Agreed on how draining a full day of face—to-face meetings is, our worse: a full-day conference meeting. I once went to one at the company that had acquired us. It was a literal airing-of-grievances meeting for the engineering managers, that they ran annually, so that people could get shit off their chests. It was by far the most dysfunctional and stupid meeting I’ve ever had to endure. We had to fly to Chicago for it.

If it was virtual I’d have turned my camera off and chilled out, and come away a fraction as stressed. As it was my team went straight to the bar, and a week later one of my colleagues - foreseeing her future amongst these people - quit.

I think there’s a lot of rose-tinting on how great in-person meetings actually used to be.