Some of us are adult and have a professional attitude and don't need constant management. We know what needs to be done. We don't need to be treated like children.

> Some of us are adult... We don't need to be treated like children.

Why do you think planning and management is treating people like children?

How do you know what needs to be done? Are you sure you know what needs to be done?

I said stuff like this when I was young just starting out writing software in the film industry. There were dailies and rounds, progress updates twice a day, and I fought them. I was wrong, and it took time for me to understand why.

In my experience since then as both an engineer and a manager, it's clear that knowing what needs to be done at all times is very difficult, and unless you're a one person shop or in research, it involves talking to other people frequently.

If we knew what needed to be done, businesses would never fail, over-engineering wouldn't exist, no deadlines would ever be missed, and no budgets would ever over-run. I've seen a lot of people who think they know what needs to be done. I've never met someone who actually knows what needs to be done most of the time. If you do, you should manage instead of writing code.

FWIW, I don't know if this will help you or irritate you, but as a manager, your response sounds to me (ironically) quite immature. if I got this response from someone on my team, it would be a huge red flag.

I have been manager or team lead fort a long time (20 years+) and I never felt the need to check on people daily. Some may need that but in general I expect people with some experience to understand the real problems and not to do stupid things. Team members should also talk to each other without the manager having to schedule meetings for them.

Nothing of the things you describe will be prevented by daily status meetings and sitting in one big noisy room.

> Nothing of the things you describe will be prevented by daily status meetings and sitting in one big noisy room.

That does depend entirely on the kind of work you're doing. In film & games, daily is truly necessary. In pure software at LargeCorp, yeah daily status is too much, but it's common to need recurring periods of daily planning. In high flux environments like a small startup, I don't know how to avoid the constant stream of interruption & planning.

Your suggestion of what's wrong feels different than what I imagine as healthy, so I get the feeling we're talking past each other. I don't want constant meetings at all, and I don't love open offices either. But I do want devs to not go off the rails, which even the "adult" professional ones tend to in my experience. As a manager, you've never had devs who would rather work on something other than what the team is supposed to be producing, and rationalize it convincingly and with professionalism?

What is the right frequency of communication at your job? As a manager, you're responsible for team estimates and team progress reports to your manager, no? You are also responsible, I presume, for technical leadership, information sharing, establishing best practices, assisting devs who need help, etc.? Do people on your team ever get stuck and spin their wheels? How often do you track & report your team's progress? Are you putting most of those activities in a different category than meetings? Are you scheduling updates on a Maker's schedule?

I communicate very often with team members but preferably one on one or with the people directly involved. My main focus is to make sure people are working in the right direction and to make sure that everybody knows what they need to know. So sometimes you need full team meetings and often I just tell developer X to talk to developer Y directly to remove obstacles.

My observation from the few large companies I know is that there is a huge layer of management types who basically report to each other and create a lot of busywork without real output. If a developer doesn't know how long something will take they will grill him for estimates until he gives the politically correct number. I rarely see any of them engage in the real problem or help solving them. It's always "When is it done?". And they certainly never listen to complaints and actually act on them. The A/C making a guy sick constantly because it's too cold? This is what a manager should fix but typically they don't. Workplace too loud? Fix it! Stop calling meetings to discuss that already have been discussed.

You can't plan your way to success. It can only be done by actually working.

> If a developer doesn't know how long something will take they will grill him for estimates until he gives the politically correct number.

You’re not kidding. I either get straight up told what the point estimate will be or if I’m lucky I get a couple of numbers to choose from.

Noone can dispute that it's important to work on the right things. But are meetings the best way to communicate those? is there more efficient/effective way to do so? Because also no one can dispute that meetings are generally considered overhead.

The original article very clearly states that it discusses managers having to manage makers. Some of the jobs you described definitely don't seem to fit that description, so please don't hijack the discussion.

Also, not all teams have poor management. That you worked in the film industry where supposedly people had no idea of the priorities daily says nothing about the software industry in general.

My last several jobs involved sync meetings once every 5-10 days. Every meeting took 5 to 15 minutes and we all knew exactly what to do. Intermittent meetings only happened when somebody was blocked.