I would say about 5%.
Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
41–50 of 52 posts
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#42Software 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
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#43Had 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…
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.
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#44Software 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.
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#45I 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.
>>> I wonder if this is more related to agile/scrum vs waterfall?
I'd like to hope those aren't the only two options!
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#46I 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!
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#4725%.
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#48Scrum meetings and all those meetings which come before and after - how many of you dislike these ?
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#49Big 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.
Re: Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?
#50It'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.
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