The other half are about useful things, like what to do next, how your interfaces will look like, and "if you need help, just tell me, I can escalate it".
My job was to organise the work between the workers, keep the business away from my subordinates, and only waste their time when they had the complete information being asked for the specific reason.
And if I wasn't doing one of the things above, my job was to pick up the horrible things that no one else wanted/I had experience and domain knowledge in (eg : accessibility testing)
0900 till 0930 - 15 min standup meeting.
0930 till 1000 - focus time.
1000 till 1100 - Pre meeting for customer meeting at 1100.
1100 till 1200 - Customer meeting.
1230 till 1300 - Post Meeting catchup.
1300 till 1330 - focus time.
1330 till 1430 - JIRA board update meeting.
1430 till 1500 - priorities review meeting.
1500 till 1645 - focus time.
1645 till 1730 - EOD standup.
"Are you don't yet? Why aren't you done yet? Help me update infinite plans that will be outdated in a week. Also, I just promised a bunch of stuff... all that stuff we already promised, I think you can do that faster."
When I was a dev, I once had a PM with no technical skills that decided he would "learn to program to help catch us up"... He did not succeed.
Hey, at least he had the right idea. He saw that the delay was due to a lack of skilled workers and tried to fix that problem instead of just talking more about the project. That's more awareness than most PMs have in my experience.
That concept is lost on so many people and I don't understand why. One of the last teams I was on had two weekly meetings. One was 9:00 AM Monday morning and the other was 4:00 PM on Fridays. They were both running through all of our projects and always seemed surprised that the Monday update was the same as the previous Friday update.
We do standups twice a week. At worst they run a half hour for my team of about 10 people. Usually we're done in 15-20 minutes. Please tell me it's just an absolutely made up joke that you have an hour and 15 minutes of stand up meetings every day. I would shoot myself.
I had a job that had > 1hr standups for our two man project because we met with QA, BA, and management and they wanted everything changed every day so we had to explain why we couldn't do anything with constantly changing requirements every morning.
Senior engineers write enabling code/scaffolding, and review code, and mentor juniors. They also write feature code.
Lead engineers code and lead dev teams.
Principal engineers code, and talk about tech in meetings.
Senior Principal engineers, and distinguished technologists/fellows talk about tech, and maybe sometimes code.
Good managers go to meetings and shield the engineers from the stream of exec corporate bs. Infrequently they may rope any of the engineers in this chain in to explain the decisions that the engineers make along the way.
Bad managers bring engineers in to these meetings frequently.
Terrible managers make the engineering decisions and push those to the engineers.
I’ve worked for startups too; everyone does everything all at the same time! Let the chaos reign! But it is fun in its own way.
I work for a large company now after the startup I worked for was acquired. Hierarchy, bureaucracy, layers, we’ve got it all. For worse and for better though, it allows me to focus and specialize on what I’m awesome at and furgeddaboddit (ahem! delegate) the stuff that I suck at to those who excel at those tasks.
People in the technical career track spend most of their time making software, one way or another (there comes a point were you're doing more preparation to code than actual coding).
As soon as you jump into the management career track it's mostly meetings to report the team's progress to upper management, even if you're supposedly "technically oriented".
Absolutelly, as you become a more senior tech things become more and more about figuring out what needs to be done at higher and higher levels (i.e. systems design, software development process design) which results in needing to interact with more and more stakeholders (your whole team, other teams, end users, management) hence more meetings, but you still get to do lots of coding or at least code-adjacent stuff (i.e. design).
It depends VERY much about the content and invitees of the meetings.
If you're there to give your expert engineering feedback, awesome. If you're there to receive the information you need in order to provide expert engineering feedback, awesome.
So often, I find, meetings are too broad and end up oversubscribed. Engineers are in a 2 hour meeting with 10 minutes of relevance.
There are serious differences in meeting culture, with vast implications oh the amount of efficacy you can juice from the attendees.
