One quick meeting a week I handle easily and find common-sensical. 2 hours a day? Absolutely not, and I don't care if you are the Pope, the Illuminati's leader or Zeus himself promising me a minivan full of dollars. That is micro-management and you said it yourself that it retracts from your usefulness to your superiors.

Have we forgotten brain context switches penalty? Is there anyone out there who still thinks they are a made-up problem? While you as a manager are in the groove of managing spreadsheets and timelines your entire workday and having a small meeting here and there is mostly not interrupting your overall thought process and vision for the company, a dev being regularly pestered is absolutely destroying their performance. Your job is working with people and the formal tools to manage people -- even if you do 40 small tasks a day you're still mostly on a single reality plane. We need to build mental pictures of a system, simulate how it works, produce a theory what we should do and then start doing it and validating our ideas; 2-3 interruptions on any stage of this process and that forces us back on an entirely different reality plane, and the whole thing goes in flames and we have to rebuild it in our heads again. Very often this leads to forgetting very good ideas on how to address a problem (or add a feature), too. How is that helping you and the organization you manage exactly? This is a somewhat directly measurable loss of productivity.

You also admitted this is about trust but also insisted programmers shouldn't treat often check-ins as lack of trust. Well, I can turn this right back at you -- I insist that they are a lack of trust, so please leave me alone; I am a really good professional, I have a lot of skills outside the programming area and I dare to think I have a good chunk of emotional intelligence in me as well. Why is your opinion on this weighing more than mine? I'd say, try me. I'll prove myself to you if you make one compromise about how you work with me.

^ Have you worked with a person like this? I mean, person who actually delivered after being left alone? I've had plenty of such people in my work. (Admittedly, there was also a large number of fakers and posers, of course.)

I also strongly disagree that all programmers left alone tend to lose focus and work on made-up issues. Most of them -- sure, you'll never hear me dispute that. All? No. Many of us go through that phase, yes, but you seem to forget that not a small amount of us emerge of the other side of that labyrinth victorious. If (1) you are working on something very tightly integrated with other people's work AND if (2) you all make good progress each day, then I'll agree that quick daily syncs are very valuable, they prevent duplication of efforts or coding against the wrong assumptions. But if the above two conditions aren't satisfied then no, in my eyes it's just the manager forcing a process out of context. That's like insisting the temperature outside is a stable 20^C every day, 365 days a year.

The part that's concerning me here is that you seem to want to shoe-horn a singular process on different kinds of people. If you were my supervisor, I'd not be okay with that.