Ask HN: How much of your time is spent in meetings?

A meeting every other hour is definitely NOT normal. The most meetingsy places I've worked at had no more than a standup every day and longer meetings usually no more than once a week. You should try to bring some change about in the organization, or find a different place to work.

When I worked at a big corp, we talked about this issue at some point.

We started literally putting up a cost clock, that ticked off the running cost of a meeting. It was surprisingly convincing and motivating for everyone, even (especially?) our external customers who were previously happy to sit and chat for hours.

That said, there's a reason I don't work at a 'big corp' anymore :)

- Treasure Data (current): 1.5 hours a week (100 ppl company)

- Oracle (past): 1.5 hours a week (a few thousands ppl)

Both cases my team and management avoided unnecessary meetings, the 1.5h is for two meetings: 1:1 and team meeting. It's not up to the company size, but instead how optimized your team wants to behave.

note: I am in a SW Engineer position. Not sure about Marketing, HR, Finance..etc.

I work at Google on the main website as an SWE (non-lead). I have about 1.5 to 3 hours of scheduled meetings a week.

> To the point of a meeting every other hour

That seems excessive - are you sure that's typical across your company and not just unique to your team?

Anyway, to answer your question, at VMware I spend about about two hours a week in meetings. [N.B. I'm a fairly junior engineer, more senior ones typically spend more time in meetings]

As a systems engineer at Eventbrite, I'm in 1 to 3 hours a week depending on what is going on. It's usually on the lower end. That includes my weekly one-on-one with my manager.

I 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.

If you don't count stand-ups, take 3 hours away from each week.

I work for a 'big corp' and had an excessive meeting culture on my old team.

One day a week, half our day was spent in scheduled meetings regardless of whether or not there was a set agenda in advance. Additionally, daily standups would last ~15-30 minutes depending on who was rambling for the day on a team of five.

I would be invited into meetings to discuss speculative things without a set agenda all the time. After a while, I began to decline meetings in which I would have no direct impact or could get a good summary of via email.

One "prospective invite" I indirectly received was when a small project I was working on changed stakeholders, and a new person I hadn't been introduced to was looped in via email. The project was for an internal tool that less than five people in the entire company would ever interact with. This new person who was looped in said something along the lines of:

"_____ (new stakeholder), are you thinking of discussing this in our meeting next week? If so, should we extend that meeting to cover it? Let's invite ______ (me, OP) so we can talk about it."

I ended up blocking off my entire day with appointments on my calendar that were just for me working so I wouldn't get invited to as many.

Had 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, changed, etc?

I can help answer a lot of these questions. EventBoard.io is able to provide a ton of data & insights to better understand how your rooms are being used.

Zach Culverwell zach.culverwell@eventboard.io 415-813-3772

If you think that's excessive you should try working for big government...

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I am team lead at a big corp and have 5 to 20 hours a week. It's pretty crazy with a lot of meetings with too many participants without clear goals or outcomes. It's mainly the meetings with other departments that take a lot of time without results. Within R&D most meetings are productive.

Line managers seem to spend most of their time in meetings.

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.

That'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)

Smallish 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.

I'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.

Small company, 0 hours of meetings. We resolve everything over Github issues, email, Slack, or in person conversations.

Great 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.

Working 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

I feel pretty lucky, meetings are rare for me, just shoot an IM. "I'm working on XYZ, almost done. What do you want me to work on next?" or "Hey Bob are you done with that test environment" etc. I might go have one-on-ones maybe once or twice a week if it's too long/complex a conversation for IM. And those don't usually take long, maybe 15 minutes?

That said I'm a mid-level dev and I know the more senior devs & boss are in meetings more often working out how things will work with other departments and such.

60-70% of my time as PM.

Big 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.

I have two one on one meetings each week which together wind up being one to two hours a week. The CEO of my company's philosophy is that having more than two engineers meet together is usually a waste of time. This is for a small company of ~40 people.

> How much of your time is spent in meetings?

Does time spent on HN count?