[rapjr9]

Five years ago I worked on implementing a custom Bluetooth interface to act simultaneously as a Central and Peripheral for a smartwatch. The first several months of the work was spent reading the massive documentation and reading the driver source code and spec sheet and example programs from the chip vendor and getting the development environment set up. Some work has absolutely no real observable measurable output.

[ironmagma]

And the last several months? Hopefully you can see what I’m getting at. A job doesn’t exist if there is no observable output to it, at least not for long. Your manager would know if for those months you were supposed to be reading docs, that you were actually slacking off, because come time to implement the thing, you wouldn’t have been able to do it. Thus needing to spend another few months reading documentation, and there definitely is a cutoff point where if you have been reading documentation for many months and producing no output, you just get axed.

Incidentally, another reason for managers to be capable ICs. If your manager was getting frustrated with your speed at executing, he/she could always step in and “show you how it’s done,” or at least teach you about Bluetooth details themselves to spare you from having to spend time reading the docs.

Otherwise, they don’t really have a leg to stand on and it’s just shouting into the void like Vizzini yelling at his giant to climb up the cliffs faster.