That place sounds great. I complain about more than an hour of meetings a day and am told that is unrealistic. This is a small company with under 30 people. Half of them seem to go to meetings all day long.
If your job is to build consensus for a plan, to collect feedback before committing to a major decision or to communicate progress and agree next steps on anything, meetings are work.
Meetings are work.
I can’t say this enough - not all work can be done on your own in an editor or IDE.
And no, it’s often not just busywork. It depends on the domain you’re in and what level of experience your colleagues have.
If you work in anything touching public sector, you’re going to need a lot more meetings to get alignment on even small decisions than if you work on a trading floor. It’s the nature of the beast and how “compliance” is interpreted by different cultures.
