I am slow to realize obvious things, and recently someone told me that line managers couldn't be expected to write much code anymore* because they were in a lot more meetings these days (perhaps especially due to remote work). I almost didn't believe them, so I asked some friends if this were the case, and if so, what were all those meetings about? The answer I got surprised me!
To back up a bit: there's been some noise about Shopify cancelling all recurring meetings with more than 2 people. I think this is a bad idea for many reasons, but one of the top reasons I believe this to be a bad idea is due to the surprising thing I learned when I asked why people were getting overloaded with meetings. The answer wasn't stand-ups, or group status meetings, or any of the other annoying project management ceremonies, as you might naively expect. It was, instead, an overabundance of 1–1s. And this applied not just to managers, but to the Staff+ engineers as well!
What are these 1–1s all about? Well, line managers meet with their direct reports and their manager, of course, but also their peers, their product managers, designers, recruiting, skip level manager upwards, people from other teams who decided to reach out. Staff+ engineers might meet with all of the members of their team, other staff+ engineers, managers from other orgs, and more. And of course these senior people also have a lot of interviews (arguably a form of 1–1 meetings, certainly not something saved by cutting out recurring group meetings). This 1–1 communication has become the de facto way for people to stay in touch, build trust, maintain alignment, and generally create a sort of eventual loose consensus about the work.
Now, I'm not gonna lie: to me this is absolutely ridiculously wasteful. A Staff+ engineer should not need to do weekly 1–1 meetings with every engineer on their team; as much as I agree that there is "glue" work to be done in this case they may be falling into the trap of filling management gaps that they shouldn't cover up. Engineering managers of peer teams should only need to meet 1–1 weekly when their teams are collaborating on something critical together, and otherwise aim for a monthly-to-quarterly cadence (ok maybe you have a buddy you like catching up with weekly, but you don't need to do this with everyone). And senior engineering managers should not overdo the skip level 1–1s to the point where they are spending half their time talking to their skips about their directs unless something is very broken in an organization.
As a more senior leader, abdicating the responsibility of creating productive group meetings is the worst possible outcome, because all it does is lead to the never-ending grind of 1–1 meetings that don't accomplish as much and take far longer to complete. You are responsible for setting up well-run weekly group meetings to fill the trust and alignment gap, rather than having your broader team go through the combined number of subset 1–1 meetings. Letting topics that should be discussed as a group turn into 1–1 topics has many negative consequences: the order you deliver messages leads to slight changes in the messages and a higher likelihood that each person hears something different; in the moments when some people have heard one perspective from you and others haven't heard anything at all, you can guarantee they are all talking to each other about what it is you're thinking or communicating; and you don't allow for the group to ask questions and hear shared answers to those questions.
If you're still unconvinced, consider: Have you ever had to deal with the fallout of your manager thoughtlessly discussing something 1–1 with another person to a conclusion that caused you to run around and have several other conversations and meetings to resolve? This is the situation you are likely to create if you overdo the "quick" 1–1 meetings as the default communication channel. Similarly, you encourage people to make decisions in circumstances of plausible deniability, behind closed doors, by making it hard for them to have a regular forum in which to discuss things as a group. I truly cannot imagine the mental model of someone who believes that the solution to too many meetings is to cancel group meetings while leaving 1–1 meetings untouched, unless their goal is creating a kind of hyper-political anti-transparency culture.
Yes, it is true, many managers (and Staff+ engineers) have no idea how to run good group meetings, and group meetings can be much harder to run well over zoom than in person. It is easy to miss the subtle body language of someone who doesn't agree but also doesn't feel comfortable speaking up in a group video meeting, and without practice we end up in a world where we think silence means agreement. We all need to build up better meeting execution skills whether in-person or over video, and as a senior person you should consider developing these skills a core part of your job.
So build up those skills, please. And yes, cut the pointless status update meetings where most attendees show up and say at most one thing. Be thoughtful about peoples' time, and don't waste it; but don't assume that a meeting is a good use of time just because it only has two participants, and watch out for replacing more-effective group communication with error-prone 1–1 time.