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The Manager-In-The-Middle Attack
An untoward management practice that disparages engineers and keeps the inept aggressor in employment.
There are many ways in which those of the management classes keep themselves in gainful employment and pretty much none of those ways are related to any actually useful skills when it comes to contributing to doing great work within the Grand Game of Software Engineering.
The ideal manager¹, in the eyes of a progressive software engineer at any rate, would keep themselves out of the way whilst making sure that the developers under their notional charge were free to work undistracted, unmolested, and with enough resources such that they can succeed in their tasks.
However what tends to happen is that they deliberately do get in the way through adopting ridiculously complex processes², arranging endless pointless meetings with as many attendees as possible, running continual performance review exercises in cahoots with HR, and bringing everyone to the brink of metaphorical starvation when it comes to the resources necessary to keep the project even on life support.
But, you may think, not all managers are like that — and you’d be absolutely right — as the typical automaton I’m describing here has little actual power and influence in the organisation as a whole and is therefore fairly easily circumvented.
