The working-from-home debate gets old

My manager protects me from meetings and gets me the things I need.

I like my manager.

Managers perform a helpful role. There’s a lot of ways to be bad at everything and many (most?) people are minimally effortful which exacerbates the actual difficulties. Good managers (in my experience) are uncommon but managers are common.

However, I am convinced that if a person’s title is Scrum Master it doesn’t matter how much effort they give for their job; they will never fix the error of their position being created and filled.

it 100% depends on the project and is demonstrably false for many things I participated in. For example, if you are a fintech integrating with a bank - which is very important for moving money cheaply and being able to make the ends meet - like 80% of the work is bullshit meetings and compliance and beating things out of like 30 different 9-5 idiots somewhere on the East Coast, which I would be ecstatic to delegate to a manager or a PM, who can run the whole project, track the timeline and answer the endless questions about when it's going to get done already. On other projects with less human dependencies you really don't need one.

Most managers aren’t really insightful in their leadership. They’re turning a formulaic crank, doing what books tell them to do, and being rewarded by other managers and promoted because managers decide who gets promoted. They form a cargo cult of HBS case study vomit, with no actual management ability. They don’t understand people or how they work, they don’t innovate and figure out how to make effective teams from a collection of individuals. They create policies to form individuals to conform to an idealized worker, write performance plans when they fail to be something they’re not, and wonder why people who are smart enough to go to a top school and graduate with honors and pass the rigorous interview can’t “perform” according to their metrics that are at best proxies for that idealized worker that doesn’t exist. A good manager learns the human dynamics and assembles a team like a puzzle, focusing on the delivery of results over the methods and let the team organize as they organize best, watching for pathological edges and correcting the teams dynamic towards health. They help individuals exaggerate their strengths and find peers to compensate their weaknesses.

The first manager can’t handle remote work because there’s no formula to follow. They’re lost. They’re the boss and don’t like being lost, so they force everyone to conform. It’s all they know how to do, and their cargo cult cheers them.

The second manager is unique but let’s people work the way they work best. In office, at home, hybrid. They figure out ways to smooth the rough edges, and get things to be smooth. People love this manager. They get amazing things done. HBS studies are written about their techniques, and eventually the cargo cult adjusts. But before then the cargo cult of other managers and the management hierarchy absolutely loathes this manager. They don’t speak the cargo cult language. They don’t conform. They seem to be successful, but when they explain their method it doesn’t make sense and doesn’t follow what HBS says. It can’t be right.