> A lot of upper management jobs consist solely of attending meetings for projects they are only vaguely aware of so that they can ask questions about irrelevant things, interrupting people who are trying to get work done to ask them how long the work they were doing before being interrupted will take to do (more time now that I've been interrupted again, thanks) and other needless tasks.

I mean, _explicitly_ this, to the point that I almost included it in the initial reply. The reason they think no projects have moved is that they can't sit in endless, pointless meetings making unhelpful suggestions to feel justified. Meanwhile, the scientists and developers who actually build things haven't been pulled all over the research campus to sit in these pointless meetings all day any more, so the "real" work being done, and incident response timing, has drastically improved.

Literally no projects have run any later than they always did (by initial plans, at least, they normally tended to restrospectively "move the goalposts" so that historically past projects are defined as having delivered "on time"), but this is being used as the primary justification for forcing everyone back in, full-time, from september.

Maybe I'm just exposing the dysfunction of my hybrid academic/industry working place, at this point. We had trouble recruiting before, will be interesting to see how many people leave because of this; informally many are searching for alternative employment.