Number of Meetings per Week?

Question

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 · Accepted Answer

How 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.

LinuxBender · Answer

I 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_...

disrael · Answer

Our experience was similar and one of the goals we started https://www.uclusion.com for was to help fix that.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).