[papito]

Hit and run management. Suggest to your engineers how to do things and then disengage, leaving them to follow your directive, while knowing that you are dead wrong.

Twitter had to scrap their entire rewrite that took one year, because the dev manager told the team HOW to do it, triggering a death march project.

Bottom line: if you don't trust the people who are down in the trenches to make technical decisions, be a manager at Chipotle. But probably goes for Chipotle as well.

[groby_b]

This is a beautiful illustration of the misunderstandings I mean. Nobody was talking about "making suggestions". This is typical engineering musings aloud. ("I wonder what would happen if...")

I've made it clear in the previous post that there's no intent to direct the team anywhere, and yet your ideas about management led you to interpret it as somehow ordering the team to do things. As not trusting them to make technical decisions. As triggering a death march project, for crying out loud. (fwiw, the project got stopped the moment I realized what had happened, with apologies on my part. We're not all monsters :)

I don't fault you for it. Your past experience shapes you, and heaven knows we have enough bad managers in this industry to trigger severe PTSD in many of us.

But that's the reason to word things extremely carefully, depending on audience. There's a good contingent of people who give management words a lot of weight, and so we need to be very cautious what we say when it affects a wide audience, especially if it includes people we haven't built deep trust with.

And while I don't know about Chipotle, I can confirm that all my managers in food places had a tendency to micromanage ;)