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I think your theory is correct: in the or world it's an effective strategy.
It might be a bit unfair to blame them for trying to apply it in tech. They might need to be told more about how the tech world works.
I think it's quite common for a non tech person to become a manager for a tech team and everyone in the team assumes they will learn and adapt automagically without ever really being shown how the tech world works.
Sometimes the team needs to step up and educate the manager a bit.
In my team we actually made sure the managers went to a short coding introduction class. And had a seminar just explaining stuff like "here's how we work when making a change from ticket to backend to frontend to PR to merge and release" -
@jiraTicket ... Which is a red flag.
The manager itself needs to step up and do this on his own.
You can't take responsibility for something you don't understand and even less can you make decisions in emergency situations when you have no fucking clue.
In this special case though I think it's really just a lack of understanding workflows. It's a common misunderstanding that someone with authority has the right to interrupt anyone elses workflow to benefit his own...
Which is a thing I absolutely hate for multiple reasons. As those persons are most of the time quite resilient to education as "I'm in a higher position than you" is what counts to them. Until you plug them out by winning the pissing contest at the higher hierarchy and giving them a lesson that power is a very fragile thing that can be taken away easily. -
@jiraTicket For me it boils down to a lack of trust, combined with micromanagement. If *he* wanted to do that to fix an issue and he was unaware of workflows, fair enough. But forcing *me* to pick up the phone and speak to someone, rather than just sending an email - that to me crosses a line, especially when he's non technical. Don't tell me how to do my job and I won't tell you how to do yours kinda thing.
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@AlmondSauce and @IntrusionCM you're right and I agree. They did step over the line.
What is it with non-technical managers, especially those in sales, thinking that the solution to all problems is to "just pick up the phone and ring them?" This was *always* his opinion, whether the web service we were using wasn't accepting a valid request (apparently this was best "explained over the phone", I kid you not - have you ever tried speaking JSON?!) or whether we just needed a simple request going in to increase the API limit. I mean I could send an email or log a ticket in a few minutes tops, but you want me to spend 2 hours on hold to a support department only to be told "ah we don't take those requests over the phone, here's the URL, log a ticket."
Then it's always a case of "I don't understand why they're like that, all the guys I speak to are happy to help on the phone". Yeah, beacuse you're in sales & marketing you muppet. Blathering on to each other so you can stroke the egos of yourselves and your companies is kinda in the job description.
Grr. This was all a while ago, but I thought of it just now and the pure concept just annoyed me, so here it is. I really hope he's not doing the same thing to guys under him now (but let's be honest, he probably is.)
rant