That's because you manage people by expecting them to be adults, and they step up and do the work.

Auuugh! I hate that!

Seriously people, document as you go.

Let me tell you why: Accidents happen.

Do you know what happens to all that lovely detail data that you keep in your head after a concussion? Yeah, it's has gaping holes, or is completely gone.

I hate to think of how many projects and departments get derailed by auto wrecks ands major illnesses.

I'm still cleaning up stuff left half completed by a guy who went on medical leave a year ago.

IOTW, discriminate against people who taught themselves on crappy equipment, only hire people with fancy degrees who know nothing except how entitled they are.

Translation: Discriminate against poor people and people with cheap parents.

Seriously, when I was in high school, the AppleII had just come out. I asked for a computer for Christmas. I got some half-baked mechanical boolean logic "game". I was teaching myself to program on the TTY at school because there wasn't room in the programming class. It was real obvious that I wasn't going to get anywhere with computers at that point. I kept it as a hobby that I would try to do, but didn't try to work with computers again until the 90s, after the PC came out and was affordable.

Yep.

Stack ranking automatically penalizes people who aren't present to be "seen" and play politics. If you mentor others but don't self promote and kiss ass, the people you help will keep their jobs and you won't.

Stack ranking is evil, and destructive to real collaboration and teamwork, regardless of how densely you pack them in and how much you micromanage sprints.

Amen.

Also, daily scrums are a way for managers/PMs to micromanage the team down to every little task.

Headphones are not a solution, IMO. They give me headaches and ear infections. Bleah.

I wouldn't. Open plan and hot desking are demeaning hell.

I've literally left jobs that moved me to open plan from cubes, I hate it that much. I tried it for over six months each time. So no, give me a cube, or better yet, and office.

Ugh!

No, Yahoo ended remote work because their managers were not capable of managing remote workers, and were getting scammed. So they punished the whole company because a few managers couldn't tell that their people weren't really working.

Seriously, one remote guy left because of it, and those of us who took over his job wondered what the fuck he did all day, because stuff was so fucked up and incomplete that it was obvious he was not producing any real results and only doing part-time work for his full-time pay. This was purely his manager's fault for not establishing goals and results, and not keeping track. (In the manager's defense, he had a double-sized team, mostly in office.)

But many of Yahoo's middle managers spent more time kissing ass and playing politics than actually managing.

You left off a zero.... ;)

But amen!

Agreed. I figure he is one of those jerks that make open plan such a hell for any deep thinker. He just wants his coworkers around so he can talk at them.

Obviously you don't think deeply about much of anything. It's often at least 15 minutes.

Guess again. Your review is based on YOUR productivity, not your team. Therefore it is what matters. I have been in jobs where I mentored juniors (answering questions takes waaaay more than 15 minutes), then got crucified on my review for spending too much time on "other stuff", and not doing my tasks. I got no "credit" for helping, "unblocking", mentoring or being an information source. None.

Also, your coworker who is so "blocked"? Has a question that they should either a) figure out for themselves without you holding their hand all damn day, b) do some searching on Google and or your internal wiki, or c) write on the group Slack so it is well formulated and able to be answered by anyone who is available.

True. Some people can't manage themselves well at home. They have to have the conversations that make them feel important. They have to have their managers watch over them to keep them on task, and not bugging everyone else. They need to smell the farts of their coworkers, and get every illness so that they really feel like they are part of something. I for one find those people to be the biggest impediment to productivity.

Face to face conversations are waaay overrated, and for people who never learned to communicate via the written word. These are the same types of chumps who refuse to comment their code.

I am far, far more efficient working from home, or alone in an office after hours, than I am with everyone and their siblings, cousins and significant others interrupting me all goddamn day with stupid questions that can be answer by reading the goddamn wiki or doing a Google search and applying their fucking brain!