Yes. There is a pernicious group of candidate employees lurking outside of every organization all of the time, and if you let these people in, this is the kind of output you get.
People who've made their careers as "non-technical people managers" have no. freaking. idea. what to do when you put them in a "remote office". They've gotten by with their free donuts twice a week, their wry smiles, their nice suit, their good posture, and their firm handshake all of these years and work makes no sense to them if you can't have these things. Reading technical mumbo-jumbo in a Slack channel and having to pretend to know what it means is their worst nightmare.
It seems that every technical organization these types touch quickly begins to adopt nonsense practices and make really dubious overall business decisions. Sometimes the manager/executive's connections can help give the company a kick in the pants, but it usually won't survive the new employees' MBA-informed directives too long before fresh MBAs come in to issue a fresh kick in the pants or someone competent eventually ascends (rarely happens).
The really scary thing about the MBA-types is that once you let one in, they invite their friends, and then they're impossible to extricate. Then you start getting "technical" people (read: management's buddy who fixes his computer on the weekend) getting big titles, pretending they know what they're doing and making technical decisions that are absolutely, criminally disastrous in the medium and long term.
Then they call their friends at the trade mag and get an article written about their new revelation, which starts a trend that a lot of normal tech people inexplicably try to copy. :|
A lot of bureaucracy and politics are coming from tech people too. Turf wars, ego issues, you name it. But yes, collocation seems to be of particular advantage to the ones being talented at 'being pleasant to the right people'.
Yeah, it's not that there are no political issues among technical people. I just feel like most technical people will generally recognize good technical arguments and work toward them as long as the arguments are framed/presented considerately, because when it comes down to it, there are cold hard facts in that world. They're approaching their work semi-rationally, so there's some possibility that you'll get somewhere if you have a strong case respectfully presented. That's been my experience with good technical workers over the years.
The primary time that pattern is subverted is when a technical person gets overly concerned with appeasing a non-technical boss. That happens because the non-technical bosses want it to happen. They don't care about the engineering. They are trying to remake the technical side in their image, which is part of why they bring in the aforementioned weekend-computer-fixer and give him a fancy title like "director and architect". This makes it so that he doesn't really have to do much if any technical work because there is plausible deniability -- he can say he was busy doing "direction and architecture" so he didn't have time to write the code. Especially true if subordinates get added.
With non-technical types, successful interaction in the workplace goes from being half-about feelings and half-about demonstrable truths to being completely about feelings. To them, no arguments matter. For example, a non-technical manager or a faux-technical person will always be looking for ways to deflect blame because admitting you're wrong is weakness, it doesn't play well emotionally or superficially. If you want them to change something, you have to make it so that there is no possible superficial negative interpretation of their actions, and then you must show them why it's in their interest to do what you want them to do with emotions, because they don't operate in a world of rationality.
Technical teams are driven to improve their product even if there is blame involved or the possibility of a negative perception somewhere because there are actually consequences to failure or inefficiencies. The program will stop, the data may be lost, etc. Non-technicals don't have this type of real consequence behind their work.
For the non-technical MBA crowd, work is entirely a dance where you curtsy to the other entity's interest in authority, power, respect, and similar emotional expectations and (in)securities in the correct sequence. The dance program must be completed successfully. If it is, the other party rewards the participant(s) with a sum of money (aka "strippers and steak"); if not, offense is taken.
People from that world hate remote work because remote work takes away 97% of their dance floor. With few inflection points for emotional manipulation, they have practically nothing to work with. Technical people love remote work because it trims their "dance floor" down so that the emotional dance area is only there on the fringes, and the technical work can take what they feel is its appropriate place at center stage.
I'm not trying to wholly discount the emotional components that come into play in the workplace or say that they're necessarily wrong. But in work that comprises something more than pampering/nurturing the right feelings, it is obviously beneficial to minimize that aspect.
People who've made their careers as "non-technical people managers" have no. freaking. idea. what to do when you put them in a "remote office". They've gotten by with their free donuts twice a week, their wry smiles, their nice suit, their good posture, and their firm handshake all of these years and work makes no sense to them if you can't have these things. Reading technical mumbo-jumbo in a Slack channel and having to pretend to know what it means is their worst nightmare.
It seems that every technical organization these types touch quickly begins to adopt nonsense practices and make really dubious overall business decisions. Sometimes the manager/executive's connections can help give the company a kick in the pants, but it usually won't survive the new employees' MBA-informed directives too long before fresh MBAs come in to issue a fresh kick in the pants or someone competent eventually ascends (rarely happens).
The really scary thing about the MBA-types is that once you let one in, they invite their friends, and then they're impossible to extricate. Then you start getting "technical" people (read: management's buddy who fixes his computer on the weekend) getting big titles, pretending they know what they're doing and making technical decisions that are absolutely, criminally disastrous in the medium and long term.
Then they call their friends at the trade mag and get an article written about their new revelation, which starts a trend that a lot of normal tech people inexplicably try to copy. :|