[josephorjoe]

If you have people in your meeting who do not meaningfully contribute or learn something valuable that could not have been learned from a shared document, you have wasted their time.

So, ask:

Did everyone in the meeting contribute or learn something they couldn't learn by reading?

If the answer is 'no', there were too many people in the meeting or it should not have happened at all.

I've been in so many hour long meetings with 6-8 developers plus project manager, supervisor, and maybe one related person and at least 6 of the devs say nothing. That's 6 hours of dev time lit on fire each time.

The best meetings tend to be ones where stakeholders can share information and come to a decision that pushes a project forward or where there is valuable training or a useful presentation.

Also, if your meeting ever includes the phrase "well, we've got 20 minutes left so let's take some time to discuss <this thing unrelated to the meeting>", it was a terrible horrible no good bad meeting.

[decafninja]

This rings so true for me.

Depends on your org, but I bet some of those developers wish they were back at their desks working, because it's a waste of time for them. The reason they're probably there is because they feel it would look bad for them if they were absent.