4 ms·

About the meeting load proble, this was actually happening with me a bit before 2021 so I did the most sane thing: I talked with my manager and my manager's bos

About the meeting load proble, this was actually happening with me a bit before 2021 so I did the most sane thing: I talked with my manager and my manager's boss about it in a non-confrotarional way. Turns out both of them and 80% of my coworkers felt the same way, so we decided to trim down meetings to the bare minimum,arrange them so they are close to each other, and the company had to instate that meetings need a clear description and goal before setting them up. I still get the odd day where my afternoon is completely booked, but I now have about 30 hours of uninterrupted work where I can program, trouble shoot, analyse data or pair program with junior people. I believe we have to be constantly watchful "meeting creep" and always question stuff such as ritual meetings. If an IC is swamped by meetings, things are very wrong indeed. And about the communication after work hours, unless it's an outage, I reply when I get back at work and so does everyone in my team. Maybe having this arrangement with your boss and setting boundaries is a good idea? You can't forbid them from communicating asynchronously whenever they want, but they need to respect that you won't reply to them right away.

steveBK123 5y ago
Agreed, the meeting load waxes&wanes.. we at one point had mandatory team-wide agile meetings of one form of another for about 9 hours/week. I managed to push that down to 5 hours/week, but other stuff creeps in. We all feel the same way, and management is aware but it's hard to get meetings removed until it becomes bosses idea, so it is often 6 months of suggestion before reality. Often the response to high meeting load for ICs is management telling us how many more hours of meetings they have! Agreed about after-hours comms, though sometimes it then becomes a Friday 5pm or Thursday 6:45pm call to the cell instead, which never happened in the before times.

steveBK123 5y ago

Agreed, the meeting load waxes&wanes.. we at one point had mandatory team-wide agile meetings of one form of another for about 9 hours/week. I managed to push that down to 5 hours/week, but other stuff creeps in. We all feel the same way, and management is aware but it's hard to get meetings removed until it becomes bosses idea, so it is often 6 months of suggestion before reality. Often the response to high meeting load for ICs is management telling us how many more hours of meetings they have! Agreed about after-hours comms, though sometimes it then becomes a Friday 5pm or Thursday 6:45pm call to the cell instead, which never happened in the before times.