4 ms·
Ask HN: Number of Meetings per Week?
Hello HN!
I joined a company where meetings can take a lot of my calendar time. I'm working as a software engineer. To give you more context, I can spend between 15h to 25h in meetings. I feel a little bit frustrated as most of them are useless (weekly update / weekly sync / non-prepared meetings / non-relevant meetings). I'm a little bit afraid to decline them.
Am I the only one in this situation? Please share! :)
What is your role? What kind of meeting do you have? How do you deal with unproductive meeting?
- monkeybutton 6y agoHow recently did you join the company? Perhaps many of these meetings feel useless / non-relevant because you're not as "integrated" with your job yet. Once other developers start depending on your deliverables and vice-versa, those meetings will be more meaningful to you. Also, whenever I (a mere team lead) am on-boarding a new developer, I tend to arrange meetings with them and the leads as a sort of training/orientation on what different teams are working on, who owns what components, and where they can go for help. It can feel overwhelming at the beginning and also not-so-relevant because its not what they are working on directly. That said, if you feel some meetings are stealing too much of your time, talk to your lead / manager about it and see what they think. They should be open and honest about what is and isn't a priority and shouldn't be offended by you asking a fair question. Since a lot of the time meeting invites can be annoyingly vague (no agenda, no notes, no list of things to read / prepare for..), I'll end up messaging the organizer on slack to ask those questions. If I don't feel its relevant I'll ask them directly if they mind if I skip it or if I can send someone else on my team that would be a better fit instead of being a proxy in between them.
- riantsoa 6y agoGreat question and I should have been more precise. I joined the company in October, so yes at the beginning it makes sense to have a lot of meetings to get onboarded. I used to work in a company where asynchronous communication were heavily used. Here it's the opposite. I started to discuss with my manager but unfortunately he seems to have not enough power to change the situation. It seems it is a cultural thing in the company...
- disrael 6y agoOur experience was similar and one of the goals we started https://www.uclusion.com https://www.uclusion.com for was to help fix that. http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html - Here's an article even more critical of meeting driven development from the founder of YC (and this site).
- LinuxBender 6y agoI don't know the culture at your workplace or its management style, so I hesitate to suggest anything. If this is happening across the orgs, it could be a company culture. If it's just your team, maybe something could be done. Either way, I will just add this for inspiration. [1] [1] - https://www.ted.com/talks/david_grady_how_to_save_the_world_or_at_least_yourself_from_bad_meetings https://www.ted.com/talks/david_grady_how_to_save_the_world_...
- riantsoa 6y agoFrom what I've noticed it is a problem across the orgs. But if my team and myself can at least find a solution to avoid this overdose of meetings it would be great! I've tried to implement asynchronous communication but right now it is a half-failure (90% of things are dealt with meetings...) So thank you for the video I will check it out :)