Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?

31 pointstopshelf49 comments

If you're a developer for a 'big corp' how much of your time (% or hrs) a week is spent in meetings?

At a new 'big corp' 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/average in large organizations.

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.

EDIT (to clarify what counts): Agile/scrum company, and we don't count first day of sprint (spring planning) or last day (sprint reviews).

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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?

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.

Asynchronous communication along with a culture that ensures its used.

Times that you're working on $THING and a matter related to it legitimately requires you and n other people dropping what you're doing to talk about it synchronously are very rare.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

- 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.

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).

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

> 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]

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

I head up product for the data side of EventBoard (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!

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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

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.

What's a releng role?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Isn't an in person conversation a meeting?

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

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

> How much of your time is spent in meetings?

Does time spent on HN count?

<1%

60-70% of my time as PM.

I would say about 5%.

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)

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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