90 minutes is wild.

Observation: there are multiple languages spoken at any given tech company. At least two; sometimes as much as twenty. Refinement of that observation: leadership always speak a different language from the people building the product.

The biggest problem with basically every all-hands I've been to is that nobody explains why I should care. Hey, the leader of an organization that I'm not in is talking about a thing. Maybe I have heard of this thing or vaguely know what it is, but never more than that. The presentation includes some assumptions about my knowledge that are very wrong, and (more importantly) is in an entirely different language than I speak.

I'm not even talking about different dialects of engineering-ese. The presentations are given in product language, or sales language, or marketing language. It goes beyond using words I don't usually use: the presentations demonstrate that this person thinks about the company, our product, our use cases, or our customers differently than I do.

Oh, and also: I'm busy. Sometimes I'm overwhelmed; other times I feel like I have the complexity mostly under control, but I've always got a lot on my plate.

So someone speaking a language I don't understand is talking about something I've barely heard of. My director is nodding along like this this is a fascinating discussion. My peers are all on Slack or talking with Claude Code or coding themselves. I have a decision to make: do I lock in and take the effort to really understand what this person is saying, or get back to my job? The CEO usually gets that attention. EVPs tend to start rabbiting on about stuff I don't have much context for using language I'm not familiar with. I'm a busy guy. Zoom gets backgrounded and I'm working on the task that completion of is necessary to exceed expectations on my next performance review.

(You know what isn't even going to be mentioned in my next performance review? Whatever the EVP on stage is currently talking about)

So even if the information is interesting and maybe you can argue that it SHOULD be relevant to me and I SHOULD be paying attention, remember how busy I am, and how hard it is to sustain attention for something that's hard to pay attention to. Unless your speakers are conveying information so critically relevant that busy engineers are going to say "oh dang, I need to hear this"...well, everything after the first 20 - 30 minutes could have been an email.