The managers make you go to meetings all the time, just to make themselves important or relevant.
Here's how it works at Cisco, at least insofar as my experience. They acquired your company, either to add to their product mix or to k–l off access to your product(s) from competitors. If the latter, you'll be more quickly dissolved. They try to re-package your product(s) into some behemoth software package in order to jack up the price. One effect of that is your previous customers now are kinda turned off because of the bloatware. So your work mainly is to integrate, no more innovate. Then after the packaging is done, you're gone, and your work is now maintained by offshore workers. In the meantime, you just waste your talent doing basically nothing meaningful.
I wonder how Cisco can survive like that. It must be a lot of arm twisting, but we know from IBM's experience, you can only twist that much.
What a shame what's happened to once premier tech company in Silicon Valley.