
Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly? - stackdestroyer
Hi HN - curious to understand how much time engineering leaders spend in meetings.  Thinking engineering managers, directors and VP&#x27;s...<p>Extra credit:  What&#x27;s the longest duration meeting you regularly have?  (For OP, it&#x27;s a twice monthly 4 hour meeting with ALL product and engineering sr. mgrs and directors - FML)
======
Jemaclus
I'm a director at my company. I spend all day, every day in meetings, with the
exception of Friday afternoons. I typically spend that time just thinking
about everything that happened in the week and writing down thoughts and
things to deal with for the next week. I'd say 75% of those are pre-planned a
week or more in advance, and the rest just pop up as people want to talk to
me. I often just have to reply "If you can find time in my schedule, do so and
we'll talk."

I don't have time to code these days. I don't really miss it that much, but
it's nice when I do get a chance to write something.

About 1/4 of them are 1:1s, another 1/4 are leadership meetings similar
reactions. I'd say another 1/4 are project planning, kickoffs, and checkins.
The last 1/4 are just ad-hoc one-off meetings, often to deal with an emergency
or personnel issue.

I don't mind it, generally. I actually like the face-to-face interactions with
people and enjoy most of the meetings. The problem I have with it is the whole
"meeting that could have been an email" thing. Especially status update
meetings. Huge waste of time.

The other problem is that I do have a number of direct reports and I'm doing
them a disservice by not having time to interact with them more directly. I'm
in the process of hiring some more managers to take that load off my back.

~~~
nilkn
Many companies criminally underhire talented technical PMs and team
assistants. The latter in particular are fantastic and you’d be amazed just
how much can be handed off to them. You can completely transform how much time
you have for people by investing more in these areas.

The phrase “executive assistant” is just one huge mistake. It makes the role
sound like a secretary to one person, which makes people think they shouldn’t
have one until they’re overburdened to the point of being completely
ineffective at their job. In fact, even small- or medium-sized teams can
benefit immensely by having a team assistant who can handle tons of logistics
and odds and ends for everyone on the team.

~~~
lazyant
what tasks would this team assistant do that a team leader/manager is not
doing now? I'm a team lead and I consider myself a facilitator/server of my
team mostly.

~~~
nilkn
It's not about doing things that you're not doing. It's about delegating some
of what you do so that you can focus on a smaller set of tasks and do them
better than you currently do. It's about elevating the quality of everything
that's going on from the small to the big and making it easier to grow if
that's the trajectory you're on.

Scheduling meetings and aiding in calendar management for everyone. Running
meetings and taking notes. Collecting and assembling agenda items in advance
for any and all meetings. Setting up and handling logistics for team events.
Managing team-related documentation on the company wiki so it's always up-to-
date. Helping schedule any phone calls or meetings you need with candidates,
partners in industry, customers, etc. Catering food for customer meetings. If
someone's going to give a presentation, making sure everything is in order,
setting up and running A/V, recording the presentation if desired, etc.
Keeping track of annual review, six-month, and quarterly check-in cycles and
helping you make sure you're hitting every single checkbox for all of your
people. I could keep going but after a certain point many of the duties end up
being specific to your team or organization. In general, though, there are
probably many things you do that don't necessarily require your specialized
expertise and knowledge.

There's some overlap with what PMs do, but generally this person is focused on
the team itself instead of specific projects. You might feel that's what
you're supposed to do, but once the team is big enough you'll find yourself in
a situation where you don't have time for the people on the team anymore -- or
at least not as much as you feel like you should.

Offloading this stuff frees you up to focus on people, hiring, retention,
unexpected urgent things of a variety of natures, and engineering (maybe not
writing code but working with folks to make sure everything that's going on
makes sense, meshes together, is aligned with broader objectives, etc.). If
you run a larger organization and have managers under you, it frees up your
managers to do the same. They'll spend more time with their people and less
time on logistics.

------
nirvanis
I have around 18 hours per week of prebooked meeting time (1:1s, team
meetings, planning, 1:1 with manager, sync meetings with different cross
initiatives, interviews, candidate screening, etc).

I have observed that my biggest productivity killer are not those meetings (I
try to make them useful for me and I try to make sure they are useful for
everyone). The biggest problem comes when the time around them is very
fragmented. For me, a week with 30 hours of meetings can be more productive
than a week with 15 hours if I manage to defragment the time around them.

I have recently worked with my team and other peers to put an effort to
defragment my calendar by batching predictable meetings together (this is a
process I repeat every 6-12 months) and I feel an immediate boost in focus.

My rule of thumb is trying to make sure I get daily focus slots as close as
possible to length X where X is:

X = ( (40 hours) - (prebooked hours in meetings) / (5 weekdays) )

In my case (40-18)/5 = 4.4 hours. I currently have two 4-hour slots monday and
tuesday, a 5 hour slot on wednesday and a 3 hour slot on thursdays. Not bad.
But that degrades quickly!

