As an engineering manager, it seems like the full time job is either meetings or communicating the results of those meetings to someone who can act on them. I've done some mixed roles, and I think that's the only balance that makes sense. It's also good for a manager to have empty time (i.e. they shouldn't be expected to write code or whatever).<p>Meetings themselves aren't so bad, but when I was a manager, our meetings would require a half hour drive somewhere, or going up to the 40th floor of some building, preparing slides, charts, and so on. Sometimes you need to bring in an expert/consultant/trainer and brief her on the project prior to the meeting.<p>Most of the work is around those meetings. You can have 20 hours of meetings scheduled per week, and that translates to 30-40 hours of time blocked off and 10-20 more hours of writing reports, updating Jira, answering emails, taking screenshots, and so on. If you've got a remote team, that's even more workload.<p>The longest meeting we've had was about 3 days long, 9-5 straight UI/UX workshop. The client balked at this at first - they have their share of meetings already, but afterwards everyone agreed it was 100% worth it. It was the only way to get a lot of stakeholders in the room, and it killed a lot of assumptions - we had UX requests that were not technically possible, UX that didn't fit user behavior, underestimated the robustness of some hacks that a dev/now engineering manager made 3 years ago, and so on.