[palata]

> devs have basically always felt like our time is being wasted in meetings.

I think that's key. My experience is that I have often told my managers that "I don't need this meeting personally, so unless somebody else needs me in this meeting, I am losing my time".

Do you know what the managers usually answered? "I disagree, I think this meeting is useful for you. We are having this meeting to help you developers".

No wonder I don't respect my managers then, and now I happily waste my time in their meetings.

[bitwize]

Scrum practitioners often spout weird propaganda. I once remarked that a programming task might be time-intensive, and difficult to accomplish quickly in a process as meeting-heavy as Scrum. The Scrum Master then linked me to a FAQ item on some pro-Scrum web site which purported to assure us that Scrum teams spend far fewer hours per week in meetings compared to other teams. She might've had a point, albeit a small one, if:

* standups were limited to 15 min/day (all Scrum teams I'd been on took 30 min, minimum, to do standup)

* we actually had 1 hour retro, planning and refinement meetings (retro, the most useful meeting, was actually 1.5h, planning and refinement could take 2h)

* POs did not feel free to schedule arbitrary additional meetings to keep up with the increasing backlog. SAFe specifies a quarterly, multi-day, division-wide planning meeting to align disparate teams during which all the work you intended to do for the next six sprints was scheduled on a big board. Of course there was never enough time to point and schedule six sprints' worth of work, necessitating a pre-planning meeting, and sometimes a pre-pre-planning meeting. Hours each.