Having spent a few decades in Enteprise digitalisation, both in the public and in the private sector I think this issue is sort of unsolvable. I’m not convinced

Having spent a few decades in Enteprise digitalisation, both in the public and in the private sector I think this issue is sort of unsolvable. I’m not convinced it’s fully down to managers, but this is obviously the anecdotal and non-tech organisation point of view, because they manage people. What I mean by this is that I’ve had excellent managers who didn’t know half their staff wasn’t doing anything remotely useful. That may sound off to you, but I think the culprit is that a lot of process and management people actually think what they are doing is creating value, despite it being a load of nonsense. I even sort of get why that is, because sometimes the business processes are actually helpful and other times they aren’t, and it’s really hard for non-business-value producers to tell the difference because of how the systems work. Say you bill clients by the hour and work this directly into your Atlassian ticket system all the way down to the developer level. You can do that, and you can even have a lot of business intelligence to show that you’re doing great, meanwhile if you ask any actual developer off the record they are likely going to tell you that it’s terrible. They will tell you things like how they game the systems instead of producing the best code. They’ll tell you how the senior developers don’t want to help the junior developers, because every minute they spend on non-billable tasks is a minute that will make them look worse on the performance matrix. Now something like that can work, and if can even involve a bunch of process/management people (as well as the BI people) who all feel what they do is useful and have data to show that it is, meanwhile the actual software development is an absolute shit show compared to what it could be if the processes didn’t get in the way. Obviously the flip side is having too little process/management and then having people cruise along doing whatever they want. Though to be fair, in my anecdotal experience you still get more value from a developer department that does this than one that tracks issues by the hour. Anyway, I’ve never seen anyone come anywhere close to solving it. Personally I tend to try to work in the places that suck the least, and shift if the process part of development becomes too tedious for me. Exploiting that it’s not so easy to find a senior developer. But I’ve honestly given up trying to impact the process/management side of things, and now just flee the ones I dislike.