My boss (who's in a different country) just joined our internal Skype group where most of our daily information is spread. She honestly thinks we work faster when she's asking questions about progression on stories via Skype.

Why doesn't some managers trust developers? >.<

The thing is the managers are tasked with making sure we are on track and pushing forward. The problem is that they don't understand what we do. A lot of what we do doesn't look like work to them. We also all tend to go silent for long periods with often nothing much to show when we come out of silence because what we were working on is not intended to work by itself.

In other words they don't know shit, all think you are not doing shit and all believe they must check on you in order to get shit done.

Fun piece of life experience: I once had a manager whose office was 10 feet behind my own. And when large projects would go slightly over he would sit in his office with the door angled so he could watch me by reflection in the window. He would sit there for hours doing nothing but watch me wondering whether I was working or not.

@dewmsolo Great description. That boss you had sounds very stressful!

I've had other bosses who didn't act this way, who had more trust in me and my team members. He trusted that we would get things done and we did.

In my experience, most people who love what they do don't need someone watching over them do get things done. It's just that some people don't understand that :/

Well partially because some of us have started taking longer bathroom breaks on devRant..

To reference Randy Vasquez (Star Citizen) : "A producer is never the development's boss; the job is to facilitate and help them out, make sure that they are not blocked so that they can do their job"

I once had a dev become manager/client-facing... and after less than a year he had forgotten what. our dev job was like. Never go too far deep in the rabbit hole.