The architects and BAs in our office are expected to bring their laptops and get a little work done during meetings. And it makes sense, since they're often in meetings for at least 5 hours out of the day.
The developers don't have laptops, so we just lose development time when we're in meetings. Although we generally get just enough work assigned to us that we can still work only 40 hours a week, so I'm not really complaining.
That doesn't make any sense at all. If they're doing work in the meeting, then they probably didn't need to be there. If they do need to be there, then they should be concentrating on the meeting. Otherwise the number of meetings needs to be cut down.
I've been to a decent number of the meetings here to know what it's like. You might only be really needed to answer one or two questions, or for one item on the agenda. You can mostly ignore the meeting and can work on other things.
For example, I was stuck in a two hour support call meeting the other day, and I really only had to be passively listening to it and speak maybe four or five times briefly. I was designing puzzles in my notebook the rest of the time. They don't give devs laptops, so I couldn't get real work done.
But hey, I've been in plenty of classes back in the day when I didn't have to pay close attention and only had pen and paper to keep me entertained (I drew, wrote stories and poems, designed games and databases, etc), so it doesn't bother me too much.
There's a reason why there's a full team of BA's and they can't write up work fast enough to keep the devs busy, and I think this is part of the reason. But there isn't enough of a push to change things, and it seems like most people would rather communicate in person here instead of via email when possible.
Any set up where someone is in meetings 5 hours a day every day is a set up where there are huge functional problems where a complete up-down blowup and reorg is needed.
You just supported the typical anti-pattern of management where someone new gets hired and proceeds to re-orgs everyone after a couple months of meetings to superficially understand how an organization works. This thereby usually causes many, many more meetings all in the name of trying to reduce the meetings.
The programmer equivalent attitude is "this code is horrible, it's due for a total re-write." Re-factors and re-orgs are the same things, but there's few regression tests for business besides "oh crap, we lost a bunch of money all of a sudden" which is a lot closer to coding directly in production.
I'm not sure what you mean by that, but they've definitely lost a few people because they got sick of how many meetings happened here. But they also have people that have been here for well over five years doing that role, so I guess most people are okay with it. I don't think I would, so I'm not gunning to get promoted here.
The developers don't have laptops, so we just lose development time when we're in meetings. Although we generally get just enough work assigned to us that we can still work only 40 hours a week, so I'm not really complaining.