maybe meeting aren't so bad
I have basically worked remote my entire life outside of a single internship, and occasional office visits. the interesting thing I noticed about remote work is that a 2 minute conversation that could have happened in the office was a minimum of 30 minutes remotely.
there's lots of pleasantries, small talk, and tangential discussions unrelated to the tasks at hand. the worst meetings had 6+ people in them with all cameras off - nothing was getting done. I grew to really dislike meetings, and some of naval's advice actually led me to just not going to many of them.
I've recently changed my stance on meetings. with AI - engineering hours can produce a whole lot more, but the hardest part is figuring out what to build. execution risk will approximate towards zero over time, as this happens, you don't really want to be the engineer that locks themselves away for days at a time. progress is now measured in hours and days instead of weeks and months.
I see meetings now as gaining alignment on what needs to be solved. it's almost akin to running plays in sports - you need everyone on the same page, or someone is going to mess it up for everyone. if the team isn't aligned, or aware of what everyone else is doing, then bad things will happen. trust will erode, politics will take control, and everyone will be a little more unhappy.
with execution risk going down, it's also a call for people to be multi-disciplinary. maybe the engineer should comment on what the designer has in store, maybe they should be a part of key product decisions, maybe they should be getting buy in for a project. having people dedicated to creating & assigning tickets for engineers will be a thing of the past really soon.
it's also just really easy to build the wrong thing! I've been loving flash demos recently - hop on a call with a stakeholder, and show them something I might be working on, no matter how barebones it is. it's amazing the amount of feedback you can gather by just putting something in front of someone, and having a synchronous communication line open.
asynchronous communication is great, but it's just much faster and less nuanced to talk over things on a call.