"Management" is generally a bunch of morons bikeshedding to try to distract everyone from the fact that their jobs are utterly worthless. The fewer decisions management makes, the better. If management feels like they need to make a decision, throw something in there they can tell you to remove later. It's a tried and tested method of getting those imbeciles off your back. Then build the damn thing that actually needs building. Management will take the credit, of course. But they'll be happy. Everyone wins.
Think about it this way: the person who suffers the consequences of the decision should be making the decision. That's not management; they will never, ever accept any level of blame for anything. They'll immediately pass that buck right on to you. So that makes it your decision. Fuck management; build what needs building instead.
Look at what happened when "management" started making decisions at Boeing about risk, instead of engineers making the decisions.
Building the wrong thing is exactly what happens when you listen to management too much. Talk to the client yourself. Learn the subject. Get the textbook. Read the materials. That's how you build the right thing.
> They are required because building the wrong thing is worse than not building anything at all
And yet, "manager" is usually[1] only responsible for ensuring the boards get carried from the truck to the construction site and that two workers don't shoot at each other with nail guns, not "we, collectively, are building the right house."
I freely admit that my cynicism is based on working in startups, where who knows what the right thing actually is, but my life experience is that managers for sure do not: they're just having meetings to ensure the workers are executing on the plan that the manager heard in their meeting
1: I am also 1000000% open to the fact that I fall into the camp of not having seen this mythical "competent manager" you started with
Think about it this way: the person who suffers the consequences of the decision should be making the decision. That's not management; they will never, ever accept any level of blame for anything. They'll immediately pass that buck right on to you. So that makes it your decision. Fuck management; build what needs building instead.
Look at what happened when "management" started making decisions at Boeing about risk, instead of engineers making the decisions.