When I started at my current company, they assured me that there were very few meetings. "We're pretty quick and agile around here. There are a few meetings but they're all optional; our team lead represents us at them and we're free to work"

A few months into my employment here, all of the project/product management staff went to a week long Agile Methodologies conference.

Now I have about 6 hours of meetings a week. Always at 2-4PM, which means that I get absolutely no work done in the afternoon (I get in early; get back from lunch at 1, by 1:30 it's meeting prep time; meeting ends at 4, or sometimes doesn't; I'm out by 5). We have sprint planning meetings. Sprint retrospective meetings. Backlog grooming meetings. Roadmap planing meetings. Sprint demo (internal/to team) meetings. Sprint demo (external/to company) meetings. Formalized 20 minute standups instead of informal 5 minute standups.

In fact, in a supreme example of Kafkaesqsue irony: because our previous (functional) meetings got corrupted into Official Agile™ Meetings, the benefits we got from our old meetings got lost. So now we have a new meeting, the Engineering Meeting, where we get all the things we used to get out of our functional meetings. Non-technical management is not welcome at this one.

Hell, from my calendar this week:

Monday, 2-3:30: Backlog Grooming meeting (ie. Product tells us what we're going to do next week)

Thursday, 2:30-4: Internal sprint demos (ie. showing Product what we did; note we already have to informally demo each completed feature to the corresponding product owner anyway so it's unclear to me what the point of this meeting is)

Friday, 11-11:45: Sprint retrospective (ie. "what went well, what went poorly, what should we do differently?". This is probably the only Agile™ meeting in my calendar that is actually useful. Though there is absolutely no mechanism in place to review past weeks to look for trends in improvement, or hold us accountable to 'what should we do differently?')

Friday, 3-6PM: External Sprint Demos (ie. massive meeting where every team int he company does a 15 minute presentation of what they've done in the past two weeks. This meeting is formally 'optional', which means only presenters attend. For some reason, all the nontechnical departments don't attend; still have no idea what Marketing does all day. The end of this meeting involves free food and drinks as a bribe to get people to stay until 6 on a Friday)

Bah. We'd be so much more productive if Product had read Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule