There's a number you see quoted sometimes in management books, and most engineers dismiss it the first time they read it: in a team of eight, there are 28 possible communication paths. In a team of sixteen, 120. The formula is n(n-1)/2 and it's just geometry, but geometry is the thing that runs your day. Every one of those paths, on an active project, is a message you triage, a Slack reply you owe, a meeting that could have been async but isn't. The paths don't cost much individually. They compound ruthlessly.
What Six Years of the Tally Actually Showed
I spent six years as an engineer inside Kyiv's product industry. Good companies. Real products. Smart people. Somewhere in year three I started keeping an informal tally: how long did each feature actually take, and how much of that time was I writing code? The ratio got worse every year. By the end, for a typical ticket, my time with a compiler open was maybe fifteen percent of the calendar span. The rest was alignment. Meetings about the meeting. Review cycles where the reviewer was waiting on a decision from someone who was waiting on a decision from someone else.
The numbers are public if you care to look. U.S. workers average 35 hours of meetings per month. The load of unproductive meetings on individual contributors has roughly doubled since 2019, from 1.7 hours a week to 3.7. Seventy percent of managers describe their meetings as costly and unproductive, and they are the ones calling them.
