# they trap you in meetings because you keep doing stupid shit

Stop complaining about "too many meetings". Meetings exist for reasons.

They don't trust you, and you probably don't deserve their trust. You or
somebody on your team or your industry demonstrated that value will not be
delivered quickly without hand-holding. Don't demand autonomy before you've
earned trust.

Of course you may be capable of building without guidance, but management
doesn't _feel_ that way, and you're doing nothing to address their _feelings_.

Take a h\*cking second to think of things from the business's point-of-view,
then offer tradeoffs to them in _their_ terms:

> Hello manager, just reminding you that I'm spending 9.5/40 hours in meetings
> every week instead of producing X. Would you like me to cancel/shorten
> meetings A, B, and C? I can submit a weekly review of A/B/C via email instead.
> With this change, I think we can deliver X to customers 1 month ahead of
> schedule.

If you think a particular meeting is useful but disorganized, try this:

> Hello manager, I think meeting A would be more valuable for our team if we
> moved to a more focused format. Could we try doing M for 2 weeks?

Yes, management knows that each meeting costs 6\*$150/h=$900/h or whatever. They
did the math and believe that annually spending $46,800=$900/h\*52h will accrue
an equal amount of profit in the long run. If they're not doing the basic math,
then, well, they're doing even stupider shit than you.