I'm curious about what everyone considers to be a high frequency of meetings. Two 1-hour team meetings per week, along with a daily 15-minute stand-up meeting. Do you think this frequency is high?
I have two daily stand-ups (30 minutes) with different teams I’m a part of
A weekly status meeting (1 hr)
Three weekly status meeting update planning meetings (1 hr each)
Sprint planning every other week (2 hr)
Demo and retros every other week (2 hr)
Eight 1:1 weekly meetings (4 hrs)
That’s 12.5 hours per week so far without even counting any real project meeting where we solve anything. I’m generally around 16 hours a week in meetings and I’m not even a lead or anything. Just a standard coder at a small company.
And our velocity shows it. We’re slow at getting stuff done cause we just don’t have windows of time to focus. When meetings are only an hour apart, I rarely get to do anything productive between them. So two hour meetings can eat three hours+ of productivity.
We prioritize relationships a ton here and so I meet 1:1 with each of my peers in both teams (3) and each manager of both teams, so that’s 8 people per week.
The entire company has extensive amounts of 1:1s. Were in the mid 40’s of employee count.
I do. At a previous company, we had 1 meeting per week max. Your manager was a more senior engineer. There were no standups, no 1:1's or other extra bull. If you had a question or concern, you just walked into their office and discussed it like an adult. Most of my early career was like this actually. It wasn't until we hit 2010 or so that agile/scrum took over.
I don't think the frequency or duration of meetings is the (biggest) problem - it is the undefined scope, undefined outcome, unnecessary attendants and dragging along for much longer than needed that actually block some people achieving their goals and doing their work, which may or may not overlap with the organizer or other participants.
We got a 1-2 hour weekly team meeting, and then just project-specific ones, usually with clients or other internal teams. So depending on how many projects are going on at once, that'll be 1-3 meetings per week typically, and they'll often be 15-30min, 1 hr tops.
Some weeks there might be more, some weeks I just have the team meeting. When there are more I try to get them to fall on the same days, so I still have some empty days left.
We tried using a daily standup but didn't find it productive, so we stopped.
same, one I was part of a team that did 1.5 hr stand-up with devs & QA and some external folks everyday in morning. there was no discipline there, people will talk about status, issues they are having then branch out into possible solutions while everybody else is yawning on side. Problem is if you have this its likely a byproduct of some other dysfunction in team like the manager or leads not being technical and unable to communicate across teams.
It depends on the meeting, I had serious issues at a previous company where the non-engineers were “planning ahead” and wanting discussion, details and estimates for work we were not thinking of or looking at. I’m big on: when in doubt, prototype, investigate, etc. This was very disruptive to our current work trying to do this in parallel.
A weekly status meeting (1 hr)
Three weekly status meeting update planning meetings (1 hr each)
Sprint planning every other week (2 hr)
Demo and retros every other week (2 hr)
Eight 1:1 weekly meetings (4 hrs)
That’s 12.5 hours per week so far without even counting any real project meeting where we solve anything. I’m generally around 16 hours a week in meetings and I’m not even a lead or anything. Just a standard coder at a small company.
And our velocity shows it. We’re slow at getting stuff done cause we just don’t have windows of time to focus. When meetings are only an hour apart, I rarely get to do anything productive between them. So two hour meetings can eat three hours+ of productivity.