machine that hides the crimes of the South African government and the mainstream media.
CEOs can end up contributing absolutely nothing of value to a company they run?
I'm afraid to ask, but what even is a "pre-meeting"? Is it just another meeting?
Each corporation can use it in a different way, for me it’s when you get a small group together like with Operations and Project Managers and get a coherent story together to present on a separate meeting with progressively higher ranking people on it
So getting on the same page with project financials, why x event happened and y factors/results, making sure you don’t get asked a question in the bigger meeting and the whole team just goes “uhhhh”
Yeah. It's a giant covering your arse exercise. The last company I worked for was all about it. I was always so stressed and all I wanted to do was write code, but most of my contracted work day was spent in meetings and I had to pull hideous amounts of overtime to actually get work done.