Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry
I’m seeing a lot of comments that seem to point to first line management as the problem here. In my own anecdotal experience, I’ve seen a lot more “fake work” come from listless leadership that lacks a true vision for the product. That rolls down to Product Managers that can’t prioritize features and don’t really understand what they’re building or why. Ultimately this leads to engineers and members of the team working on things they don’t believe in or that don’t actually move the needle and are scrapped.In places like this the engineers and managers closest to the product and customers tend to have a better feel for what to work on, but in a large enough org it’s impossible to align those priorities across teams to get things done. This leads engineers to either POC ideas that aren’t possible in production yet or to focus on smaller features that don’t have dependencies.The blame there lies solely in upper level leadership who often care more about org size than output.I’m tired of the messaging around “lazy workers” pointing the finger where it doesn’t belong. Gut from the top if you want to get rid of the problem. It’s not the 
L5 engineer or the first line manager that’s holding any product back. These people tend to be the most invested in building something in my experience.