Friday, September 12, 2008

9-12-08: Age vs. Meetings

    I noticed something today regarding a commonality between old and young engineers. The subject: meetings.

    Young engineers, on the whole, dislike most meetings. Some are pretty worthwhile, but all day meetings tend to drag on into Boring Land a bit too often. For some reason, management tends to like them. I still go, but I sometimes get a bit bored when the topic strays away from anything relevant to me.

    Older engineers, on the whole, dislike having their time wasted. Today I was sitting at my desk and two older engineers (both with 30+ years at my company) talked about how they didn't feel like going to this meeting or that meeting, and flat out wouldn't go unless directly asked. One of them was skipping a meeting at the time, and really couldn't care less.

    The odd thing is, the same isn't true for the middle of the road guys who do a lot of the work. Young engineers tend to do more busywork; older engineers often serve as advisors or consultants. Neither find meetings to be all that relevant to what they are doing.

    I just thought it was interesting.

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