> "Your inability to adequately track my team's weekly or monthly performance is not my problem." …

the management where I work, has the known strategic objective of eventually outsourcing all our development jobs to our indian facility. However, they prefer us to not leave our jobs before time, to ensure an orderly transition that wont lose us customers. In which universe are we not supposed to have an adversarial relationship? Our role in this is that our former ownerboss sold us to one of the big vertical software graveyards when he retired.

This is a great, experienced reply. All reasonable companies operate somewhere between the extremes: Tracking a project minute-by-minute is extreme. "Kicking off a project one day, and then returning once on the due date to make sure it is done" is an extreme, too. What's an appropriate amount of periodic tracking is a negotiation among all the stakeholders, many of whom need to plan their own work: leadership/execs, marketing, sales, r&d, and many more. Some companies arrived at "weekly tracking" as a happy median, others have longer or shorter periods. So we've hopefully established that all projects need at least some kind of periodic tracking. So then, how do we do it? As a project manager myself, my preference is to have some kind of automated metric/metrics that I can pull myself and not have to bother engineers directly about. "Ticket count" might not be a good one, but the team s…

You are right. Unfortunately, most companies out there do not operate as desired, hence the adversarial approach. I would even go further and say that if one lands in such companies (the not good ones, this is, the majority) with a non-adversarial approach, oh boy, you’re gonna be eaten (specially true for juniors)