You actually want to be on those, because that's where half of the nonsense comes from that you then have to deal with on the job.

True client story, heavily anonymised: I was representing my client at a meeting with a third party with which they were planning to integrate. Financial systems and many zeroes were involved.

It became apparent early in the call that although we were talking in some detail about integrating two complex and complicated systems, no-one on the call was a developer (except myself, lapsed).

It had never occurred to me that the powers that be might do that. Next time (and from then on) there were developers involved, at least from our side.

You missed a big opportunity to create your own “Project Rescue” outfit for when the project inevitably fell apart.

Classic. Yet when projects fail it's IT that gets the blame. Not to say IT is without fault sometimes. But IT based projects fail because everyone else failed to acknowledge it was an IT project. Effectively talking when they should have been listening.

Managers just want to be able to make software without those pesky developers getting in the way.

It depends. I can see myself getting exhausted of arguing and explaining and then having to deal with it anyway.

Engineers:

>what are these requirements? Where the hell does product come up with this crap? This is so unrealistic and just explaining why will take 15 minutes! What is the deal, why can't we just get aligned? Product is so stupid.

Also engineers:

>have fun in your product only meeting, dorks. I'm a programmer, and we HATE meetings cause of programming and stuff.

...but I'm not a developer.

Have fun in your meetings.