~~~
forkexec
Another technique is to insist on an agenda before any meeting, both for time
to prepare and to see if it's pertinent, or the default answer is "no."

Standing meetings are 99% a waste of time, usually about someone/s trying to
climb the career stripper pole.

~~~
MiracleUser
Standing meetings are also used to force procrastinators to report in
frequently enough that they stop relying on "secret" all-nighters at the end
of the week to get their work done

~~~
daseiner1
i am both the driver of my team moving to 15-minute stand ups, and the dude
“secretly” pulling the occasional heroic all nighters. peak cognitive
dissonance rn

~~~
samatman
hah.

Do you actually get standups resolved in under 15 minutes more than half the
time?

If so, what's your secret?

~~~
jakebellacera
We do, in a team of 10. We have a very strict rule of being prepared before
standup and going through the standup list quickly (< 1 min each). We also
make sure to keep our list of tasks focused. Any sidebar discussions are taken
until the ending of the meeting and all stakeholders who care can be part of
it.

I think for us at least, just having the team all aligned on wanting to finish
the meeting as fast as possible helps keep it running quickly and smoothly.

------
pgm8705
One 90 minute leadership meeting a week. Generally, that will be it, unless
there is another issue that requires hashing something out. For my engineering
team, I try to keep "meetings" at 0. Well organized asynchronous communication
with the occasional slack discussion keeps things running pretty smoothly.

~~~
antipaul
Terrific man. Glad to see folks be creative and disciplined against meeting
culture.

Around here, everyone complains about meetings, yet few do anything about it.

Its just easier to go to meetings, instead of thinking hard to reduce others’
time with google docs, async discussion, etc.

And those who creatively push back against meetings fear being called “hard to
work with”

------
celim307
At one point I had 3 or 4 mandatory meetings a week, totaling 9 or 10 hours a
week.

I think it was a side effect of the scrum coaches having little work to do, so
we would have planning meetings with the whole team, even if nothing in your
domain was on the schedule for the meeting. We also re-defined primative agile
concepts every week, as in we would have to debate what a bug, task, or chore
meant, every week.

When I raised the concept of meetings only involving those who it concerned,
or even better, letting a workflow develop organically, I was accused of being
lazy and not committed. In a lot of manager heavy orgs, the culture is that
meetings are what productivity is measured by, and more visible.

~~~
xvedejas
Those are very long meetings! I consider myself lucky to work somewhere that
30 minute meetings are the norm, and if longer ones are needed we try 45
minutes before taking up a full hour. Being strict about ending on time
encourages efficient use of everyone's time.

------
collyw
Too many, and nicely spaced out to maximize the loss of productivity from
context switching.

------
googler38714
Needs "Ask HN" in subject line.

I generally have about 5 meetings a week, totaling around 3 hours. I don't
enjoy meetings, but they seem somewhat productive and the burden isn't too
bad.

------
masonhensley
Don't mean to hijack the thread hope the following is helpful once some
replies roll in. I've been wondering about meetings + tooling + project
management styles, etc too.

Here's a rough survey, should be able to see result graphs afterward
submission:

[https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfUkV2P1VxAnRSD88eU...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfUkV2P1VxAnRSD88eUtzIzRGjVt5JWzmyB8CdHvmwMAwbCng/viewform?usp=sf_link)

Raw data results link for community to look at:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x59q4CbEGOeYirskJ7Ac...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x59q4CbEGOeYirskJ7AcliGQ7CsKAvFOI1E7C-2aELk/edit#gid=616192040)

===

Main Q: ~16 hrs/week (had about 10 1:1's/week for a while)

Bonus Q: 2hrs

------
vosper
It makes sense to also post your role if you're posting your meeting hours
here.

