alt Hacker NewsI work at a (ahem) war contractor and at least 50% of my calendar in any week is filled with meetings. As the week progresses, the incidental meetings that people throw at me the day before fill up at least another 25%. I am the chief architect for two major projects, but it does leave me wondering when I'm supposed to be doing any architecting.
Oh, and half the company leadership expects me to also stand up a professional "agile software development capability" in the rest of my time while the other half parrots a sentiment from before we grew from 500 to 3000 people that "we aren't a software development company." Well, neither is a bank, but banks employ armies of software developers and they don't tend to underfund them. When exactly I'm supposed to perform my supervisor functions and annual trainings is left as an exercise to the unpaid overtimers.
Sigh I need a new job. I never wanted to be a defense contractor in the first place.
Hello. For what it's worth, I'm in a similar role (Security Architecture) in a different sector. It's the same here.
The trick is to block your calendar with 30min slots to approx. 80% of capacity. If your calendar is private, these won't be challenged. This leaves you some space to do the work, some other space to get random meetings in and if you're lucky, everyone is happy.
I think this is the price to pay for a high-profile role.