From what I understood, they are talking about the author’s complaint that he doesn’t get to spend 100% of his workday coding/testing/documenting. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the companies were poorly run - larger enterprises with more projects, teams and customers are going to require more meetings.

Maybe he worked at poorly managed companies, who knows. The fact that he was asked to participate in meetings instead of only being assigned purely code-related tasks isn’t very compelling evidence of a company being a “joke”.