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.
Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
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Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#12I 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.
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#13> 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
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#14I 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.…
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.
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#15I 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.
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#16Had 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?
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#17I can help answer a lot of these questions. EventBoard.io is able to provide a ton of data & insights to better understand how your rooms are being used.
Zach Culverwell zach.culverwell@eventboard.io 415-813-3772
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#18If you think that's excessive you should try working for big government...
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#19<1%
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#20I 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.