Because if you're a VP or senior director then yeah, your life is probably
meetings and that's normal. If you're an engineering team lead spending 16
hours a week in meetings, well maybe not so much.

Without that info your post doesn't really tell us much, other than some
people have more meetings than others :)

------
castillar76
It's pretty horrendous. It got to the point in the fall that I had a couple
days a week on average that were 100% meetings, wall to wall. I finally went
through and blocked out my lunch hour and all of Friday, shoving meetings
around to crowd the rest of the week so that I could have some uninterrupted
time at least once a week to catch up on all the stuff I couldn't do while
sitting in meetings. Even then, I still have to make exceptions into that for
last-minute meetings, although at least then it's my choice to do it.

One thing I'm trying to get better about is not attending all of the
weekly/bi-weekly "let's just check in with each other" meetings. If I'm not
attending I let them know so they can pull me in if needed, but otherwise I
make those meetings more of the "if I'm not actively engaged in deep work,
I'll be there" priority level. FOMO is real, but I'm combating it with the
satisfaction of seeing servers up and code running. :)

------
letientai299
2h _3 for interview and report, then 2h_ ~4 for other kind of meetings (sync,
feature discussion, 1-1), then some mentoring sessions, 30m * 3-5.

~16h meeting every weeks. To be honest, I'm very much dislike that, but people
seems to love talking more than writing detailed docs.

~~~
georgeecollins
There is also the issue that some people don't read things. Plus, when people
don't read something there isn't very good feedback that they aren't paying
attention. If you have a meeting, you know that the information you wanted to
get across is being transmitted and you have a way to quickly detect if people
aren't paying attention or they don't understand.

People do like talking and lots of meetings are unnecessary. But I think you
can deal with the issue better if you get into the heads of the people calling
the meetings and figure out alternatives that meet their needs as well.

------
falcolas
Enterprise Architect: 11 mandatory hours this week, and a number of regular
meetings have been canceled. Optional meetings amount to around 7 hours this
week; pretty light.

At my busiest, it is closer to 30 hours a week, and my longest regular meeting
is a quarterly planning offsite that's ~3x 8 hour days.

EDIT: I can't say that I resent any of these, since they're simply a part of
the job. My role has a component that I have come to call 'state
synchronization'. I act as a bridge between multiple groups by syncing up
technical knowledge, status, and blockers between the various engineering
groups (and other technical leadership) who I work with.

Standups work great for small groups, but they don't scale well beyond 10-15
people.

~~~
jpincheira
Exactly, we say the same thing to people using our product [1]. And the same
falls true for team compositions. If you have a 10+ team is already hard to
work "as a team" like that. And standup meetings becoming bloated are a strong
sign that you need to change and / or split that team and responsibilities.

[1] [https://standups.io](https://standups.io)

------
city41
I am an engineer (ie, IC), and I currently have about 8-12 meetings per week.
At my worst I've had over 20 meetings in a week, and in a previous position
(but same company), I had about 15 meetings per week. A decent chunk of these
meetings are interviews, which are two meetings each (the interview itself,
plus the debrief).

I'd say anywhere from 5-15 hours per week in meetings. But the real killer is
the dead little "pockets" between the meetings. Hard to get any real, deep
work done when your day is chopped into pieces.

------
muzani
As an engineering manager, it seems like the full time job is either meetings
or communicating the results of those meetings to someone who can act on them.
I've done some mixed roles, and I think that's the only balance that makes
sense. It's also good for a manager to have empty time (i.e. they shouldn't be
expected to write code or whatever).

Meetings themselves aren't so bad, but when I was a manager, our meetings
would require a half hour drive somewhere, or going up to the 40th floor of
some building, preparing slides, charts, and so on. Sometimes you need to
bring in an expert/consultant/trainer and brief her on the project prior to
the meeting.

