[Periodic]

As an engineer at Google a key difference from some other companies is how few meetings I have. I have less then 10 hours of meetings per week, and they are all scheduled between 11am and 4pm. There's also plenty of less-formal meetings when I strike up a conversation with my coworkers, usually closer to 6:00 as we start to focus less and wonder more.

[andybak]

10 hours... A week?

Is that considered good? I run a small company and - also as a developer - I'd really like to get meetings down to 3 or 4 hours a week.

[codeka]

It depends on your role, PMs and managers would obviously have a lot more. I'm just a lowly engineer and looking at my calendar this week, I've have 2.5 hours of regular meetings, 3 hours of interviews (though that's an outlier, I normally do 1 interview a week, which is 1 hour long), and 2 hours of "tech talks" (which is not really a meeting, it's basically people from other teams talking about what they've been working on).

[what_ever]

Including weekly one hour of tech talk I have 2-3 hours of meeting every week and I love it that way. 10 hours a week would be terrible. (Not a Googler btw).

[jqm]

Agreed. 10 hours a week of meetings seems nuts.

I've been trying to get my boss to reduce the 2-3 hours a week of meetings I have to attend.