I had, what I felt, was the best seat in the office at my previous job. We had an open office with short cubicles and standing desks, and the cubicles were arranged so that two people shared a small area with two desks/cabinets/etc.
For a while, it was wonderful. My "cube-mate" worked from home 4 days a week and only came in for meetings, and we had a window on one side and an empty desk on the other. It was about as great as an open office can be.
And then my manager moved into the cube nextdoor, and arranged his desk so that when he stood at his standing desk (which was most of the time), he was looking directly over the cube wall at me and my monitors. It made me very self-concsious and uncomfortable, and was (a small) part of the reason I left, TBH.
Works the other way as well. I don't want to be able to see what others are working on--open offices are also distracting for this reason.
Over time, I think I've gotten better at looking busy while reading HN. I don't think there's a very strong correlation between looking busy and being productive.
In a perfect world, quality control twiddles their thumbs all day, does some tests, and collects a paycheck because everything is perfect the first time.
In practice, I know engineers who leave in tiny and easy to fix mistakes for QC to catch. They do this because if they turn in something with no errors QC finds something for them to add, frequently requiring larger changes and thus creating a crunch. QC does this because they have someone breathing down their neck who measures their effectiveness by how many errors they caught. I'll refer you to Goodhart's Law[0].
I'll also note that I see this as a common "tip" for paper submissions. But I'm not sure it is as strong of a correlation as when passing things through QC.
It's also important to realize that what middle management wants and what its staff thinks is important usually diverges. Middle management wants to look good, to climb the ladder. Staff generally wants someone to provide guidance, and remove obstacles. If middle management isn't technical, there ends up being a gap.
My favorite is a manager who hired a DevOps admin. This person had never touched Docker, yet after a one week course, was put in charge of our environment. Needless to say, he's made Docker look really bad due to his inexperience. The manager looks good though, because our stodgy company is using Docker.
My second is the manager who was hired to manage our SQL and Oracle team. He has no experience with either database, and was a pity hire by our VP. He's been wonderful.../s
Their purpose is to manipulate the self-esteem of the people within the organisation so that workers feel so bad about themselves that they never feel entitled to ask for a raise and directors feel so good about themselves that they feel entitled to keep paying themselves large bonuses. Middle managers don't serve customers, they only exist to serve the emotional needs of their bosses.
That said, there has been one situation where it was actually an advantage that everybody could see our screen. We had the most terrible working spot you could imagine: next to an intersection of two corridors, in a room that was open on one side, had a glass wall on another, was shared with another team, and had only a single window. A co-worker was sitting with his back to the intersection so everybody could see his screen. At the time, we were playing around with Neo4j, which has a nice graphical browser interface, and everybody seeing that, got us into contact with a couple of other teams we didn't know before that were also using Neo4j.
I had also good managers, but imo, the way companies are organized currently attracts and promotes leaders that are bad at leading part.
TBH, I should have asked him about it, but I couldn't think of a way to bring it up that didn't sound rude or suspicious, and it turned out I left soon anyway.
On the other side of the glass wall was the pause room, with the coffee machine and everybody gathering. That felt really awkward.
> The irony was that I was probably the most productive person in that office (in my humble opinion).
The easiest and the most efficient way to ruin my productivity is to look at my screen. I can't work (nor can I pee - a funny coincidence, that's called "paruresis") when somebody is watching.