My company is very lenient with how I spend my time (as long as I'm somewhat in the office and get my work done, which I god danm do!) and it's absolutely amazing. Often before a big release I run out of work and since no one is tracking it, I can just work on optimizing/cleaning our code or fixing some UX issue. I mean what are people gonna complain about? Me not doing the work I already completed? If they ever start tracking us I'm jumping ship, our new team pushes out the best code this company ever had and if that's not enough, then nothing could be.

I'm also confused about this whole "constant meetings" thing. At work I have an analyst that does the vast majority of client communication for me. From how people talk about work, it makes me think "analysts" aren't a thing in other companies. My gf (also a developer) didn't even know what an "analyst" could be. Like seriously? I love that guy! Life would suck soo much without him. The only meetings I attend are technical or educational in nature. And our monthly team leader meetings, just because he wants to make sure everything is ok with us.