> Also people that find this thread interesting should join Blind.

What is "Blind" ? Is it some sort of think-tank ?

If the manager has done a good job he/she has hired people that are more knowledge and experienced in their specialization fields then the manager. This is only true for "intellectual" work though, if the employees do physical work, like laying bricks, you can measure performance on how many bricks where laid.

For example, one employee might have spent 3 weeks carefully reading code to find a bug. Not a single code push for a whole month. And might not even have found the bug. But likely found lots of unused code that everyone been too scared to touch. So if you're measuring performance by LOC written, that person could end up on the nagive.

Blind is an app that has people with confirmed company affiliations but anonymous, if you trust them. People speak openly if very greedily about wrk place shenanigans. It seems like an informative if distorting and addictive sort of thing. I check it every few months or if there is something big going on, e.g. layoffs or whatever. There are sections only your company can see and then more shared areas where you can read the woes of a PIP at Amazon or the rest and festers at Google, etc.

Would you say that software engineering and architecture aren’t core job functions because they require skills and experience to do? It’s not effortless but these people are being paid top salaries so it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect them to have at least a rough idea of what the people who report to them are doing.

This goes double for the other concerns you mentioned: if you’ve created an incentive system where people commonly BS their way into promotions, that’s a major management failure.

From the engineer's perspective, it's hard to take seriously a manager that is completely ignorant of any of your day-to-day work.