Most of the work is around those meetings. You can have 20 hours of meetings
scheduled per week, and that translates to 30-40 hours of time blocked off and
10-20 more hours of writing reports, updating Jira, answering emails, taking
screenshots, and so on. If you've got a remote team, that's even more
workload.

The longest meeting we've had was about 3 days long, 9-5 straight UI/UX
workshop. The client balked at this at first - they have their share of
meetings already, but afterwards everyone agreed it was 100% worth it. It was
the only way to get a lot of stakeholders in the room, and it killed a lot of
assumptions - we had UX requests that were not technically possible, UX that
didn't fit user behavior, underestimated the robustness of some hacks that a
dev/now engineering manager made 3 years ago, and so on.

------
jpincheira
Me and my cofounder have only two sync meetings per week. For the rest we
dogfood our own async video product [1] as we are 9 hours away in time zones.
He’s in SF and I’m in Germany at the moment.

We believe in that most of things can be communicated asynchronously. For
those things that strictly need to be address synchronously we keep those too
slots in the week.

[1] [https://standups.io](https://standups.io)

------
trustfundbaby
Was doing really well on a previous team with just one (usually) or two
meetings a week, got assigned to a new team with a new meeting happy PM, and
now I'm lucky if I have less than 3-4 meetings a week. It's driving me fucking
insane. Theres a meeting for everything, and dude spreads communication out
across several email chains, slack groups and channels and even google groups.

------
pionar
I have 2 recurring meetings per week, standups MWF, and design sessions (I'm
in software architecture). Other than that, really nothing, besides the
occasional quarterly department all-hands.

My longest meetings are the design sessions. It's myself, another architect,
and our director for 2 hours twice a week. However, I don't consider that a
meeting as much as a productive working session.

------
gshdg
18 hrs/wk of 1-1s incl. w/ reports, peers, and my own manager. 2 hrs/wk
staff/leadership mtgs. 4-6 hrs/wk project mtgs. 4-6 hrs/wk ad-hoc mtgs.

That makes... ~30 hrs/wk of meetings. Yup, that just about matches my
calendar.

Longest: the 1.5 hrs my manager and I have blocked off for our 1-1s. It
doesn't always run that long, but we also often run out of time.

Edit: Role is VP Engineering

------
HenryBemis
I usually have 30 or 60mins meetings totalling 2-3 hours per day. When I am
the organizer I always make them 20 and 45 minutes respectively. This is a
life saver for people that have meetings back to back, and at the same time we
try to get things done fast. If we run out of time then I set up another
20mins meeting with even fewer people.

------
tstrimple
I'm now full time in architecture in a large international finance company
which is a very different environment than what I'm used to. I'm lucky to have
8 hours a week which _aren 't_ scheduled meetings. Yes, that means I usually
have at least 32 hours of schedule meetings during the 8-5 week.

~~~
stackdestroyer
How many hours a week do you spend working?

~~~
tstrimple
To do my role properly without additional hires to support me? I'd probably
need 50-60. However, at the moment they are paying me for 40 so I'm working
40. Phone notifications off, no email response after hours, etc.

------
manca
I had 7 meetings in total today, starting at 8am. Almost the entire work day
(8 hours) spent in meetings. I am principal engineer and usually have say in
many technical discussions and decisions.

But on a light day I have around 2-3 meetings a day. One of them usually being
an interview with the candidate (either phone or onsite).

------
flancian
I'm an engineering manager with a team of six and a cross-functional project.
I seem to average 15 hours of scheduled meetings a week, plus impromptu one
offs (firefighting, escalations). I find it quite draining: meetings and email
don't leave a lot of time for project work. I like my job, though.

------
wexxy
Support engineer at my current role. All meetings are pretty ad-hoc as current
issues necessitate. On call rotates for a week every 4~ weeks, and there's a
15 minute systems status meeting every morning. Most days that's my only
meeting.

That sounds miserable and unproductive OP :'(

------
jedberg
> For OP, it's a twice monthly 4 hour meeting with ALL product and engineering
> sr. mgrs and directors - FML

This sounds pretty dysfunctional. Is that a productive meeting?

I was involved in an "all leadership" type meeting that was heading in that
direction, and then we switched to a memo based meeting.

