A good meditation on productivity and its antithesis, and on how both are necessary.

I am amused by your recollections about working in software development. I have some thoughts on your efforts to be honest, to be productive, and in floundering at times in that environment.

First, most managers aren't really very good at managing because they have no training in leadership, which is what management really needs to be. As Adm. Grace Murray Hopper said, "You don't manage people. You lead them," and that is what I learned both while earning an MS in Technical Management and in serving as the adult alumni adviser (and mentor, guide, role model, leader, teacher, friend, and older and wiser Brother) to my fraternity.

Second, most managers in software development traditionally have had no insight into the process of software development because software development was chaotic, anarchic, dependent upon heroes. That is, they didn't know what you and other software developers were doing, so they had no way of knowing what they were supposed to do. That is partly the fault of upper management for failing to provide guidelines of how one manages and leads software developers in the process of software development. If there is no repeatable, defined, managed, and optimized process, then there is nothing to judge effort against. Vague concepts such as "milestones" and "deliverables" outside of a well-define process are meaningless. Moreover, without productivity statistics and estimates based upon those statistics, all estimates are SWAGs (Stupid, Wild Ass Guesses), so it isn't surprising that neither you nor your managers could tell how much time and effort would be involved. Fortunately, this chaotic and undefined approach to developing software is being replaced by genuine software engineering, that is, of the application of true engineering science and discipline to the craft of programming, much like that taught at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute, where I was taught how to be a software engineer.

And finally, most managers are idiots, not all, surely, but most are. Certainly most that I worked under have been idiots, primadonnas, strutting and mindless RickPerrys, stunningly neurotic, and occasionally borderline psychotic.