5 ms·

Only an hour a day is most radically anti-meeting culture I’ve ever heard of. It’s an extraordinary week when I get as many as 40% of my working hours for focu

Only an hour a day is most radically anti-meeting culture I’ve ever heard of. It’s an extraordinary week when I get as many as 40% of my working hours for focus time. * Weekly cross functional syncs for the products I’m involved in, 2 hours. * Weekly design and SLA/postmortem reviews for the org, 2 hours. * Three interviews and associated debriefs, 4.5 hours. * Standup, planning, and retro, 2.5 hours. * Tech talks, knowledge sharing sessions, org and company all hands, 2 hours. That’s before anything as-needed to work on a specific issue.

FeepingCreature 5y ago
I haven't timed it, an hour may be off. Call it two for safety. We generally orientate meetings vaguely around mid-day. Having a flextime schedule helps, because some people only show up an hour before lunch so you can't plan meetings for the morning anyways. That explains a lot of things though. It sounds like most of your meetings are terrible. Actually, if most of people's meetings in this thread are terrible experiences, that seems like it would explain their sentiments. In other words, meetings are mostly time loss, which you're of course trying to minimize. (It really helps that we have a culture of "I don't think I can contribute to this meeting, I'm gonna head out.") Almost all of my in-person meetings are technical debates - or group debugging sessions, where progress depends on randomly noticing something. In both cases, they scale well with number of members up to a point of four or so, where adding another participant generates more ideas than it costs time.
- BlargMcLarg 5y ago
  >they scale well with number of members up to a point of four or so, where adding another participant generates more ideas than it costs time. That's the main thing I come across. Most meetings are well over four people. And personally, I already don't deal well with more than 3 people as most people work on a vastly different wavelength than myself. Now consider all the "Agile" meetings are already 5+ people and often contain management types and people who are both higher on the chain of command and have no technical background either hogging the attention. Suddenly, most meetings I see become either a hybrid announcement + roll call, a "meeting" with ulterior motives (e.g. managers trying to measure "participation" as a way to grade employees) or a very rushed design-by-committee approach to solving something.
  - FeepingCreature 5y ago
    Yeah we very rarely have that sort of management meeting, which is good cause they're useless.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Meeting sizing is a good point. It feels like adding additional people is often done aggressively but thoughtlessly, so maybe the solution is to have a company-wide rule to counter-balance that tendency. If voice/video meetings could have no more than 4 participants unless (insert somewhat burdensome exception process), all participants would presumably consider more carefully who should be added.
    - _0ffh 5y ago
      A more flexible rule that also might help a little would be to require a separate justification for the use of time to be filed for every single invitee. It's just like of the signup process on your landing page. Make things you want to happen as effortless as possible -> make things you want to happen less more effortful.
      - _0ffh 5y ago
        In an evil afterthought: If people still keep inviting to many others to meetings, make the filing of the justifications only possible using a special intranet page, and make your least capable intern code that page. That should sort it out. }:->
  - rtkaratekid 5y ago
