[brailsafe]

Imo it's a symptom and the cause of the entire incentive structure of a hierarchical company; success in that system is defined as doing exactly what one layer above you expects, no matter how rational or connected to output it is. Most people just accept the smaller ways this manifests as a fact of life because it's easy and it's how they get rewarded.

For example, generally you'll be fired if you're not on time, regardless of whether "on time" is meaningful or connected to any real constraint. If there isn't a hard deadline, someone will pick an arbitrary one and decide that's what they need to be mad about that week. It could be that you just weren't on Slack at the moment they said "hey".

If it's not immediate, they'll note it down and weaponize it later. There's seemingly always someone like this in charge and there are only limited, temporary, or lucky ways around it.

If it's not specifically time, it's some other aspect of visibility that's never sufficient. Controlling people and organizations are built on an insidious lack of trust and the pursuit of measurability. This is why, imho, it's rarely worth doing more than the bare minimum, because you need 100x positive extra credits to compensate for even one petty mistake. Not being available in the middle of the night to fix a bug in the system gets you a negative mark in a performance review, while staying late to fix the bug gets you 0.01 positive marks.