Seems if you have staff that needs constant oversight and micromanagement, it's a waste of your own time. Do you really want to check someone 8 hours a day, 5 days per week to make sure they do what they are supposed to do?

I think in such cases it might be better to get rid of such staff, for your own sake and theirs.

> Do you really want to check someone 8 hours a day, 5 days per week to make sure they do what they are supposed to do?

I had to do something like this. Not every hour, but several times a day was needed to keep this person on track and productive. And no, I did not want to check on an otherwise-functional adult that frequently. Nor did anyone else, but circumstances led to them working on my team.

> I think in such cases it might be better to get rid of such staff, for your own sake and theirs.

Yes, that was the best option and is ultimately what happened. Going through the required HR hoops was just as much effort as micromanaging, which is why no one bothered to do it for several years. It was easier to shuffle them off to another project and tell the lead "they're alright, they just need to work on communication".

What led you to believe checking on them so frequently was useful, and what were the results?

I have worked with people who needed explicit instructions for every step to perform, and if they complete what is assigned to them they will quietly sit and pass the time until they are explicitly told to do something.

This isn't an "oh it's 4:30 and I'm not going to start something new", it's "It's 11am, and everyone else is busy, I will play solitaire until my manager explicitly tells me which of the 45 tasks they want me to complete".

If you say "go into room X and fetch the Y to do Z", if Y isn't in the right place they will await further instruction. If challenged, they will say they need training on how to handle the situation, or that it's the managers job to ensure the process is right. If you give them the explicit instruciton to tell you when their task is complete, they will come to you and stand next to you until you give them something else to do.

However, if you give them a task like do X at 9:30 every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, it will be done, to spec, every time. People like me will occasionally miss it due to other asks, prioritisation,a perceived lack of value of the task, or an "I-know-that-this-isn't-important" mindset.

Part of management is identifying these behavioural differences, and utilising them effectively.

If you have a full team of people who need explicit instruction, your job will be shuffling tickets around. If you have a full team of people who look for improvements, and are constantly thinking ahead, your job will be trying to reign them in and keep them working on the right things. Neither is good, you want a mix of both.

That's a good nuanced take, where actual productivity increases and hostility isn't created, for particular kinds of people.

Thanks. Unfortunately, you do get people who are just poor at their job sometimes, it might be ability or life circumstances (death/divorce/illness/?). The real problem is when there's a mismatch of expectations - if I hire a principal for my team, and expect them to be independent, if they require hand holding or guidance, it doesn't matter how good their code is. Similarly, if assign out bug fixes to someone, and they don't do them and instead do the "juicy" work, it's not going to work.

The only real problem are the people who I can only describe as maliciously incompetent. They do the bare minimum that is asked of them, take advantage of all of the freedom and lack of definitions (no core hours meaning I don't work 10-4 Monday through Friday, that sort of thing), and when you try to reason through it together they jump to the most hostile action possible and weaponise your flexibility and grace against you.

The only solution for these people is for them to be part of large companies with rigid policies that they are guardrailed into and have no way to test the boundaries of. If you have one of these people on your team you need to get rid of them. My experience is that there's usually one in every 40-50 people. If you get one early on your team, you're in big trouble.

I think what you've described here is some sort of circular dependency on the mismatched expectations you described, and probably a failure of communication in both directions.

I could probably fit the description of the malicious person you described, but only because it wouldn't map to what my manager knows exactly how to work with, almost always defaulting to a doubling down of otherwise unnecessary tests of my competence, as defined by their uncommunicated expectations in terms of how they differ from what I'm doing and why. More specifically this seems to manifest as micromanagement. It's quite shocking to watch, it doesn't take much to set things on a bad course, and it's very difficult to recover from.

In the case of my last job, I was working remotely from the the PST timezone with people in Vietnam, Spain, and Germany where the manager was. At first I was waking up for a 6am morning meeting every day to have a little overlap with the rest of the team, but later I'd discuss it with my manager and change it to 3 days a week. I made it clear that despite being in a wildly different timezone, I'd do my best to be in attendance at the most important of the new meetings that were accumulating as the result of org change and boilerplate agile, and be available for a few hours in the morning and a few hours later at night that overlapped with other developers who needed to chat in real time with me, so I could get a block of relatively uninterrupted focus time in the evening or late afternoon. This actually worked pretty well, I kept up with responses on Jira, code reviews on Github, and delivering the features and bugfixes I committed to. I was originally hired as a contractor and then moved reluctantly to employment, which is when my boss started asking I keep core hours, which I agreed to. Things kind of kept moving along fine, but he seemed to be accumulating resentment about something, which impacted his ability to communicate respectfully. He started "checking in" during strange hours for no tangible reason, and when I didn't respond immediately, he would just keep sending more messages. Whenever I did respond, he'd seem to come up with an excuse for why he needed my attention, such as for a status update on something I'd already visibly commented on. My response was always to try and be more communicative, but surprisingly he kept getting more toxic, and more passive-aggresive, in what seemed to be an effort to remove what agency I had to get work done.

