Designing Effective Meetings in Tech: From Time Wasters to Strategic Tools

If you’ve been in software engineering long enough — especially as a senior, staff engineer, architect, or tech executive — you’ve felt it: meetings that drain energy, fragment your focus, and somehow still fail to move anything forward. The irony is almost historical. The word meeting comes from the Old English mētan — “to encounter” or “to come together with purpose.” Yet in modern organizations, especially in IT, meetings often represent the opposite: diffusion instead of direction.