Let me introduce you to the world of PI planning where two days of every quarter are spent with approximately 100 people (developers, program managers, etc) for each line of business to plan out the next quarter of work - even if 90% of it is continuing the work from the last quarter...
Two days sounds lucky. I've been in SAFE plans where it took an entire week to plan things, it was unreal. Like you I met people I've never seen or heard of from the company all giving their input on software I'm creating. I'd never see them again until the next SAFE planning, only this time it felt like 1 SWE out of maybe 15 (yes there were only 3 teams of 5 devs, put 100+ in these SAFE meetings) contributed anything meaningful.
Company wasted so much money, then the org shut down for spending $500 per customer per year in maintenance (this was a health insurance company) whereas the main company would only spend $70 per customer per year. You'd think leadership of the org would get fired for this but they were rewarded with other positions within the company to do the same thing.
Unreal. Why do shareholder's put up with this? I guess the healthcare monopoly is the only reason to.
Half a day is spent on collecting and analyzing the confidence vote. The results of the confidence vote have no impact on the plan except as a baseline for the next PI.
AWS has (or had) a weekly 2-hour operational status meeting. It has over 200 people in it, a mix of distinguished and principal engineers, very senior managers, etc. That meeting easily crossed the $100k-per-pop threshold. Worth it, though, that was actually a pretty great institution.
Sometimes the meet has folk that are even more expensive (not me). Sometimes theres more than 50. Four hours of meetings, six hours of wall-clock
Edit: some companies have >20k employees. My first years at MS (late 90s) had these "war room" like 2x a week, 50 people, multiple VPs in the room, 2h. But there were other groups doing their war rooms too.
I was involved in a large software project with a large financial institution. Every weekday, there was an hour long status meeting. Based on what my company billed my time at (and presuming the other 40 companies billed their staff time likewise), that morning status call cost about $50k.
