As the other commenter said, it is all busy work to make themselves (and anyone else who care) feel productive. It looks good, calendars are filled with important-sounding discussions, and they're also the ones getting the "praises" when they announce what "their" team is doing in various meetings when higher ups are present.

They looked and were very busy in the office, never sitting in one place. I think remote work essentially reveals that they're essentially just casually chatting on zoom all day long. The decorum is really what makes things look important.

On a final note, I had to replace my manager for 1 month, and I inherited a ton of 1h+ meetings every week. It was ridiculous, I felt like cancelling meetings most week but I didn't want to look like I was slacking off, so I was basically just doing the equivalent of standup meetings with the various teams and devs and cutting it short. That's it, a bunch of people telling me their progress for a few minutes a day and I was effectively replacing my manager on top of my actual role. Whenever something blocked progress I would simply tell people who to connect with and ask of they wanted me to setup a meeting or preferred to use the live chat. That's about it.

It makes them look productive tho. Their calendars always look full, because they are really busy being in all those meetings. The circular logic works out just fine for them. They are all input, they have no outputs.

We didn't have a scrum master but a new development leader implemented it in practice and managed it amazingly. He really made sure that time isn't wasted and the meetings were short, concise and everyone loved it after a few months. Work processes improved greatly, they used to be in chaos because management were (and still are) a bunch of imbeciles and supposedly didn't listen to the developers regarding how work processes should be improved.

But then his probation was over with a 3 month period of notice, and upper management started fucking with him because he refused to sign a legally binding contract of responsibility for the entire company's infrastructure which wasn't part of the deal, and was out of his scope (leading the development teams != being responsible for the entire company's infrastructure).

They started going behind his back and slowly destroyed what he had built and after a while he couldn't handle it and resigned effective immediately because they threatened him with a lawsuit regarding something he didn't have anything to do with but was management's fuckup.

This is the whole story affirmed by my coworkers and him, some of it I saw real time but I'm still on probation, looking for another job. This dev lead guy really liked some of our work for and told us if there's an opportunity he would want us to come with him and keep working together, just the company sucked ass. And I'll gladly do it because he was amazing.

Edit: added some context and grammar

i always thought it was peak laziness to basically go through entire work days and stories by just chaining endless meetings. Barely any heavy lifting ever gets done, people just spit just enough nonsense to preface the next meeting. I much prefer small corporations where the product (still) actually matters.