Everyone wrote their update in a Google Doc, each team had a section. The
expectation was that you read the memo before coming to the meeting.

Then we had an agenda with specific time blocks for each topic, and the
expectation was that you came for the topics that were relevant to you, and it
was totally acceptable to come and go in the middle.

The meeting was scheduled for three hours, but almost no one came for the
entire three hours, and usually we didn't have enough topics to fill it all
anyway.

~~~
jcims
OPs meeting sounds like one of those fixes where shit really got out of whack
because of real or perceived communication issues, so now there's a global
interlock and no excuses. It will fizzle eventually.

~~~
stackdestroyer
Not fizzling yet...more than 1 year in...

/me NEEDS MORE FIZZLE

------
Lightbody
I hate to be _that guy_ , but if you're looking for a simple way to defend
yourself from too many meetings and/or conflicts, my startup might be
interesting to you.

Our first product,
[https://lifeworkcalendar.com](https://lifeworkcalendar.com), blocks out your
work calendar when you have personal events. And our next product (coming
soon), [https://reclaimai.com](https://reclaimai.com), does a whole bunch more
to align your calendar to _your_ priorities.

Email us if you're interested in a demo -- I love the Hacker News crowd and
our target audience is busy managers/directors/VPs in product orgs :)

------
romanovcode
Head of Engineering of a not-so-big e-commerce company, I try to do as little
as possible so unless there are some scheduled meetings my standard meeting
schedule looks like this.

Once per week with CTO and once per month with every developer + QA + DevOps.

------
bwb
We are working toward sharing the data we have and it will show how much time
engineering makers and managers spend in meetings. For fun we built a free app
that shows individuals their meetings stats and how they compare within their
company. And, now we are working to showcase that anonymized data and what we
learned.

Example report here: [https://app.shepherd.com/personal-
report/sample](https://app.shepherd.com/personal-report/sample)

If you get a chance to look let me know what you think!

We hope to have the report on how it looks big picture in maybe 2 or 3 months.
I'll post on Show HN when its done.

------
peterhunt
I manage managers and engineers at twitter. Most weeks are 25-30 hours of
meetings.

------
dastbe
Senior Software Engineer

* ~2 hours of 1-1s with mentors/mentees/manager (manager is weekly, others are biweekly)

* 1 hour team operations meeting

* 2 hour company-wide operations meeting that I don't have to buy enjoy attending

* 1 hour sprint planning every other week

* 1 hour demos every other week

* Another 4-10 hours worth of ad-hoc meetings throughout the week

So somewhere around 10-15 hours worth of meetings, but all of the pre-planned
meetings are either very early in the day or very late in the day. The worst
weeks are when the ad-hoc meetings go way over 10 hours (several design cycles
lining up or several emergent emergencies that need attention), but otherwise
I really enjoy it.

------
piptastic
Architect. \- currently no regularly scheduled meetings.

Sometimes I'll have a recurring meeting for a particular project, but even
those end up being useless as we talk about the project all the time outside
of the meetings, and we end up cancelling half of the recurring ones.

On average I'll have around 3 hours of non-recurring meetings per week
(although some weeks have none).

That said, there's probably ~2 hours a day of impromptu conversing with
colleagues on work topics that eats up a lot of time.

The rest of the company has the normal "waste half of the week" set of agile
meetings that they attend.

------
jakebellacera
I have bi-weekly 30 minute 1:1s with my chapter lead and manager. I also have
a 30 minute sync every week on each of my project(s) I'm leading and daily
standups with my squad.

All in all, I'm probably spending anywhere from 2-5 hours per week on
meetings, on average.

Our organization is pretty distributed across a variety of timezones, so the
expectation of having face-to-face meetings is not always feasible. That means
project spec reviews and other planning-related discussions are typically
performed asynchronously over Confluence and Slack.

------
mccolin
I'm a technical project lead at a small consulting firm. I manage the
engineering efforts of two independent projects with team sizes ranging from
two to eight engineers.

I have about 8 hours of regularly scheduled meetings (standups, sprint
reviews, delivery meetings) with 2-4 hours of "as needed" meetings (client
sync, etc.) in a given week, with 1-2 hours of company meetings, too. This
does not count one-off help sessions and "fire fights."

