
Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings? - topshelf
If you&#x27;re a developer for a &#x27;big corp&#x27; how much of your time (% or hrs) a week is spent in meetings?<p>At a new &#x27;big corp&#x27; job, and the amount of meetings seems far larger than other employers. To the point of a meeting every other hour, killing productivity. Hoping to get a better understanding of what would be considered normal&#x2F;average in large organizations.<p>Aside from an all employees gathering, the biggest meeting yet involved two entire teams (~15ppl not all developers) for a full hour of discussion. For comparison, I had to get approval to order a $40 laptop stand, and estimating the meeting to be worth about $600 of salary time called on a whim.<p>EDIT (to clarify what counts):
Agile&#x2F;scrum company, and we don&#x27;t count first day of sprint (spring planning) or last day (sprint reviews).
======
thex10
Had about 10 hours of meetings this week; this is on the heavier side.

Serious question. How do other folks get collaborative work done on big
projects without having meetings to discuss/brainstorm/check in/etc? There
seems to be a strong attitude here of "I am working on $THING, therefore leave
me alone unless it's an emergency," but how does that actually work when
$THING gets complex, malleable, ill-defined, risky, changed, etc?

~~~
ryanSrich
Teams really shouldn't be _that_ big. Having a daily standup should be no more
than 15 minutes, even if you have 10 developers on a single team.

If you're seeing a product evolve in complexity that much during the
development phase I'd look elsewhere for issues. Those high-touch
brainstorming/problem solving phases should be worked out well in advance of
engineering.

If you're speaking to those phases then I've found those are done much better
in person. Even for remote teams (I'm remote as well) getting together in
person for large project kickoffs is vitally important. Collaboration can be
done async, but I'm a firm believer for in person meetings for conceptualizing
those "new" things.

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DIVx0
I'm a dev manager at a mega corp. I spend about 60 - 75% of my day in
meetings.

I don't really mind the volume because when I was a developer I liked working
with managers who tried to keep my calendar as open as possible and only
bringing me into meetings when my opinions were needed.

I try to emulate that now I am a manager and have a sizable staff of
developers. I will typically take meetings that traditionally would have
included a developer or two. I will only bring them in if it's obvious their
input is needed or they specially asked to be more visible to the process.

I'd say developers on my team average about 2 hours a week in scheduled
meetings. There of course are times where breakouts need to happen to discuss
some fine points of such and such thing but such things are part of the job
too.

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sgt101
Lots of arbitary answers : "n hrs are about right"! Why?

I run 3 teams, I delegate obsessively (a my team leads are smarter than me and
know what they are doing better than I do) however I thing people, bosses,
team, politics, now and next. Every week you _MUST_ meet with your boss, your
direct reports, you must meet with your peers and you must have a meeting
about the current work and a meeting about the next work. You also need a to
be doing some political meeting - random folks who want to talk to you and do
things with you/for you/get you to do things.

Team/peers - you will do 2hrs to share everything (min), DR's is an hour each,
I have 3 (and a half but that's another story) boss will be 1/2-1hr (as he/she
will be at their wits end) big boss will be 1/2 hr (so 2 hrs bosses), politics
is 3 hrs. Now is 1/2 hr if all is good.. but there are a lot of nows, so put 2
1/2 hrs min against that, if all is not good budget 5 hrs. Next is 30 mins (at
the beginning of a cycle) to 5 hrs (at the end of a cycle.

Tot it up... 13 -> 20 ish.

They all have a specific purpose for me; they keep me employed and they keep
the pipeline alive. Being less selfish; they keep those who depend on my
engagement happy and they make sure that my company gets the value center that
it invests in in the shape of my team. I deliver on the investment, build
capability and a work stream.

Most of all I do not piss anyone off by being unavailable or unfriendly - for
a manager work is a social activity; if you don't like it you need to look for
another dev gig.

------
rkho
I work for a 'big corp' and had an excessive meeting culture on my old team.

One day a week, half our day was spent in scheduled meetings regardless of
whether or not there was a set agenda in advance. Additionally, daily standups
would last ~15-30 minutes depending on who was rambling for the day on a team
of five.

I would be invited into meetings to discuss speculative things without a set
agenda all the time. After a while, I began to decline meetings in which I
would have no direct impact or could get a good summary of via email.

One "prospective invite" I indirectly received was when a small project I was
working on changed stakeholders, and a new person I hadn't been introduced to
was looped in via email. The project was for an internal tool that less than
five people in the entire company would ever interact with. This new person
who was looped in said something along the lines of:

"_____ (new stakeholder), are you thinking of discussing this in our meeting
next week? If so, should we extend that meeting to cover it? Let's invite
______ (me, OP) so we can talk about it."

I ended up blocking off my entire day with appointments on my calendar that
were just for me working so I wouldn't get invited to as many.

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fragola
Too much! To me, it doesn't matter how short the meetings are, even a short
meeting is disruptive. My new manager is really excellent, though. She has
moved all our meetings to Mondays and it is now very manageable.

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imsofuture
When I worked at a big corp, we talked about this issue at some point.

We started literally putting up a cost clock, that ticked off the running cost
of a meeting. It was surprisingly convincing and motivating for everyone, even
(especially?) our external customers who were previously happy to sit and chat
for hours.

That said, there's a reason I don't work at a 'big corp' anymore :)

~~~
topshelf
We've discussed as a team too, cost clock sounds like an interesting idea.

