Chelsea Troy, a software engineer, writes about programming practice, remote meetings, tech talks, leadership and the effects of AI on work.
HN commenters recommend her posts on running meetings with moderators, leveling up as a programmer, and AI's effect on programming jobs.
Chelsea Troy has a great article describing this exact problem with meetings, and it applies to both remote & in-person meetings:
https://chelseatroy.com/2018/03/29/why-do-remote-meetings-suck-so-much/
And then she describes the solution - assign a moderator to your meetings:
https://chelseatroy.com/2018/04/05/how-do-we-make-remote-meetings-not-suck/
Just like we all know that meetings are better with agendas, notes, and action items, having a moderator also important.
A caucus is defined and discussed in the previous post: “A caucus (and specifically an unmoderated caucus) is a type of meeting with no rules about who talks in what order or for how long.”
Agreed the post is confusing and could have used a summary of the preceding piece to be intelligible.
https://chelseatroy.com/2018/03/29/why-do-remote-meetings-suck-so-much/
This (pre-pandemic!) blog post highlights exactly what you describe--that active moderation is needed to make remote meetings successful, and that there are lessons for in-person meetings also:
https://chelseatroy.com/2018/03/29/why-do-remote-meetings-suck-so-much/
It's too late to edit this comment, but, on the theme of "Make yourself a Tech Lead of a bunch of (AI) developers" - this article[0] is a good explanation
[0] https://chelseatroy.com/2024/05/26/how-does-ai-impact-my-job-as-a-programmer/
Chelsea Troy, a Staff Engineer at Mozilla, keeps a blog where a lot of her posts work through various aspects of this book. I've really enjoyed reading them.
https://chelseatroy.com/
Also, I think it's highly worth reading https://chelseatroy.com/2018/04/20/leveling-up-a-guide-for-programmers/