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.
Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
21–30 of 52 posts
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#22That'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)
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#23Had 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…
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.
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#24Smallish 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.
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#26I'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.
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#27Small company, 0 hours of meetings. We resolve everything over Github issues, email, Slack, or in person conversations.
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#28Great 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.
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#29Working 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
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#30Small company, 0 hours of meetings. We resolve everything over Github issues, email, Slack, or in person conversations.
Isn't an in person conversation a meeting?