I have no idea whether this applies to your manager, but I find that a fair bit of seemingly overly simplistic management is actually, to use the terms of this topic, carefully tuned second-order thinking. It goes like this:
1. Devs are natural overthinkers, prone to analysis paralysis and to feature/quality creep.
2. If we remove nuance from the conversation about planning, this causes frustration with the devs because they're feeling unheard (1st order effect, a common complaint on HN)
3. However, it sets a culture of "just shipping", trying to find corners that can be reasonably cut, making sure that problems that are hard to explain to the dumb boss aren't really simply too small to matter (or too far in the future), etc. This increases agility in the longer term and might be worth the initial frustration (second order effect).
I'm sure many managers who stop at 2 and don't care about the adverse effect. Just ship the features so I get my bonus, you nerd. That's bad. But there's just as many who use overly simplistic reasoning as a tool to nudge a culture into a particular direction, and it's not always easy to tell at the beginning which of the two is going on. As a natural overthinker, I find this a worthy skill to cultivate and I'm impressed with people who can do it well.
1. Devs are natural overthinkers, prone to analysis paralysis and to feature/quality creep.
2. If we remove nuance from the conversation about planning, this causes frustration with the devs because they're feeling unheard (1st order effect, a common complaint on HN)
3. However, it sets a culture of "just shipping", trying to find corners that can be reasonably cut, making sure that problems that are hard to explain to the dumb boss aren't really simply too small to matter (or too far in the future), etc. This increases agility in the longer term and might be worth the initial frustration (second order effect).
I'm sure many managers who stop at 2 and don't care about the adverse effect. Just ship the features so I get my bonus, you nerd. That's bad. But there's just as many who use overly simplistic reasoning as a tool to nudge a culture into a particular direction, and it's not always easy to tell at the beginning which of the two is going on. As a natural overthinker, I find this a worthy skill to cultivate and I'm impressed with people who can do it well.