> when you try to reason through it together they jump to the most hostile action possible and weaponise your flexibility and grace against you.

All 1on1s concluded with him seemingly re-affirming his belief that frequent supervision is what he should do, ignoring anything I had to say, and this just kept compounding what almost resulted in burnout and depression.

At one point for example I had added and finished a ticket for a simple typo fix in a route, but noted that there was another ancillary issue worth looking at, not specifically related to this ticket and should be looked at independently at another time. He commented and said the ticket was incomplete until the ancillary issue was looked at, even though there were much higher priorities. So it sat paused or in-progress for some time while I finished my priority work, meanwhile he continues DMing me almost daily asking for status updates on this and other ongoing work. I eventually get around to investigating it, conclude that there's a good but undocumented and unbroken reason things were like that, and it's not something to pursue at this time, ensuring that I documented my findings thoroughly and visibly. He then assigned it to himself, realized he didn't have time to work on it, and then asked in the general slack channel if anyone would look into this, "because ___ refuses to", subsequently backing off only after I called him out on it and he wasted his time concluding exactly what I did, almost as if I'm a capable software dev

After that, he'd proceed to start moving meetings around to hours I couldn't possibly attend, cancelling 1-on-1s, and eventually I'd get laid off. Honestly it was insane and I hope he gets his head checked. The only reason I didn't burn out was because I mentally denounced his behaviour as laughably petulant and I shouldn't do anything beyond what I'm doing to appease it.

I've had other instances at other companies, and I do believe I'm the problem, but me as the problem wouldn't exist if people who had good communication skills and empathy were promoted to management. I've had 1 on 1s with spineless people approximately my age who spent the entire meeting prodding me with vague questions to try and get me to admit some pet wrongdoing, only to deny it upon being asked what they're looking for, when just stating it clearly could have helped work through the issue. Managers often avoid confrontation and resort to passive-aggresion.

Forgive the typos here, wrote it on my phone and it's a bit to review.

Edit: from his perspective, I understand that he was probably faced with home life problems and an issue of someone not conforming. So my point is that things appear wildly different depending on what your sense pf normal compliance is, especially if you have no apparent difficulties with shifting focus for example

I dont think this is about workers preference. People without oversight can get unsure about how to execute task and need validation, but when directly asked nobody will tell you they like micromanaged (seen this). Other thing I've seen is people without supervision producing less/lower quality results.

> People without oversight can get unsure about how to execute task and need validation

This sounds more like it could occur at least temporarily when most people get some categorically new task that's potentially costly to screw up, and I could imagine it being voluntarily requested rather than overbearingly applied.

> Other thing I've seen is people without supervision producing less/lower quality results.

I feel like managers identify a risk and apply their toolkit to it, which often ends up being increased oversight regardless of whether or not it's a good idea. It may or may not be I suppose, but it seems like only a niche person would respond with greater effectiveness in response to more frequent and perhaps intrusive scrutiny.

Yes. Like a thousand times yes. I learned this lesson as a manager very slowly because I hate being micromanaged.

It made me a bad manager to not have that in my tool kit. There are a lot of people who just want you to tell them exactly what to do.

It’s not a preference to be micromanaged.

It’s a preference to not execute two different skill sets when you lack one of them. That’s stressful.

You might be a good developer, but not great at talking to users and figuring out the priority and the solution and executing on that independently.

Or you might not be good at delivering eloquent speeches. Or whatever. Everyone lacks some skillset which they’d prefer someone more qualified handle for them.

Well, I just can't imagine how constant scrutiny and involvement would help what is ultimately a management and expectations failure. "We hired x to concentrate for long periods of time and improve our test coverage, but they're not so good at checking their email and responding to customers within 15 minutes, guess I'll need to start calling them frequently so they get better at that".

Seems like poorly considered delegation, or a system problem. Good managers should be able to identify or discover through conversation if someone will benefit from more specific and frequent interaction, and bad ones decide it'll be a good choice and work backwards from that.

In other cases, or if established up-front, one should expect a certain range of regular capabilities be within some agreed upon parameters; you probably wouldn't ask your system administrator to get on the sales floor, but you might ask your sales people to be able to work the cash register and lock the doors.

Interns, new employees...