What does my engineering manager do all day?
At my company you can see other people&#x27;s calendars by default so I can easily know what anybody on a manager-schedule is doing unless they opt out of sharing.<p>I am not sure why people think it is bullshit. 1:1s, cross-team meetings, project planning, sitting in on various engineering-driven meetings (e.g. &quot;What should we do about this problem that popped up?&quot; &quot;How should staffing work for this new project?&quot;), hiring, and other managerial odds and ends (your report has a question&#x2F;needs XYZ) amount to a large amount of work for a larger team.<p>I am not a manger, but I go to many of these meetings. A lot of these recurring cross-team meetings are phenomenal wastes of time - most people don&#x27;t say anything, other people only talk maybe 5% of the time or less, really only 2-4 people talk a lot. Many &quot;process&quot; meetings, like whatever agile&#x2F;scrum&#x2F;story&#x2F;retro bullshit are also filler.<p>However everything else is IMO kind of necessary, and I&#x27;d say it is real work. People won&#x27;t manage themselves, projects won&#x27;t plan themselves and align them with people&#x27;s needs or career plans, and fundamentally a tree structure is usually a much more efficient way for info to be communicated than an ad-hoc peer to peer structure (no, maybe not for the more senior people, but if you have worked with junior people, you know what I&#x27;m talking about) - we&#x27;re talking O(n) compared to a pessimal O(n^2). People can and should still communicate peer-to-peer anyway, but it makes sense for mangers to take on as much of the overhead as necessary.<p>The problem with the OP is they have found a way to somehow stuff their calendar with the worst kinds of meetings - random webinars, &quot;status updates&quot;, and jira jockeying.