The Meeting Magician: A Corporate Time Thief

Every toxic workplace has one: the Meeting Magician.

They don’t write code. They don’t fix bugs. They don’t ship features. But when it comes to meetings? They’re Houdini with a calendar invite.

You know the type. The calendar warrior who somehow manages to attend every single call without ever being useful on any of them. By the end of the week, their calendar looks like a Jackson Pollock painting of overlapping blue boxes proof, apparently, of their “value.”

The Illusion of Contribution

The Meeting Magician doesn’t need to do anything. They just need to be there. Presence over progress. Airtime over action.

And the words? Always the same:

• “Let’s circle back on this.”
• “We need alignment before execution.”
• “That’s a great point, let’s park it.”
• “We’ll need a working group to really flesh this out.”

Translation: I have no clue what I’m talking about, but I’ll use corporate filler until this call runs out of time.

They’ve mastered the ability to sound smart while saying absolutely nothing. You leave the meeting more confused than when you joined and somehow, that’s considered leadership.

The Numbers Game

Let’s put it into perspective. In one typical week, the Meeting Magician racks up:

• 30+ hours of meetings.
• 200 Slack messages.
• 0 commits.

And yet… they’re praised for “keeping everyone aligned.” Leadership eats it up because it looks like coordination, when really it’s just clogging the system.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are trying to find scraps of time between their circus acts to get actual work done.

The Black Hole Effect

The real damage isn’t just the wasted hours it’s the paralysis.

Once the Meeting Magician is involved, nothing moves forward without another session. Want to push a change? That’ll need a “sync.” Urgent bug fix? Better schedule a “discussion.” A decision that could have been made in five minutes now requires four recurring calls, three follow-ups, and a “retro” to debrief why it took so long.

It’s like quicksand: the harder you try to push progress, the deeper you get pulled into their scheduling void.

And when deadlines inevitably slip? Guess who’s first to point out, “We should have had more meetings about this.”

Why They Thrive

Here’s the depressing part: Meeting Magicians thrive in toxic companies because busy looks the same as productive.

A full calendar? Must be important.
A confident voice on a call? Must be leadership material.
A constant stream of jargon? Must be strategy.

No one asks for proof of output. Because proof would reveal the truth that they contribute nothing but delay.

The Moral

Meetings aren’t inherently bad. But when someone’s entire career is built on creating, controlling, and multiplying them, that’s not management. That’s sabotage disguised as strategy.

Real work lives in commits, in docs, in designs, in customer feedback. Not in ninety minutes of “alignment” that leads nowhere.

So the next time you’re trapped on a call while the Meeting Magician waves their buzzword wand, remember: the only thing they’re making disappear is your time.

And the sad reality? In most companies, that’s enough to get promoted.