    I dislike when management decides to join a technical meeting randomly and then spends the whole time being confused and trying to get folks to explain something to them. It’s happened at every place I’ve worked so far. For the record I’m not saying they’re unintelligent, it’s just that explaining something like how a kernel module actually works to someone who doesn’t know what a kernel is tends to put a damper on the meeting if it takes 30+ minutes.
caturopath 5y ago
I made it through most of my career thus far, including pretty senior positions, where probably most of my days didn't have a formal meeting. It's been so strange to move to a big tech company where I could spend 30 hours per week in meetings if I was not pushing back. Any they're all 30 minutes. What the heck do you expect to accomplish in 30 minutes? You spend 20% of the time waiting for someone to show up.
- gambiting 5y ago
  I'm a team lead and most days I'll have 1 maybe 2 meetings at most, but having 0 isn't unusual. Is that weird? I do talk to people on teams all the time though. I know what everyone is doing and how they are doing, just without having a voice/video call. We just text most of the time - I can be in 10+ ongoing conversations at the same time.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    It’s culture thing. Personally, I prefer in-person or video meetings because it’s an event and people are usually focused on task. One on one calls are great too. Text is good or bad. It’s an attention thief, and you never know what you are getting. Also, I find that platforms like Teams are great for the present, but awful for history and context.
    - Consultant32452 5y ago
      In my experience 90% of meetings with more than 3 people are irrelevant to my work. Here's a couple examples: "Standups" that are really PM status calls that constantly go down rabbit holes. My update is 30s or less, but the meetings are always 30 minutes long and usually run over. "Code reviews" that are really run/monopolized by one person. The entire team is required to attend even if you have no code, but in practice no one other than the runner is allowed to provide feedback.
      - pc86 5y ago
        How are your standups taking that long? We have over a dozen people on our daily standup and it's 5-6 minutes long.
icedchai 5y ago
An hour a day would be paradise. I work for a company with tons of meetings and it’s awful
- ethbr0 5y ago
  I see your awful and raise you a company where the default culture is to send blank meeting invites. At best, you might get a subject line.
  - icedchai 5y ago
    What happens if you don't show up? Do you get a nasty email, or a talking to through zoom?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
amarant 5y ago
Where I currently work, we're only doing standups every other day. It's usually around 45 minutes, and most weeks, that's the only scheduled meetings we have! Then of course if I or a colleague need help or want to discuss something, we'll have an impromptu call for it as needed. And this ain't no startup either: EA DICE can probably safely be described as a rather large company these days.. Of course, it might well be different in other teams, being a backend web developer I'm part of a somewhat unusual team in the context of a gaming studio.
SkyPuncher 5y ago
We typically accomplish everything we need in less than 5 hours of meetings per week. Most of our engineers get to spend nearly all day actually writing code. An average week is 2.5 hours of "core" meetings * 1.5 hours - 30 minute "standup" 3 days per week. Skip the BS status updates. Planning, team discussions, etc all happen in this timeframe. * 30 minutes of retro (1 hour biweekly) * 30 minutes of 1:1 We generally keep planning meetings pretty light. A _really_ heavy week will be 10 hours of planning. A light week will be 1 or 2 hours talking about an upcoming feature. Everything else happens by individuals, asynchronously.
eutropia 5y ago
My personal calendar as a software engineer at a company of over 700 people includes about 1 hour of meetings per week.

