I've seen that, and the opposite as well, where you have a huge team of people constantly working and yet mysteriously nothing gets done and managers aren't sure what people are doing on a day to day basis.
That’s just bad management. High quality work that doesn’t actually move the business needle is almost the same as if people didn’t even come in at all.
That said managing a large organization is extremely hard. I don’t think most companies have the overall business dynamics to sustain a large company where teams can do things that don’t matter. Usually those companies, which there are a lot in the tech world, have something else going on (no product market fit and too much cash) that leads to those symptoms
Sure, partially it's a failing of management. But all the management is WFH and unresponsive as well. So it's easier for me to just ignore whatever team I'm in and work with the people sitting around so I can actually get stuff done.
I haven't, that sounds like a massive waste of time and energy, so those managers are doing a very bad job if their goal is to get stuff done. Most well functioning companies that I've seen act very much the opposite. I could believe that some companies are crappy enough to do that, though.
Famous problem of the bullshit jobs. Even if some people appear busy it's way too often they do nothing of the actual value to the company. All these giants probably need only 1/3 of all staff to operate at the same efficiency.
What it really sounds like is that a lot of shit work is being done all over the place. If everyone needs to be on-call 24/7 and most of their time is spent applying fixes to problems that are continually happening, something is probably broken in your organization.
It's actually not sure that they are doing work. There are backlogs because the employees and management are slow, inefficient, and don't make changes that would be made by a private organization either staying up to date or being replaced by a competitor.
(There are complexities and counter-examples that moderate this generally true statement.)
Or, that management thinks the work they're having employees do sucks, and their employees are going to slack off as much as they can if left unsupervised. Also, that management doesn't have much in the way of supervisory powers apart from tracking hours at the office.
My work's been effectively operating as a flat organization for the last several months as our manager's been away on leave. It works for the most part as we all have our own jobs we do and all know what we should be doing. Until it doesn't work. There's no accountability with the schedule and a big communication problem between everybody. When things change, nobody really knows whats going on, when mistakes are made everybody's quick to point finger and problems take longer to solve. You really notice the lack of a manager when they're gone. All these little things that used to be taken care of now fall onto whoever happens to be around to deal with it and it's definitely been causing problems we never used to have before.
If nobody steps up then it's quite likely that work never needed to get done in the first place. win-win as long as it's a learning experience for all involved.
It's definitely a problem if you force a team or a person into a certain pattern and then change the rules without telling. For example you may have punished someone for taking the initiative in the past and now you try to intentionally create a vacuum.
In the real world there is always vacuum and always stuff people think needs to get done that doesn't really need to get done. The illusion is that the manager is omnipotent and can see all the vacuum and inefficiency. A good manager works with the team to understand those.
A finding I had when I took a management role was that it's really hard actually getting anyone to do a good job of something. This is utterly frustrating. So many people actually don't give a fuck if what they do works or is of merchantable quality as long as it's perceived they are working for the hours required. I've found that the teams usually divide into functional elites that do the work unattended and I'm dealing with micromanaging the rest and trying to educate them.
I've spoken to managers in other sectors and it's the same for them too.
Alternatively - it might be typical big company bureaucracy. These staff members might simply not have an effective way to communicate with anyone that could fix the underlying problem - without going seriously out of their way and maybe missing a few targets as a result.
The cause of all this is the grafted on management caste, that does not code. For them the whole endavour suspicously looks like not doing a thing, for to do a thing, there needs to be communication, information flowing up and down the hierarchy. Not some dude sitting there like a zen monk, reading, ocassionally typing. Slackers! Best load there calendars, to get them going..
I have seen the same as well. It also causes the managers to be disconnected from the realities of the team. Since they've delegated most everything, they don't need to pay attention and are free to go play politics with the other managers and senior leadership. This then leads to poor decision making by the managers when they actually need to make decisions.
I was in a team like that. One person in particular would pick ambitious tasks, do a completely inadequate implementation, reject all feedback and then leave everyone else to deal with the production outages.
Unfortunately management only saw the “picks ambitious tasks” and were blind to everything else.
You can’t really blame people for responding to absurd incentives in absurd ways.
That is a huge problem at the majority of places I have worked. I think that really comes into play when they have too many employees and not enough projects.
It happens all the time. At a large corporate place I was working frontend at, our dpmt manager spent almost no time with the teams and all time concerned with outout metrics. When his boss looked to be retiring and the prospect came up to get his job, he started a new year by—seemingly with no knowledge of how things were working—by shuffling all the teams based on how he thought people should be organized. He then kicked off two or three major tight deadline high budget projects with those new teams, and proceeded to take a vacation. Needless to say there was a lot of turnover, I got terminated, projects failed, and he got his promotion somehow.
In a previous workplace, there were multiple redundant management tiers on the technical side, and lots of managers were well-known for never really doing anything apart from attending meetings and finding creative ways to get out of doing performance evaluations. Which usually involved buttering up one of their employees and fobbing the work off on them. Some of them had only a couple of reports. I know of at least one who had none.
Then came the "solution." A program whereby managers had to spend 90 minutes a week on the floor talking to their employees. Work was actually supposed to stop while this happened. This got inserted into everybody's objectives.
I found this particularly galling because I'd locked horns with a couple of the worst offenders in some of the few meetings I'd managed to dodge, and because, managing a team of 15 devs, I already made 1-on-1 time available to them weekly and easily spent 90 mins a day with them doing actual work. (You just can't manage technical folk without some involvement and understanding of their daily challenges. There's a respect issue otherwise, on both sides.)
The program came and went. Nobody failed the objective, though after the first week the usual suspects just hid in their office or spent their 90 minutes playing with their phones. And when the next budget crunch came, management layers only increased (because they were all high performers going by their performance review) while people who did actual work got laid off.
Of all the stuff I saw in that corp, that one annoyed me the most (and it wasn't even the most serious - 7-figure vanity projects were a real problem).
I suspect it's individual managers who've never quite got past "if you can't see someone how do you know they're working?" Never underestimate human irrationality in these things.
There was a huge disconnect between management at the top and those on the ground.
I think some managers never learnt to correctly judge workload and responsibilities. They we're rewarding those with minor responsibilities for achieving goals and harshly punishing those with huge responsibilities for minor misses.
This inability to judge workload and responsibilities was previously hidden by people's presence in the office giving bad managers a proxy but now the flaws in that management style are being exposed in the most extreme way. Entire teams are disbanding since as soon as one member of an overworked and under-rewarded team leaves the problem for that team is exacerbated.
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