The sad part is they think that all the reporting and metrics, and the juking of the stats which goes along with it, is making things better. In reality it’s generally keeping things the same but with a pretty coat of paint.
My experience with good managers at large companies is they do a lot of work to make sure the rest of the company doesn’t get in the way of their developers. Which yes, mostly involves a lot of reporting and meetings with other people on the company. But it probably is more important for the productivity of their reports than what managers do at smaller companies, even if it seems like it accomplishes nothing.
I think they would spend their time better on improving processes and removing obstacles but that almost seems a taboo to point out. I have seen tons of scrum retrospectives that got ignored as soon as the problems were outside the reach of the immediate team. In the end you can do as much estimation and reporting as you want, but things still get done by doing them, not by talking about them
