And how has this changed from job to job or role to role for you?
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And how has this changed from job to job or role to role for you?
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Top comments (25)
meetings
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This is sad reality but it is natural.
The more you rise the ladder the less you code and more you discuss ideas/architecture/how things should work. Over the time you manage more teams that have more people involved which means more time to synchronize and get everybody on board -> more meetings.
What advice would you give someone who wants to manage their career in a direction that limits meetings — even if it means giving up on title and salary opportunities to some extent?
From the top of my head
I was pretty meeting heavy when I was in a lead engineer role, but I still managed to get 4-6 hours daily to focus on code.
Some things I did to help balance meetings with getting things done:
Way too many. I've got several roles and projects in the company I work for and I love working in each and every one of them, but sometimes the amount of meetings is overwhelming. This week will be especially rough with a whopping 21 calendar entries for tech discussions, dailies, sync meetings, tech talks, planning meetings, tactical meetings (we do Holacracy) and a pitch preparation or two. Usually it's around 10-13 meetings per week, though.
When I was a Mechanical Engineer it was solid meetings, making it hard to get work done. I moved over to software and I now have about 1 meeting per day with a lot of working sessions with my team done on the fly. I end up in a Teams call for a good 80% of my day.
Finally there are functional/technical refinement meetings (1h each, as many as needed) where a small team prepares user stories, define requirements, raise issues in spec/architecture/etc before it is planned for the next sprint.
Sometimes it feels like a lot, but if we don't have these meetings, then devs would have to figure this stuff out during a sprint and the overall delivery time would be longer. So most of them are useful planning meetings, which can be tedious, but we try to limit to 1h so everyone stays sharp.
When I was an engineer very few just usual ceremonies. Planning, retrospectives, design, kickoffs. As a product manager, unless you guard your calendar you can sign yourself up for too much. I do reverse pilots and let meetings that recur auto expire to see if its noticed. Nir Eyal has great content on managing one's schedule. It's too easy to sleepwalk your week and execute then totally whiff on strategic work.
For the first 3 years working on the company I work with, we had no meetings. As the company grew we started doing more, now we do around 1 per day.
We do 1 on mondays to prepare the week, then daily meatings of around 15-30 minutes the rest of the week. Then we do another one on fridays to evaluate the week and prepare for the next one. In the friday meeting we also do some retrospective.
When working remote we've noticed that doing short daily meetings really helps us stay in tune and work better as a team, as eveyone is informed and knows what eveyone else is up to, and how the project is going.
Our work is more effective this way, not so much wasted time.
Full time worker here. I'm in about one meeting per day. Two "standup" syncs per week, one planning meeting, and a few misc meetings on top of that.
Increased quantity and decreased outcomes of meetings seem more to do with size/culture of company.
Edit: I don't tend to have a lot of "meetings", maybe single digits per month. But I might have several multi-hour design or work sessions per week with my team. These seem like meetings since we schedule a time and video chat, but they function more like being in the same room solving problems.
3-4 meetings per week.
We try to keep content and knowledge transfer asynchronous through documentation to limit the number of meetings needed