FeepingCreature 5y ago

I haven't timed it, an hour may be off. Call it two for safety. We generally orientate meetings vaguely around mid-day. Having a flextime schedule helps, because some people only show up an hour before lunch so you can't plan meetings for the morning anyways. That explains a lot of things though. It sounds like most of your meetings are terrible. Actually, if most of people's meetings in this thread are terrible experiences, that seems like it would explain their sentiments. In other words, meetings are mostly time loss, which you're of course trying to minimize. (It really helps that we have a culture of "I don't think I can contribute to this meeting, I'm gonna head out.") Almost all of my in-person meetings are technical debates - or group debugging sessions, where progress depends on randomly noticing something. In both cases, they scale well with number of members up to a point of four or so, where adding another participant generates more ideas than it costs time.

BlargMcLarg 5y ago
>they scale well with number of members up to a point of four or so, where adding another participant generates more ideas than it costs time. That's the main thing I come across. Most meetings are well over four people. And personally, I already don't deal well with more than 3 people as most people work on a vastly different wavelength than myself. Now consider all the "Agile" meetings are already 5+ people and often contain management types and people who are both higher on the chain of command and have no technical background either hogging the attention. Suddenly, most meetings I see become either a hybrid announcement + roll call, a "meeting" with ulterior motives (e.g. managers trying to measure "participation" as a way to grade employees) or a very rushed design-by-committee approach to solving something.
- FeepingCreature 5y ago
  Yeah we very rarely have that sort of management meeting, which is good cause they're useless.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Meeting sizing is a good point. It feels like adding additional people is often done aggressively but thoughtlessly, so maybe the solution is to have a company-wide rule to counter-balance that tendency. If voice/video meetings could have no more than 4 participants unless (insert somewhat burdensome exception process), all participants would presumably consider more carefully who should be added.
  - _0ffh 5y ago
    A more flexible rule that also might help a little would be to require a separate justification for the use of time to be filed for every single invitee. It's just like of the signup process on your landing page. Make things you want to happen as effortless as possible -> make things you want to happen less more effortful.
    - _0ffh 5y ago
      In an evil afterthought: If people still keep inviting to many others to meetings, make the filing of the justifications only possible using a special intranet page, and make your least capable intern code that page. That should sort it out. }:->
- rtkaratekid 5y ago
  I dislike when management decides to join a technical meeting randomly and then spends the whole time being confused and trying to get folks to explain something to them. It’s happened at every place I’ve worked so far. For the record I’m not saying they’re unintelligent, it’s just that explaining something like how a kernel module actually works to someone who doesn’t know what a kernel is tends to put a damper on the meeting if it takes 30+ minutes.

caturopath 5y ago

I made it through most of my career thus far, including pretty senior positions, where probably most of my days didn't have a formal meeting. It's been so strange to move to a big tech company where I could spend 30 hours per week in meetings if I was not pushing back. Any they're all 30 minutes. What the heck do you expect to accomplish in 30 minutes? You spend 20% of the time waiting for someone to show up.

gambiting 5y ago
I'm a team lead and most days I'll have 1 maybe 2 meetings at most, but having 0 isn't unusual. Is that weird? I do talk to people on teams all the time though. I know what everyone is doing and how they are doing, just without having a voice/video call. We just text most of the time - I can be in 10+ ongoing conversations at the same time.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  It’s culture thing. Personally, I prefer in-person or video meetings because it’s an event and people are usually focused on task. One on one calls are great too. Text is good or bad. It’s an attention thief, and you never know what you are getting. Also, I find that platforms like Teams are great for the present, but awful for history and context.
  - Consultant32452 5y ago
    In my experience 90% of meetings with more than 3 people are irrelevant to my work. Here's a couple examples: "Standups" that are really PM status calls that constantly go down rabbit holes. My update is 30s or less, but the meetings are always 30 minutes long and usually run over. "Code reviews" that are really run/monopolized by one person. The entire team is required to attend even if you have no code, but in practice no one other than the runner is allowed to provide feedback.
    - pc86 5y ago
      How are your standups taking that long? We have over a dozen people on our daily standup and it's 5-6 minutes long.

icedchai 5y ago

An hour a day would be paradise. I work for a company with tons of meetings and it’s awful

ethbr0 5y ago
I see your awful and raise you a company where the default culture is to send blank meeting invites. At best, you might get a subject line.
- icedchai 5y ago
  What happens if you don't show up? Do you get a nasty email, or a talking to through zoom?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

amarant 5y ago

Where I currently work, we're only doing standups every other day. It's usually around 45 minutes, and most weeks, that's the only scheduled meetings we have! Then of course if I or a colleague need help or want to discuss something, we'll have an impromptu call for it as needed. And this ain't no startup either: EA DICE can probably safely be described as a rather large company these days.. Of course, it might well be different in other teams, being a backend web developer I'm part of a somewhat unusual team in the context of a gaming studio.

SkyPuncher 5y ago

We typically accomplish everything we need in less than 5 hours of meetings per week. Most of our engineers get to spend nearly all day actually writing code. An average week is 2.5 hours of "core" meetings * 1.5 hours - 30 minute "standup" 3 days per week. Skip the BS status updates. Planning, team discussions, etc all happen in this timeframe. * 30 minutes of retro (1 hour biweekly) * 30 minutes of 1:1 We generally keep planning meetings pretty light. A _really_ heavy week will be 10 hours of planning. A light week will be 1 or 2 hours talking about an upcoming feature. Everything else happens by individuals, asynchronously.

eutropia 5y ago

My personal calendar as a software engineer at a company of over 700 people includes about 1 hour of meetings per week.