[bell-cot]

You're an IC, not a /Manager$/ - right?

Cynical quip: Ask that you be scaled up to 40+ hours/week in meetings, so you don't feel guilty about never having enough time to do any serious engineering work.

More realistic: Ask if people at your level could be blank-exempted from meetings on Tuesdays & Thursdays - to let you focus on engineering and get serious stuff done at least on those two days.

[pc86]

I wish it weren't the case, but IME blacking out 40% of your schedule for meetings seems unrealistic for the vast majority of companies. We have 1 day a month and while I've only been here less than a year it is generally very well respected in the [Engineering] team that you do not schedule anything on that day, everything is through Slack (and by and large we're really good at treating Slack as asynchronous, nobody gets bent out of shape if you don't answer a message for several hours or more).

[sinwise]

Love the cynical quip. Yes I am an IC (tech lead). The non-meeting days make a lot of sense. Ironically, this will deserve an additional 1-to-1 meeting with my manager