It's just that it's impossible to scale that approach, so the larger the enterprise gets, the less you'll actually be shipping... As pretty much all of them seem to think it's easy to scale development teams, increasing their headcount and running productivity against a wall.
A small team has barely any space for Juniors however, so I think it's very good that both approaches exist in the wild
But then for the deployment and maintenance, they hired a large army of cheap inexperienced junior developers.
And if they decided to attend these meetings are they still expected to maintain the same "velocity/story points/etc."? Because if so then they will likely have to work outside of "office hours" to actually get the work done. Possibly why they decline and stop complaining... They realize they'll just get handed a bigger bag of BS.
And it's also perfectly OK to find this out about yourself only later in life, when you have gathered some (more) professional experience.
What's not OK imho is labelling other people's version of work as "corporate bs".
If someone feels like a meeting is "corporate bs", that speaks to a failing of those hosting the meeting to properly communicate the intent of the meeting. If you are not able to effectively communicate with the people you work with, perhaps it is you who isn't cut out for corporate life? If you think you can treat a class of kindergarteners like it is a fourth year university course, teaching kindergarten likely isn't for you.
Peter principle applies, I suppose.
It takes effort to mitigate all that and it takes even more effort to try to work around it if it happens a lot. If you are ready and willing to improve the system - welcome to management ;) If this feels like a whole lot of crap to you - better stay away from big companies, do some consulting, find startups with like minded people... Staying on a job, being unmotivated or stressed out is not good for anyone involved.
To your second point.. corporate bs is not necessary and should be called out. Most of it falls into waste. Another large chunk falls into people trying to climb the corporate ladder.
This is the problem. Most managers are not aware of the real ground situation and rely on “visibility” presentations to judge worth.
The question is if this is required. Personally i can't wait for AI managers who are optimizing transparent objectives
All AIs that I've seen so far just optimize the reproduction of existing biases and/or serve to obfuscate policy decisions by ensuring that no person is left to blame. Are you stating a dream there, or did I miss a development towards practical AI systems that make decisions more transparent?
You can't just have "transparent objectives" and let AI take the wheel.
I happen to manage approx 20 people in a ~500 person org. Everyone gets a chance to decide if they want to focus on becoming a social animal and growing in the org (which results in more meetings, more emails, more chats, etc.) or just concentrate on the technical stuff. The latter is perfectly fine for me as I am aware that these people still produce huge amounts of value to the company. However they are not party to some decision loops and are often on the receiving end of architecture and design decisions. Most of them start to complain about that sooner or later, so I ask them to start participating in more meetings... Once being able to put all that into perspective, most of them don't complain about it anymore.
So long story short - most of the time you can't have it both ways in a large(-ish) organization. You can either be the guy who digs a hole every day and someone tells him where. Or you can be the guy who decides where to dig the holes but only get to dig a more moderate amount of holes yourself.