So far, we've just started filing our calendar with bogus 'private meetings'
so we can get stuff done. I can't see working for 'big corp' type companies
forever, and I do like the experience so far -more learning about 'big corp'
world.

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edsiper2
\- Treasure Data (current): 1.5 hours a week (100 ppl company)

\- Oracle (past): 1.5 hours a week (a few thousands ppl)

Both cases my team and management avoided unnecessary meetings, the 1.5h is
for two meetings: 1:1 and team meeting. It's not up to the company size, but
instead how optimized your team wants to behave.

note: I am in a SW Engineer position. Not sure about Marketing, HR,
Finance..etc.

~~~
topshelf
Thanks, that's more on par from my past experiences.

We're full agile on the software side, so teams are mixed positions with at
least one business-y person (~1000 ppl company).

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sciurus
As a systems engineer at Eventbrite, I'm in 1 to 3 hours a week depending on
what is going on. It's usually on the lower end. That includes my weekly one-
on-one with my manager.

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bitcuration
It's simple. When headcount increases, hierarchy becomes a necessity.
Democracy and collaboration have to pay the price of complexity brought by the
greater number of attendee.

You have to choose one, do what is told, or collaborate on a huge scale, in
other words meetings substituted works.

Beware there are certain personality enjoy meetings and collaboration. To
these characters, the more meeting the better. Collaboration is redefining
their work and value. They consider meeting is the job itself. After all, what
can be done without collaboration.

collaboration has become the number one platform for visibility and getting
upper management attention, translate into promotion and higher pays. After
all, what else matters if you can't get ahead and earn more income.

Meetings are important. Meeting is essential to career advance.

Here it explains the mystery of your problem:
[http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/a62768/higher-iq-
less-s...](http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/a62768/higher-iq-less-social-
interaction/)

------
abritinthebay
That's too many. Unless you're in management, in which case it's not
_uncommon_ but still too much.

If more than 1/4 of your day is in meetings as a developer you're in WAY too
many and honestly... even then if it's an average it's too much (we've all had
meeting heavy days, but a rolling average shouldn't be that much)

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maxxxxx
I am team lead at a big corp and have 5 to 20 hours a week. It's pretty crazy
with a lot of meetings with too many participants without clear goals or
outcomes. It's mainly the meetings with other departments that take a lot of
time without results. Within R&D most meetings are productive.

Line managers seem to spend most of their time in meetings.

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eel
I was a developer at a big corp (financial services industry) until leaving
earlier this year. It steadily grew over four years from around one hour a
week to five hours a week (~13%) of meetings. My first few weeks had a lot
more meetings (trainings), and my last couple weeks had a lot more meetings
(knowledge transfer).

Because I became an expert in some areas, I was routinely invited to meetings
to give my input (which further reinforced opinions). Furthermore, I realized
a lot of non-technical people are not good about responding to emails. If I
needed something from a product manager, chances were better that I could get
it faster by setting up a 30 minute meeting for the following day. If I needed
something from a senior engineer, email was best, of course.

Honestly, given the role I had and the largish size of the company, I never
felt like it was too many meetings.

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cairo140
I work at Google on the main website as an SWE (non-lead). I have about 1.5 to
3 hours of scheduled meetings a week.

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frostmatthew
> To the point of a meeting every other hour

That seems excessive - are you sure that's typical across your company and not
just unique to your team?

Anyway, to answer your question, at VMware I spend about about two hours a
week in meetings. [N.B. I'm a fairly junior engineer, more senior ones
typically spend more time in meetings]

~~~
topshelf
Thanks, excessive was my first thought too.

I let that happen exactly once before bringing it up to my supervisor.
According to him, seems like it's at least across our dept (IT/software dev).

The history sounds like it didn't use to be an issue until they moved into a
giant 'open office' with very few walls/rooms. What normally would've been a
quick conversation in someone's office turns into booking a meeting room, and
the mentality turns into, "Might as well invite XYZ too because now it's a
meeting."

EDIT: typos and clarity

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dal_adamson
I head up product for the data side of EventBoard
([http://eventboard.io](http://eventboard.io)) and what we see is that it is
typical for employees at large companies (>1000 employees) to have around 15
meetings a week, taking up about 10 actual hours, but the standard deviation
is pretty wild.

We ran the numbers for our dev team specifically, and they have ~8.5 meetings
a week, taking up ~4.2 hours. We’re a smaller company; but data shows that on
average, developers spend less time in meetings than the rest of their
collective co-workers. More interestingly, this data shows that each company
has a unique culture around meeting behaviors, and so your meeting schedule
will be a function of your ‘big corp’ collaboration culture. Would love to
talk more if you have questions!

