My gf got this from a manager 3 levels removed. She’s just handed in her resignation at that place after getting a long overdue step up by looking elsewhere, because while that manager noticed if she didn’t see people in the office, nobody noticed whether or not you actually did a good job. The upside of the increase of remote work, of course, being that people who do well has a larger pool of potential places to apply to in order to leave these clowns behind.

Yeah, for my part I had a constant ssh connection to a screen session on my machine at home, and could work on all kinds of hobby projects from the office when I wasn’t in the mood to work and had to still be present. Whether I was there had nothing to do with it - when motivated I’ve often done some of my best work from home in the middle of the night because I wanted to and inspiration struck. Either way, my boss would only know if the actually engaged with me rather than go by whether I was typing. Since I love programming, but sometimes not the programming I have to do at work, I’ve had many managers who could’ve stood there behind me watching me “work” and still be unable to tell if I was slacking or not.

About 25 years ago I was brought in on contract to teach a course on networking to a group of people sent there on a job skills training thing.

Many of them wanted to be there, some didn’t. And so the first thing I was told was to look for people whose faced looked green: They were inn in front of computers, and this was the Windows '95 days, and they all had Solitaire, and if I saw a green glow it meant someone had zoned out and was playing Solitaire.

Over the years it turns out a lot of managers takes pretty much that approach to managing employees. Instead of talking to people and paying attention to whether they are productive, they’ve gotten comfortable with looking for superficial signs of whether or not people appear to be productive.

And the first sign they used to look far was whether or not you were even at your desk typing…

Of course managers who have spent their career dependent on that as their sign you’re working will freak out when they can’t see you.