------
up_and_up
I am an Engineering Manager at a large Startup

I have 18 meetings a week.

I try my hardest to stack them all onto Mon and Wed, leaving the other 3 days
as meeting free as possible.

~~~
foob4r
What do you do on the 3 days

~~~
up_and_up
Async issue review. Code reviews. Read and respond to customer input.

------
SergeAx
> how much time engineering leaders spend in meetings

Most of it, actually, if I include 1:1 meetings and job interviews too.

Regarding duration: we have an unwritten rule that default meeting for 2-4
people duration is 25 minutes. If I schedule a longer meeting - I should
provide a reason.

Meeting longer than an hour and a half are counterproductive, average person
just cannot keep concentrating on conversation for that long.

------
tyfon
I'm not a direct manager for IT but I am involved in a lot of projects at our
IT department. I used to be pestered into useless meetings all the time but
now I just reject them and email people over issues that should really only
take 5 minutes to cover.

Now I am down to one fixed meeting a week and I sometimes accept a couple more
if the topic actually needs several people in the room to discuss.

I hate meetings!

------
kevstev
At a place I considered very dysfunctional I once had a record of 8.5 hours of
meetings scheduled for the day. I went to my manager and said "we have way too
many meetings" and he replied back "if you don't like meetings maybe you don't
want to be a manager..."

Where I am now (generally quite functional IMHO)- I have a few monthly
meetings that are an hour in length.

------
freetanga
I would say 20 meetings per week. 10x 45min 1:1 with my team 1x 120min weekly
area steerco

The remainder are not mine, forced to assist. Mostly 60 mins each. I try to
join via Skype from my desk and shoot emails while people drone on.

My tip: never give more than 45 mins in your schedule. Your reports will focus
more and you can use those 15 mins to take notes, to-dos

------
tails4e
I'd say I'm lucky to get an hour a day that's free to actually do engineering
work, 3 hours would be a godsend, and rare. Its definitely hard to be
effective as an engineer with such little time to deeply engage. Ive sometimes
thought about booking a meeting with myself to go get work done!

~~~
doitLP
Do it. It’s the only way I get free slots on my calendar.

------
Havoc
Not engineering side...

About 5 per week - mostly 30 mins. Beyond that it's personal style: I much
prefer 1:1s to catchups over a coffee so not much meetings happening my side.
If something is inconvenient I just skip it - nobody's really on my case about
meetings.

>What's the longest duration meeting you regularly have?

1 hr

------
__d
Engineer: In my current job, I have _one_ 30 minute meeting a week, in a
company of 100 staff, and maybe 20 developers.

At worst, in a previous job, where I was the system architect, I probably
spent close to 20 hours a week in scheduled meetings. My longest regularly
scheduled meeting was about 2 hours.

------
danschumann
Once per day 15 minutes, once per week a couple hours. The rest of the time I
get up and go to work.

------
wintorez
Unnecessary meetings are the bane of my existence. I want to suggest a hack to
shorten meetings, and eliminate unnecessary ones: remove all chairs from
meeting rooms. All meetings have to be done while standing up. No sitting on
the floor or leaning against the wall.

~~~
lazyasciiart
This idea is what created "standups" in scrum.

------
falafel
Chief Architect.

About 15h per week, or almost half my time basically.

* ~1h daily for status meetings

* ~2h twice a week for project coordination and discussion

* ~4h once a week for overarching architecture decisions across all projects

* Various other 30min to 1h meetings depending on the week

It's terribly inefficient, but I cannot change it; believe me, I tried.

------
lukethomas
I'm the founder of a startup with 6 employees (FT/contractors) and have one
1-1 meeting every week (30 min) + a "coffee shop session" for an hour where we
shoot the breeze and talk about non-work stuff.

