Unfortunately, there's many corporate environments where technical staff are managed by non-technical staff. This comment isn't debating the merits of that, but when the manager (or especially their manager) doesn't really intuitively understand the difficulty of your work or how much you've accomplished, they measure by other things like "responsiveness".
This is similar to how patients will rate doctors (lawyers, auto-mechanics, electricians) higher by things like waiting room design, ability to make small-talk, willingness to give antibiotics, etc. which are important but actually do not correlate with better care.
So I've found that optimizing for "responsiveness" is important in and of itself, and much easier than the alternative of "let me make sure non-technical senior management person X spends the time to understand my contributions at a deeper level".
Yep. Stuff like this is the reason that I moved from the technical side into management about 4 years ago. Seeing the dangers to my team from managers who don’t understand the challenges and constraints became a situation that I couldn’t take anymore.
Now, since going that route I’ve gotten deep into SAFe (Scaled Agile) because I believe that it truly solves so many problems. SAFe recommends using “5 whys” in certain situation and SAFe itself isn’t without valid criticisms either. IMO it’s still by far the best option for a long list of reasons.
Like anything in the wrong hands though, it can be co-opted. Everything revolves around good leadership.
This is similar to how patients will rate doctors (lawyers, auto-mechanics, electricians) higher by things like waiting room design, ability to make small-talk, willingness to give antibiotics, etc. which are important but actually do not correlate with better care.
So I've found that optimizing for "responsiveness" is important in and of itself, and much easier than the alternative of "let me make sure non-technical senior management person X spends the time to understand my contributions at a deeper level".