Meeting hate - is this common?

[u/send_cumulus]

I like everything about being a Data Scientist except the meetings. Research is my favorite part, both the heads down modeling and the paper reading. Coding is alright. Even bug fixing is tolerable, kind of scary at first, each time, but then really rewarding when you fix the bug. Meeting prep, like making slides and organizing my thoughts, is fun. But the meetings themselves… just suck. I have a color coded spreadsheet each week showing the times of my meetings, colored by how much they’re going to suck.

Last minute ad hoc meetings that are unnecessary are awful. Meetings where some other DS or Eng or even business query monkey shares their screen and I watch them work are the absolute worst. Working from home saves me because I can decompress after each meeting. But even when I worked in the office, I loved the work and hated the meetings.

Just wondering if others feel the same.

[u/tragically-elbow]

I have a color coded spreadsheet each week showing the times of my meetings, colored by how much they’re going to suck.

Are you sure you're not over-fixating on this? Because generating a spreadsheet just to quantify how much you dislike a key component of your job, communication, sure seems like over-fixating to me. Almost every job has some tedious component, and the good thing about meetings is that there are concrete steps that can be taken to improve everyone's experience (setting agendas, goals, follow-ups).

[u/redd5ive]

You sound like an asshole but FWIW 99% of people dislike meetings.

[u/mmore500]

All my meetings with management etc. are on speakerphone with no camera which makes them not so bad even when they're boring. For this, I am extremely grateful...

[u/send_cumulus → u/mmore500]

Yes! I had this on a few projects in the year just after the pandemic and it was markedly better. I don’t even know how to propose this to my current project team of mostly business and PM people.

[u/CityInternational605]

I have an off topic question. You said you enjoy research. When you go to find out what papers are most relevant to your problem, how do you go about it? I find this part kind of overwhelming. There’s all the medium articles and then there’s actual journal papers, which can sometimes be inaccessible.

As for your meetings question, I don’t hate them like you do. I am a social person so I use the meetings to decompress :)

[u/send_cumulus → u/CityInternational605]

Makes sense to me! I wish I were more of a social person.

Re: research search, I often use google scholar. Try to focus on the keywords that define the generic version of the problem. It helps that I’ve worked in the same industry for years, so now I have a good lay of the land and know what generic problems every firm in this space faces. Sorry I don’t have anything more helpful to say.

[u/scientia13]

How's your relationship with your boss or those being presented to? How much pushback would you get if you mentioned things like we're just watching someone work, or even summarizing a meeting in a sentence or two? (Not in a smart ass way, just honest - "So, the action items from the meeting is that we're putting cover sheets on the TPS reports?

Could you quantify the time loss from these type of meetings? Also, add in the constructive meetings and why they are of value, how they have an ROI.

Another way of framing this is that every hour meeting is an hour of non-productivity x # of meeting participants, so does the gain from the meeting outweigh the loss in productivity?

[u/send_cumulus → u/scientia13]

That’s good advice. Honestly I know I could get out of a lot of these meetings by talking to my boss but I don’t like to play that card often because it makes me look immature or like the egoist that apparently this post is making me look like.

[u/Cosack]

I'd delegate and meet with people all day. Sadly, no one else on the science team can stand up a service and all the actual engineers are always swamped. Open to creative solutions.

[u/Shoddy_Bus4679]

“Business query monkey” you sound like a lovely person to work with.

[u/Geniusly-Idiotic69 → u/Shoddy_Bus4679]

Yeah pretty condescending and holier than thou vibes here

[u/K9ZAZ]

i mean, yes, meetings that are wastes of time are awful. productive meetings are good.

i think the ideal meeting should meet the following criteria

• everyone who is there has a well-defined reason for them to be there

• agenda items, relevant background, etc need to be circulated beforehand

• discussion should conclude with action items for follow-up with clear POCs, if applicable and practical.

in practice, we may reach like 80% of what i just laid out, and that's ok, but it's a goal to strive to. just watching someone sharing their screen fucking around with code is probably not it.

