I'm a "middle manager" managing a team of 3 right now, and my team has been all remote since I started in this role 4+ years ago. I have over 20 years of softwa

I'm a "middle manager" managing a team of 3 right now, and my team has been all remote since I started in this role 4+ years ago. I have over 20 years of software dev experience and I still contribute to our code base. It's pretty easy for me to listen to my team's daily updates at our standups and figure out how they're doing without A or B. If something's taker longer than our estimate and they explain why, it's not hard to tell if they're making this up (FWIW, no one who works on this team has ever done that). And yeah, sometimes their productivity dips because they're tired, distracted by non-work stuff, or they just find this particular piece of work uninspiring. That's ok, no one operates at top productivity all the time. But all of this just highlights the fact that if you want a manager of a development team to be able to evaluate team members' performance, that person needs to understand the job that those team members are doing.