let's have a meeting about how to break down our investigation of the unexplained segfaults in nginx that occasionally happen in our cdn into chunks that deliver value daily!
And then let's have daily progress meetings to report on the status of each chunk of the investigation! Please update Jira at least once a day!
This is a great example of the perverse incentives built into the "everything should be done in one day chunks that you report on daily". The team is incentivized to ignore highly important but challenging / hidden work, and instead only focus on things that are highly visible to management.
I think the point is that the only work that matters is work that will improve the customer experience in some way. That could be infrastructure/stability work, or that could be visible front-end work. Not sure how you're using the word "hidden", but that's my reading from this discussion. Either of those things are important/valued by management probably. But none of that should imply or require micromanagement in a high-trust engineering org.
This is really not that hard: "Yesterday I looked for correlations between segfaults and hardware vendors. I did not find a correlation, and my deliverable for the day is narrowing the search space. Today I will set up a micro cluster of random traffic to try to reproduce the crash. Tomorrow I will look for patterns in request bodies and stack traces."
Seriously, I feel you should write a blog post about this types of reporting strategies that describe the work that are both accurate and palatable to management (and perhaps most importantly avoid despise from other developers).