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gpderetta
Software developer working on financey stuff at a big bank. Almost no
meetings, except for a few impromptu unplanned discussions mostly in front of
a coffee. Allegedly we have a 15 min standup every other day, but often we
don't bother. That's common for our team, but not for rest of the bank, where
I understand meeting load is higher. I believe that my manager spends a lot of
time in meetings.

A couple of jobs ago I worked at a _large_ software company you definitely
have heard about. I estimate that meetings took at least 30% of my time,
sometimes more, this with my then manager shielding us from as much of outside
interruption as possible, otherwise I would estimate I would have spent 250%
of my time in meeting (not exaggerating). Doing the most trivial thing
required days or weeks of planning.

edit: fix sentences

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Sir_Cmpwn
A meeting every other hour is definitely NOT normal. The most meetingsy places
I've worked at had no more than a standup every day and longer meetings
usually no more than once a week. You should try to bring some change about in
the organization, or find a different place to work.

~~~
_RPM
My "manager" for my past summer 2016 internship had a meeting every hour or
every other hour.

~~~
realbarack
Not unusual for managers to have that many meetings—but yeah, really bad for
an engineer.

~~~
_RPM
I had a single meeting with him the second week I got there. Then one when I
left. I thought it might have been a good management practice to follow with
your team face to face every other week or so.

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pynerds
Meetings Are Toxic For those times when you absolutely must have a meeting
(this should be a rare event), stick to these simple rules:

    
    
        Set a 30 minute timer. When it rings, meeting's over. Period.
        Invite as few people as possible.
        Never have a meeting without a clear agenda.

Source:[https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Meetings_Are_Toxic.ph...](https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Meetings_Are_Toxic.php)

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Jemmeh
I feel pretty lucky, meetings are rare for me, just shoot an IM. "I'm working
on XYZ, almost done. What do you want me to work on next?" or "Hey Bob are you
done with that test environment" etc. I might go have one-on-ones maybe once
or twice a week if it's too long/complex a conversation for IM. And those
don't usually take long, maybe 15 minutes?

That said I'm a mid-level dev and I know the more senior devs & boss are in
meetings more often working out how things will work with other departments
and such.

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arenaninja
I work for a small corp working on re-writing an existing codebase and
migrating all historical data.

This was a heavy week, I have 14.5 hours of scheduled of meetings (out of 40
worked, so ~36%). Some meetings went over, so I estimate I can easily add
between 1 and 2 extra hours. I ended up having an emergency so I lost an
additional 3 hours, but that's extraordinary circumstance.

Last week was lighter, at 5 hours.

If you don't count stand-ups, take 3 hours away from each week.

~~~
topshelf
We're agile too, and don't count stand-ups or sprint reviews. I wonder if this
is more related to agile/scrum vs waterfall?

Thanks, I'll add that to the original post.

~~~
dasmoth
>>> I wonder if this is more related to agile/scrum vs waterfall?

I'd like to hope those aren't the only two options!

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khedoros
Big company, about 2-3 hours per week. I'm in a mostly-releng role. Two team
status meetings per week, one status meeting for another project, where I'm
the liaison for build+release.

In a previous role at the same company, my meeting load varied between maybe 1
and 8 hours, depending on how many things involving other teams I was working
on and how controversial the design decisions for that project were.

~~~
monknomo
What's a releng role?

~~~
khedoros
Release engineering. More on the operations side than the development side.

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winteriscoming
Great time to be asking this question. I am in the middle of a weekly call
right now that has spanned more than 2 hours now and we are discussing almost
the same "we will do this, we are doing this" kind of things that we talked of
in the last call a couple of days back. I wish I could just lock myself and
get some coding done.

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malisper
I have two one on one meetings each week which together wind up being one to
two hours a week. The CEO of my company's philosophy is that having more than
two engineers meet together is usually a waste of time. This is for a small
company of ~40 people.

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thex10
If you think that's excessive you should try working for big government...

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mcdevhammer
Software developer working at a fortune 500 financial company. 30 mins stand
up every day, 1 hour retro every week and maybe 1 or 2 hours a week of
impromptu meetings on top of that.

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dasmoth
Smallish company. Between 3 and 8 hours per week. Even the low end of that
ends up seeming pretty disruptive. At least I'm currently managing to avoid
standups.

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zwieback
Working at big corp in R&D

\- about 2hrs/week for larger meetings

\- about 1hr/day in Skype meetings where I can tune in half-way

\- about 1hr/day in working meetings with 1 or 2 other engineers

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bcherny
Small company, 0 hours of meetings. We resolve everything over Github issues,
email, Slack, or in person conversations.

~~~
dasmoth
Where do you draw the line between "in person conversations" and meetings?

~~~
bcherny
In person meeting = talk through a problem with a colleague for 5-10 mins. Not
scheduled, not in a meeting room, and unlikely to have >2 participants.

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samblr
Scrum meetings and all those meetings which come before and after - how many
of you dislike these ?

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monknomo
I'm in government, and I spend 5-7hrs/week in various meetings

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hackuser
> How much of your time is spent in meetings?

Does time spent on HN count?

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swah
<1%

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orky56
60-70% of my time as PM.

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dominotw
I would say about 5%.

