Your bit about executive perception is a great point. I think that's a huge reason why our offices and workdays look the way they look, why we spend so much time in meetings, why WFH has so much resistance.
The executives tend to be extroverted and at the top of the primate social-power higherarchy. Much of this is unconscious, or at least un-admitted, but the people in charge of our offices get a rush when their subordinates visably do the work. They enjoy people gathering around them and telling them about the issue of the day. To an extrovert at the top of the ladder, that power wouldn't feel as good if it was manifested solely as Jira tickets, slack pings, and performance dashboards in a home office. They would not feel nearly as important.
One open office I worked regularly flew in parent company executives from around the world so they could watch all that geeky brainpower under their command grinding away at our Macbooks.
I think this psychology has had a cumulative effect on creating our work culture. Did an individual executive decide to build your office based on how it made them feel? No probablly not, but when you take the psychological profiles of all business leaders together you get the open office, the business trip, and the all day meeting.
It made me think of another: perhaps executives wrongly assume that what's a productive environment for them and their tasks is appropriate for everyone in the organization.
> One open office I worked regularly flew in parent company executives from around the world so they could watch all that geeky brainpower under their command grinding away at our Macbooks.
Might as well put you all behind a big glass wall, with a placard underneath that says “Developers” and toss a few bananas in every once in a while.
At my office, our team IS behind a glass wall. We have four external facing 70" monitors displaying various dashboards, and we call this work area "the Fishbowl..."
Right, I think some people honestly think that software just magically leaps from developers’ fingertips onto store shelves. Product management, project management, operations, marketing, legal, sales, BD? They just sit in meetings and play Candy Crush all day...
I never claimed that everybody but software engineers are useless, I wrote that managers are mostly useless, as in you could reduce their number by perhaps 2/3 and you would get the same results (probably better).
Where do you work? I've rarely experienced this. Current and last company, both fast moving adtech firms, we are always desperate for good managers. BUT the key is only to have managers with, well, management skills. That does not mean promoting the best engineers to management, a common problem. In fact it is often specifically not that. They get promoted in the tech track.
The book "Managing Humans" is worth a read if you're so cynical about managers. Though the actual problem is corporate culture in my experience.
The executives tend to be extroverted and at the top of the primate social-power higherarchy. Much of this is unconscious, or at least un-admitted, but the people in charge of our offices get a rush when their subordinates visably do the work. They enjoy people gathering around them and telling them about the issue of the day. To an extrovert at the top of the ladder, that power wouldn't feel as good if it was manifested solely as Jira tickets, slack pings, and performance dashboards in a home office. They would not feel nearly as important.
One open office I worked regularly flew in parent company executives from around the world so they could watch all that geeky brainpower under their command grinding away at our Macbooks.
I think this psychology has had a cumulative effect on creating our work culture. Did an individual executive decide to build your office based on how it made them feel? No probablly not, but when you take the psychological profiles of all business leaders together you get the open office, the business trip, and the all day meeting.