I feel like a lot of the criticism and dismissals of management and corporate meetings like this unfairly and naively denigrate the value and importance of corporate strategy and processes in nearly the exact same way as engineering work and processes are often denigrated and misunderstood by non-engineers.
Early in my engineering career, I had the privilege of being personal friends with the older CEO of my company who was very much a business/corporate type but valued engineering as well though he was not an engineer himself. He was able to help me see through several product cycles that sales and marketing was, in many (or even most) cases, more pivotal to the success of a product than engineering. That's not to say that engineering does not matter -- it does, especially when it comes to scale and technical debt that affects release velocity, but the end customer in 99.9% of cases does not care about the engineering behind a product, only whether it solves their problem. The business and corporate meetings (when done properly-- there can be complete BS business/corporate stuff but that's a matter of incompetence) should focus efforts on delivering what customers need. Seeing that first-hand gave me a much greater appreciation for other disciplines within successful companies as well as some humility around the magnitude and importance of my contributions as an engineer. It takes all kinds and the talented business types who can proverbially sell ice to Eskimos are force multipliers akin to the mythical 10x engineer and worth their weight in gold.
Absolutely this. While of course there are true bullshitters out there, HN's consistent snarky dismissal of any possible value to non-technical business processes, while simultaneously getting self righteous about management's lack of understanding of engineering practice, is kind of embarrassingly un-self-aware. The fact that other fields in the business have their own jargon does not change that fact.
It also sounds like OP is just not the actual audience for the meetings they're in. Either someone at their company needs to rethink how wide such meetings need to be, or OP needs to figure out what parts of it are actually relevant to their role, and not worry too much about the rest.
Early in my engineering career, I had the privilege of being personal friends with the older CEO of my company who was very much a business/corporate type but valued engineering as well though he was not an engineer himself. He was able to help me see through several product cycles that sales and marketing was, in many (or even most) cases, more pivotal to the success of a product than engineering. That's not to say that engineering does not matter -- it does, especially when it comes to scale and technical debt that affects release velocity, but the end customer in 99.9% of cases does not care about the engineering behind a product, only whether it solves their problem. The business and corporate meetings (when done properly-- there can be complete BS business/corporate stuff but that's a matter of incompetence) should focus efforts on delivering what customers need. Seeing that first-hand gave me a much greater appreciation for other disciplines within successful companies as well as some humility around the magnitude and importance of my contributions as an engineer. It takes all kinds and the talented business types who can proverbially sell ice to Eskimos are force multipliers akin to the mythical 10x engineer and worth their weight in gold.