I had a similar experience to this at amazon. I think the nature of programming work is so murky that it makes sense to do this even if you don't care about the

I had a similar experience to this at amazon. I think the nature of programming work is so murky that it makes sense to do this even if you don't care about the employee (though my managers genuinely seemed to). What I mean by murky is that similar looking amounts of work can take 2 days or 2 weeks depending on how excited the engineer is about the project. Maybe it's more common with engineering managers for this reason?