Looking back over my career, there's an obvious inverse correlation between being watched and being productive. Well, except that I'm able to look productive while being watched, and arguably that counts as "productivity". Just not the kind the company probably had in mind.

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.

I've always been terrible at looking busy. At my very first job, I'd written a bunch of macros and scripts to generate my code directly from the functional design, so half the time I would be leaning back watching all my scripts do their thing. My boss hated it.

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.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read HN through lynx for this exact reason.

You know, I've always wondered why there are so many stories about these middle management types who seem to pay so close attention to things that are _not_ employee productivity. I guess on first glance, it may appear that "looking busy" corrates to "getting stuff done", but why not cut out the middle man and pay attention to what the employee actually does?

I'll give you a potential corollary. Quality control.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Related: "Just remove the duck"

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/06/05/duck/

That requires the middle managers to actually understand the jobs and responsibilities of their staff. For me, this hasn't been the case in over a decade. Since my current boss doesn't really have a technical understanding of what's involved with his teams responsibilities, he instead simply feeds metrics to his boss (also not technical). These metrics range from tickets closed, system uptime, and "automation." I would love to have the Bobs come in and ask him what he actually does here.

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

It’s like I am reading the rough draft script for Office Space 2

The problem is that most middle managers don't really care about the product. Their entire job is just message passing between higher level managers and lower level employees. Their real purpose in the organization is to propagate a sense of hierarchy which makes directors feel important and the workers feel unimportant.

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.

I notice a lot of people here feel uncomfortable when other people can see their screen. I completely recognise that feeling, though over time I learned to ignore it, and these days I just don't care anymore.

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.

My experience with middle management is the one of incompetence and personality that enjoyes little power trips.

I had also good managers, but imo, the way companies are organized currently attracts and promotes leaders that are bad at leading part.

To be fair, I don't think the manager in question did it purposely to monitor me, but it made me uncomfortable nonetheless.

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.

I fear that a lot of this stems out of those managers having a fixed mindset, where they feel that they are smarter and more productive than everyone else (telling themselves that's why they got promoted), but they also don't trust that their staff being productive.