How many meetings do you have per week?

And how has this changed from job to job or role to role for you?

Comments

[Zikitel22]

meetings
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|/ ____ years of career

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.

[Ben Halpern]

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?

[Zikitel22]

From the top of my head

• Early stage startups - how many meetings do you need to sync 3-4 people given they are mostly seniors :)
• Being part of "innovation department" - never experienced it myself but from what i heard this is almost no meeting environment
• Lone wolf freelancer/consultant - well you have meetings with clients but i doubt that they happen more than once per week

[Joe Mainwaring]

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:

• Require meetings to have agendas, otherwise I would not attend
• negotiate with other stakeholders on timing & frequency
• consider meetings optional if a team member was taking the lead

[Waylon Walker]

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.

[Edwin]

• Daily stand-up (15-30m) - useful, quick status updates and discuss urgent issues.
• Weekly architecture discussion (1h) - cross-team discussion of any architecture topic, this is good for standardisation across teams, reach consensus on topics.
• Biweekly sprint review (1-1.5h) - Every team presents work delivered during the sprint, useful to see progress and gives devs a feeling of closure.
• Biweekly feature kickoff(1.5h) - PM presents new features and collects some early technical feedback from the team (helps the team get a feeling of what's coming and understand the bigger picture).
• Biweekly sprint planning (1-2h) - estimate planned work for the coming sprint, assign story points and identify any issues before work is started.
• Biweekly retrospective (1h) - feedback on internal processes, which does help to improve over time.

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.

[Keff]

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.

[Ben Sinclair]

It varies depending on what projects I'm booked on, but usually around 10-15 or so?

5 x common morning dev coffee type meeting
5 x random meeting
3 x client meetings for different projects

The common meeting is something that wouldn't have happened in the office, but working remotely it helps keep us all connected with what else is going on in the team. People I'd sit next to but not share work with for months aren't lost to the ether.

I have had much more meeting-heavy months, certainly, and at one point last year I'd say nearly half my working time was spent in one meeting or another, but these days I'm back to programming :)

[Daniel Starner]

3-4 meetings per week.

• planning
• 1:1 with manager
• retro
• flex meeting for discussing projects or department-level stuff

We try to keep content and knowledge transfer asynchronous through documentation to limit the number of meetings needed

[Christian Bewernitz]

I think it's important to define the term more clearly to get good answers.

Is every Teams/Slack/Zoom call with more then one more person a meeting? Even if the context/content is preparing/planning/pairing on a ticket?

When there are team rituals, is the length and frequency working for the goals that the ritual is trying to reach?

And last but not least, are the right people invited? Minimize "mandatory meetings" and if a whole group is invited, make it clear (over and over again) when a "relevant discussion" is only for the people that are interested.
And be brave about giving feedback to organiser(s) or even saying "No" if you think it's not relevant for you.

I think it's good to regularly think about/question those things, in a way that's a hygiene thing.

By the way, providing meeting notes for people that didn't have the chance to join makes it easier to jump on and off, or get involved when it's relevant.

[Yak]

In my experience over the years, having worked on my own and for third parties, the equation regarding meetings is like this:

meetings <$
Or it could be
meeting < important you are

I discovered that the more I avoided some meetings, not only was I the more productive (that's obvious) but also that people's gaze towards me and their value of my time changed.

[Kasey Speakman]

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.