Inversely I can tell you what factors contribute to my good days.
Primary factor is when my manager and his manager are out of the office.
We do an hour long project update every morning and afternoon so that both managers can poke at our progress and make sure it's "meeting the bar". And my direct manager isn't trusted by his manager, so my skip is in there and they squabble around task prioritization and tasks get re-assigned randomly half done between developers when they don't feel enough was done on the task in the last 3 hours.
There's plenty of good stuff at this job, but that part drives me insane.
In the remote era this is the only way that 2nd level managers can exert authority. In the office they have a nicer desk and eat lunch with a different crowd so you know they hold power.
If it makes you feel any better the director is doing exactly the same thing to them.
I'm sorry for your experience with second level managers. For me they were all very chill and friendly, so it's definitely not a hard rule that all higher managers are bad.
Sounds crazy. With little info, I would guess one of:
* Management has lost faith in the manager and/or their team. (e.g., handholding to try to fix the manager/team, or to mitigate temporarily whatever turns out can't be fixed)
* The company, product, or some management role is in crisis, enough for management to be firefighting in desperation mode. (e.g., task re-triage up to once or twice a day can be a legitimate tactic, and I've seen a company saved that way; but two hour-long meetings of the entire team a day consumes huge time&energy, so that would need additional justification)
* Management is operating out of their experience, or overextended, and not adjusting fast enough.
If you trust your manager or the skip, you could go talk to them. But, if they are crazy or cruddy, you should be prepared to be leave, and not necessarily on your schedule.
Meeting the bar? That's amazon bullshit isn't it? Actually they constantly raise the bar for a recursive bullshit.
Companies stack ranking an inherently team activity will never learn. You can't be a team and have the core incentive to fuck someone over for when the musical chairs end.
Primary factor is when my manager and his manager are out of the office.
We do an hour long project update every morning and afternoon so that both managers can poke at our progress and make sure it's "meeting the bar". And my direct manager isn't trusted by his manager, so my skip is in there and they squabble around task prioritization and tasks get re-assigned randomly half done between developers when they don't feel enough was done on the task in the last 3 hours.
There's plenty of good stuff at this job, but that part drives me insane.