More Manager Metrics

Here's another manager metric: does your manager often justify decisions or processes or technology choices as "industry standard"? Your company is in an industry, but the industry is not your company. Who cares what everyone else is doing? If all the other kids are doing something, it makes it worth investigating, but it certainly isn't a rationale for doing it - particularly within the software industry. The software industry sucks so badly that "industry standard" can often be used fairly reliably as an indicator of what not to do.