[throwawaaarrgh]

All of this is very true! Thanks to the author for being open about their mistakes.

If you want to avoid this scenario, your company needs good leadership. If you're at a company where the managers don't do any due diligence in terms of verifying the progress of work, you are at an either inept or toxic company. If all people do is ask you for a "status report" and they just hope it's correct, they're setting everyone up to fail.

Good management is like a teacher in school who checks if students are completing their work, and if they aren't, gives them assistance. The teacher must actually check the work, and be interested in the welfare of the student as much as improvement.

[nine_zeros]

> Good management is like a teacher in school who checks if students are completing their work, and if they aren't, gives them assistance.

This requires the managers to know a lot about the technical aspects (nitty gritties if you will) of the work. In my experience, most line managers, and certainly the bosses above them, are so woefully clueless about the work that they are unable navigate timelines, scopes and challenges.

Often, the bosses interests are also misaligned. Rather than take a step back and rescope/reevaluate the project, they want to squeeze engineers to get "something" done. Why? Because some upper manager will lose a fraction of their bonus or stock or promotion due to optics.

The result of all this is Boeing of 2024.

[throwawaaarrgh]

Immediate managers must have some experience with the report's work, absolutely. But farther up the chain, they still need to check work. There's certain details of progress you just can't fake.

If you have 10 pieces of work, and you show each piece getting done at regular intervals, along with demos, then you can show your actual results and exactly how close you're getting to finished. Even someone who has no insight into the product can follow along and see the progress's results and trajectory. The more detail you get about the work, the harder it is to fake (you can fake a demo, but it's much harder to fake an entire Jira board)