I live near one of these projects by chance. It seemed like back door deals for land which some happened to be sold by a former Oracle exec then magically the tax district approved unanimously by < 10 council people to put a tiny city of ~11,000 people on the hook for $500 million dollars in tax financing for their infrastructure?

For extra fun today the WI Realtors Association and other groups are suing the city to stop an upcoming vote from an accepted petition that forced approving projects over tax financed projects $10 million dollars get voter approval.

https://biztimes.com/mmac-sues-city-of-port-washington-over-...

I have to disagree. It all depends on the value I receive which some are a bit better than before.

For example for Office365 Home you get 5 licenses including 1TB of OneDrive all for $99/year.

If I had to pay for just one Office Suite License(word, ppt, excel) would be around $200(low end). If I needed 5 that would be $1000. Now divide that $1000 over how many years you would probably use before wanting upgrade which for me would be 3-5. At 5 years it is average $200/year for lesser product because it doesn’t even include the value of 1TB OneDrive.

Thus 99$/year is cheaper in my mind and I am happy to pay them instead of looking for for some pirated version. It just works and I get newest version whenever it is released.

Yes, distractions are not great - but communicating with your team is important. Even if the manager is not there the team does it and they do it usually < 5 minutes. Some days I literally don't talk to my team except for that 5 minutes.

But as a leader you want to make sure the team is rowing the same direction - it doesn't matter if it takes you longer on a ticket but it also helps in a team to know what others are working on in case you end up working on it later yourself. (We discussed at standup to implement it X way because of Y factors).

Many engineers (myself included) don't like asking others for help. But guess what when someone says they are stuck - it is easy to point them to a person or direction and not waste time debugging a problem already solved in the past.

If they were so horrible and unproductive, managers (who mostly were engineers in the past would get rid of them).

Actually I somewhat disagree with that. I think they should code to some extent, but it doesn't scale in my experience. I lean to say #7 is a good point.

If the manager is required to complete the feature their "free" time is't the same as an engineer - read meetings/discussions. I manage two teams and when I first became a manager my instinct was to take tickets along with the team. Yet my other responsibilities came in play and made it harder for me to finish tickets I assigned to myself and others on the team waited.

I still code review and partake in high level design and some scripts here or there etc. but not mainline code that another engineer will depend on to be completed by xyz date.

The goal of a manager is to ensure the work pipeline and project trajectory are on path with the company needs while still taking time to learn new tech and skill-sets of the team. Of course most importantly protecting their time from distractions.

To move from manager upwards, building a great team that trusts each other and follows and ensures the team standards is crucial. If I am required for every decision or code review, then I become the bottleneck. Empowering other people and trusting their judgement was one of the harder leanings growing from manager upward.

Hmm, as a frequent flyer once a week. I have gotten a cold maybe once so far that may be related to travel within last 12 months.

All I mainly do is wash my hands before and right after flights.