This is the most blatantly ridiculous straw man, I can’t believe people on HN keep trying to make it especially against FAANG. Do you really think these companies are run by middle managers that just want to watch people work?

At least at Google, a huge number of employees already work in a different floor, office, city, or even country than their managers that this couldn’t even be a factor for them.

It’s not hard. It’s not as though Sundar Pichai sends out a survey to all Google employees. He asks the VPs, and the VPs ask their reports and so on and so forth. I have no doubt there’s data from middle management that is getting weighed more than that of the people they manage.

> It’s not as though Sundar Pichai sends out a survey to all Google employees.

They actually send surveys to everyone. They also talk to the VPs, but surveys have weight.

No, they do. And you can see the aggregate scores of everyone in the company on a dashboard afterwards.

In Scrum, Scrum Master is a contributing member, just as everyone else. It's a role without power, but servant leadership and can be rotated.

This doesn't work in practice, as people are too bogged down in their work to take on this. So the role is left up to the nearest manager, ex-manager, clueless business people who're not contributing or otherwise people who just reports upwards. This defeats the role, and it's very very rare to see a contributing member being scrum master, ie. taking up slack and do the necessary stuff around the team.

So you end up with such role, or manager, overseeing the desks in open office, of the servants. Such a one-sided arrangement is both intentional, ignorant and about dominance. Feng Shui explains why it is bad for knowledge workers to have eyes over their shoulders all the time.

This varies on the manager. There are managers who do want to see butts in seats, but there are also managers who want to know their directs outside of "what's the status of JIRA ticket X-1234" in a scheduled zoom meeting. Sure, there are 1:1s if the agenda isn't too full, but it still feels kind of contrived as opposed to bumping into someone in the break room and asking them about their weekend, hobbies, or recent projects.