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Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

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Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

#101

Post by stackdestroyer »

jcims wrote: post #75
jedberg wrote: post #61

> 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 be…

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.

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

/me NEEDS MORE FIZZLE

Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

#102

Post by stackdestroyer »

tstrimple wrote: post #26

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.

How many hours a week do you spend working?

Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

#103

Post by [deleted] »

stackdestroyer wrote: post #101
jcims wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not fizzling yet...more than 1 year in... /me NEEDS MORE FIZZLE

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

#104

Post by jpincheira »

falcolas wrote: post #15

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 th…

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

Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

#105

Post by tstrimple »

stackdestroyer wrote: post #102
tstrimple wrote: post #26

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.

How many hours a week do you spend working?

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.

Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

#106

Post by Jemaclus »

castillar76 wrote: post #68
Jemaclus wrote: post #58

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 c…

This was what my old boss had to deal with a couple years ago. With 18 direct reports, there simply wasn't enough time for 1:1s with everyone regularly, and he had some entry-level folks that really needed the weekly attention. He finally got management to fund the structure underneath him, divided the org into service groups, and added managers. It was a difficult transition for the people being moved into those gro…

Good feedback. I've already brought it up with my team. So far, most of them appear to be fine with it, whereas two people seem very upset about it. I'm still trying to figure out how to handle them, but it really does have to happen. Frustrating for sure, but will definitely be as sensitive as I possibly can.

Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

#107

Post by Jemaclus »

darkerside wrote: post #79
Jemaclus wrote: post #58

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 c…

Honest question about those status emails. When do you find time to read them if you're literally in meetings all day?

I think I didn't communicate that part well. I don't get status emails because the people who should be sending the emails are holding meetings instead :) These are "should have been emails" meetings. For example, you don't need to spend 30 minutes in a room when there's a status update. You could send an email instead and I could read it at my leisure. That's 30 minutes I don't need to spend in a meeting. If I have 6 of those a week, that's 3 hours of my week back.

TL;DR people should send status update emails instead of holding meetings whenever possible

Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

#108

Post by Jemaclus »

ivalm wrote: post #71
Jemaclus wrote: post #58

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 c…

How many reports do you have?

I have 14 direct reports and am responsible for 25 people in total.

Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

#109

Post by 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.

Re: Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

#110

Post by 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.

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