In my experience, status reports are a cover up for incompetent management. It may sound harsh, but making engineers writing status reports, is a waste of time that could have easily been spent otherwise (and yes, I consider surfing web more productive as writing status reports). Not to mention that the whole point of making engineers writing status reports is the fact that your own manager does not know what his subordinates do. Which is sad in it's own right. What is sadder is that a manager could easily obtain data from any half-decent issue tracker and SCM, but they are either too lazy or to inept to do so.