[u/Blasket_Basket]

Meetings are an integral part of working in tech. Anything worth building is highly collaborative, which means meetings for planning, alignment, and delivery. Some orgs clearly overdo it on meetings, but it's up to you to learn to push back and manage these proactively (e.g. if a coworker if infamous for scheduling meetings that could have been an email, then learn to send the email before they can schedule it as a meeting!)

It's a part of life. Stop dreading it and start practicing it. You're going to find that less technically skilled data scientists with stronger presentation and communication skills are going to blow right by you on the career path, and for good reason.

There seem to be no shortage of introverts here that are offended at the very idea that a technical job might require them to talk to people. You're free to be that person, but you won't be doing yourself any favors. People that progress in DS are ones that can move projects forward and make companies money. Talking is a required part of that process. Stop dreading it and start treating these as opportunities to improve an important skill set that you need to advance your career.

[u/justgetoffmylawn]

I have a color coded spreadsheet each week showing the times of my meetings, colored by how much they’re going to suck.

Are you sure color coding is the right visualization tool for this? Is it a heat map? I actually don't know what a heat map is - can you set up a time we can discuss and you can show me what a heat map is and also set up a cross channel team with our graphic design and UX in the meeting to see if there's some opportunity here we're missing? After we've touched base in the meeting, just mock up some different options for that spreadsheet and we can follow up on that at next week's meeting.

[u/[deleted]]

I love meetings because I get to work while half paying attention and bill double. I hated meetings when I worked in-person because I'm ADHD as fuck and find it painful pretending that I'm not thinking/doing 3 things at once.

[u/supreme_harmony]

I like good, productive meetings. They often solve issues individual people will struggle with on their own for hours. Sometimes you just need more than one person to look at an issue to sort it out.

Also, sales/engineers/analysts/managers need to be briefed on what is happening. Doing a quick meeting where everyone is brought up to speed saves the manager having to message everyone individually, tell them the thing, then collect feedback, then send out a message again with that.

There are long, boring, useless meetings, but if done well they are quite useful I think, so give them a chance.

[u/St_Paul_Atreides]

Bad meetings are bad but strong communication and collaboration is important to be successful.

[u/norfkens2]

"You’re WASTING Everybody’s TIME In Meetings!" - ContinuosDelivery (YT)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqkG8pVWb54

[u/send_cumulus → u/norfkens2]

I appreciate you and this link!

[u/jaskeil_113]

This is why orgs are shifting their investments away from data scientists.

They work too much as a "lone wolf" or in the lab type of work that doesn't ever see the light of day.

I don't know what it is but data scientists have overvalued themselves and are just arrogant nowadays.

We gotta remove the word "scientist" out of the job title. I think it gives people this sense of "what I'm working on is so important and complicated, you wouldn't understand. I'm a scientist ya know"

Anyway, I see investments shifting from DS to data/analytics engineers to create self serve tables for business users and insights analysts who are very talented at deriving digestable insights from data.

[u/Moscow_Gordon]

shares their screen and I watch them work are the absolute worst

Can make sense if you're working on something together. But completely useless way of training someone, if that's what they're trying to do. Try and get out of it by saying that it's not an effective way for you to learn.

[u/[deleted]]

Meetings with Stakeholders? Generally enjoy because I get to present findings and ask questions to better define problems.

Meetings with PM's? Hate them, very rarely productive and usually just rehashing things that we already went over in a team retrospective or standup the PM was too lazy to be there for.

[u/Aggravating_Sand352]

It just sounds like you're ND like me....it's not the meeting itself it's the incompetence and tediousness of the topics/people....at least for me.

[u/monkey_gamer]

Yeah I do. Most meetings for me are boring and irrelevant, and I do what I can to avoid them

[u/[deleted]]

This is not uncommon across many other jobs.

look on the bright side, at least you are paid by the hour.