g attitude of the
"grown ups". It is very important for the "management" to realize that they
are actually only facilitating what is "happening" and they should let the
system handle itself and get out of the way than get into and disturb the
existing norm.

~~~
raganwald
One of the most serious problems with modern "management" is that the
incentives are all wrong. Imagine that I hire a programmer and pay him by the
line of code. This idea has been so thoroughly debunked that it is nearly
impossible to write out the consequences without sounding cliché. Yet it
happens all the time: Companies promote "Architects" who are evaluated by the
weight of their "architecture." The result is stultifying and demoralizing.
The architect does not work to facilitate the programmer's work, he works to
produce evidence of his contribution in the form of frameworks, standards, and
software process.

So, how are most managers evaluated? By the amount of "managing" they do, as
measured by the amount of process they impose on their team. Evaluating a
manager by the amount of managing they _do_ is exactly the same thing as
evaluating a programmer by the amount of code they write. And it produces
results like you describe, where the manager works to produce evidence of
their management in the form of processes and decisions from the top down,
rather than facilitating the work actually being done.

In a simplistic world, the answer would be to change the incentives and the
behaviour would change itself. But as they say, "correlation does not equal
causation." The incentives have to change, but so do the people. Results-
oriented managers don't work in those kind of environments to begin with, and
after a year or two in such a place they will already have left. You need to
change the incentives and the culture and the people all together.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Middle managers are rewarded for making budget and meeting release dates.
Seems good, right?

So they agitate for (wait for it) maximum budget and minimum feature set. So
that succes