------
lbruder
Infrastructure architect: Five 20 minute "standups" per day, plus a seven hour
meeting once a month. Add about 20 hour-long ad hoc meetings a month. Just let
me do actual work dammit.

~~~
Redsquare
Five 20 minute "standups" per day....#fragile

------
optimuspaul
I work at a small non-profit teal organization. we have a daily standup for
the engineers, but other than that meetings are rare for me. I have to go on
HN to get my fix for being distracted.

------
edoceo
My company does 6 team meetings/week. Daily 30min with dev&support. Friday
it's 60min while we review the week. Not counting any ad-hoc or scheduled 1on1

------
ravenstine
I encounter about 1.5 hours of meetings per week. At my last job, that was
probably around 3 hours on average. I feel fortunate after reading the
comments here.

------
jdlyga
Daily standup, weekly Kanban board review, weekly review of PR's, twice per
month team retro. And that's about it. And it's a big company too.

------
lgunsch
~3.5 hours. One 2 hour weekly department meeting. 10 ~ 15 minute standup each
day, and finally a 45 minute sprint review & sprint planning meeting.

------
pmiller2
Senior software engineer: around 2 hours of regular meetings, plus a maybe 1
hour of ad-hoc/non-recurring meetings per week.

------
Aeolun
I’m a tech lead. If I go to all my scheduled meetings I’ll be in them about 3
hours of the day.

My longest regular meeting is 1 hour though.

------
ethanwillis
At least 5 hours per week. ~1 hour long standups each day in the middle of the
day. Then ~monthly 1 on 1s for an hour.

~~~
icedchai
Those "standups" sound like pure hell. How many people are on your team? You
should be complaining regularly until the situation changes.

~~~
ethanwillis
Only 2 other devs and 1 sysadmin. I've only been in this job for a few months
so it hasn't worn on me yet, but it is definitely starting to.

~~~
icedchai
At least your team is correctly sized, so there is some hope.

At a previous company, we had 12 people in a standup. It took about an hour.
(I didn't stay there long.)

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raztogt21
Two weekly meetings (15-30 minutes) with my current employer. And a single
weekly 30 minutes meeting for a contractor.

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rajacombinator
I can’t think of a time I’ve had a meeting with more than 3 people that was
useful at all.

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blunte
Senior backend Dev, small team, 60ish person department:

Daily stand-up.

Weekly department.

Weekly refinement.

One or more demos per week.

One or more random meetings per week.

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dusted
We have at minimum 1 per day, the daily standup, sometimes more.

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elwesties
Engineering Manager - Normally around 4-5hrs a day of meetings.

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pensatoio
I'm a lead engineer for a market research data ETL & enrichment platform.

Weekly, I have...

* 1on1's with my developers and peers (30min per person, 4-6 per week)

* Standup (2x 15 min)

* Engineering leads meeting (1x 30min)

* SRE catchup (1x 1hr)

Other misc meetings...

* Engineering leads kvetch (unstructured 1hr every 2wks, cut short if there's nothing on our minds)

* My squad's retro (45min every 3wks)

* My squad's grooming (1hr every 3wks)

* Platform retro (multiple squads, 1hr every 1mo)

* BI-Quarterly KPI/OKR Planning & Review (1-2hr every 1.5 months)

* Skip-level manager meeting (1hr every 3mo)

Wednesdays are my no-meetings-slash-deep-work day. I probably invest between
1-3 hours in pairing, by request. I clean my calendar _aggressively_.

tl;dr ~5 hours of meetings per week

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anewguy9000
too damn many

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planetzero
I once worked for a small startup with 5 people and a boss obsessed with scrum
and that only had experience in big corporations.

It was a remote development job with lots of meetings:

-1 hour standups daily -twice per week, 3 hour planning meetings on top of the daily standup -Friday we had a 'watercooler' meeting for an hour after the standup, where we were supposed to 'tell jokes' or 'share a funny story'. Since most of the developers were overseas and from different countries/cultural backgrounds, it usually ended up being very awkward. -twice/month we had a 4+ hour big-picture meeting on top of the daily standup

Sometimes, I would bill over half my weekly hours as meetings.

The strange part is that with all of these meetings, the tickets that would be
assigned to me would be vague or filled with missing information. Even when I
would have a 1-1 call with the boss to explain the ticket, she would talk in
circles and could never give me the exact information I needed.

When I completed the ticket and didn't read her mind, things would have to be
re-written.

I was eventually replaced by an overseas worker from India (the boss told me I
was too expensive and she could hire someone from India for much less) and the
company lost most of its investors within a few years.

