Meetings are absolutely essential in matrix organizations and especially projects with cross-functional resources. It's important to meet when communication goes across functions, for the sake of creating clarity, and (counter-intuitive for some of you) time efficiency. And time efficiency doesn't mean that someone with 8 hours of available work time completes 8 hours of work. It means that it doesn't take you two years to develop and release a product that your competitor can do in 18 months. Going fast means you have to quickly generate consensus from functional experts/leaders. And you can do that with meetings. It's not foreign to me that worker-bee types have a stimulus/anti-body response to meetings, especially engineers, they don't like begin put on the spot. They like to receive data, interpret, mull it over, and then offer the most complete response with a million asterisks so that their ass isn't on the line if it doesn't work. Anyway, fully agree that meetings can be time wasters. But some meetings are perceived to be time wasters by people who aren't high enough to have the whole picture.