Ehhhh, depends on how your titles work, and I would argue that's at least a little odd. Most senior engineers I know are ~50/50 code/oversight, at worst. Once you get to Principal or Staff, though, you're lucky if you write 50 loc/week.
Senior rarely translates to something like architect anymore, it's at least a level or two up from there.
The beauty of titles like this is that they're absolutely meaningless.
You can't compare them between companies, sometimes even departments, you can't compare them between different industries, and you can't compare them between countries.
I'm a senior, and my job is currently to sit in meetings most of the day to convince BAs, architects and other team's leads not to make stupid decisions. The rest of my time I'm communicating the results back to my colleagues and writing escalation mails, because Steve again tried to re-introduce his god awful ideas that we shot down five times before and I'm hereby voicing my concerns in a business-like tone, but actually would want to exterminate him and his entire offspring.
My old project, however, was completely different and I actually spent 70% of my time actually writing code and 20% code-related meetings.
I've worked in a few places, all with senior engineers, including myself as a senior engineer, all of which the senior engineers spent most of their time actually engineering. If I went somewhere as a senior and was told I was going to be in meetings all day, I would quit because that's management, not engineering.
No it isn't - a senior engineer should be a technical track professional that's excellent at their job - it's likely there will be a fair amount of mentorship but that can take many forms including PR reviews and pair programming.
A technical lead, architect, or a front line manager is the one that should be eating meetings four to six hours a day. And absolutely nobody should be in eight hours of meetings a day - even bullshit C level folks should be doing work outside of meetings. Eight hours of meetings means that you're just regurgitating the output of other meetings.
I'd clarify that having occasional eight hour meeting days isn't bad, there might be occasional collaboration jam sessions that everyone prepares for... but if your 8-5-52 is solid meetings then nothing productive is happening.
Where I work, Senior Engineer is an IC role. They attend the same meetings as other engineers. Its the Staff+ Engineers and managers that attend more meetings (in ascending order)
Of course there's no point in trying to rationalize this 'cos these people use meetings to try justify their usefulness to the company (HR does the same with random activities), so you end up drawing red lines with invisible ink...
I work on the City side of the development world. We're always getting screamed at for taking 3 weeks to review a plan set by the same developers who want to meet with me every minute of every fucking day.
I've got 40 projects in my review queue and all of them are demanding a weekly meeting. When am I supposed to do the fucking reviews?
When you talk to your management and show them how overworked you are and ask for a helper. But don't just say how much, show them in business lingo so they actually understand.
Fill out your calendar with the meetings and show management how you have no time for meaningful work because of meetings.
I'm on the Municipal side. City Council ain't gonna raise taxes to hire more people.
I'll get burned out and leave soon enough. The longest-serving person in the development department has been here just over a year, and we pay nearly double what other cities in the area do.
I just got a Jr dev job about 3 weeks ago and I haven't written a single line of code. It's all been meetings and other shit. I'm kind of ok with that. Lol
I think this is something a lot of people posting here don't get. You can be a programmer, make apps or games in your spare time, set your own goals and be your own boss, and that's great. Suddenly you get a "normal" job programming and you have you deal with customer requirements, business nonsense, and working as part of a team; that's being a software engineer. One isn't superior to the other, they are just different beasts.
Absolutely. There is very little programming involved in a normal job most of the year. I actually knew that before getting in. I have friends on the same team that have been there before me and they explained things beforehand. I have so many meetings and business stuff daily. We also reach out to users to help them fix issues on their machines, too.
This is not the first time I’ve seen memes like this, and it makes me so glad I’m not involved in programming or software development. I would straight up die.
If you can find a comfy mid level role or a "real" senior role that is mostly code it's a very rewarding career. But yeah I'd lose it with day long meetings
not my experience at all across 3 separate companies. Ime senior engineers are the highest level that still spends most of the day heads down most days, and that's why I'm gonna stick it out at this level as long as I can.