In both public sector and private sector places I have worked, management usually was, at best, dead weight. More often than not, management was an active impediment of getting work done for the ordinary worker doing the actual productive work of the institution.
At one place, a director and the VP she reported to both retired. A temporary director was hired under contract who was mostly hands-off (and remote), but she immediately fired the manager who was her direct report. The group I worked in had reported to the fired manager.
Without managers, productivity soared. We literally got more accomplished in a year without managers than we did in the prior five years combined. All of our deferred maintenance issues, some dating back over a decade, were addressed in the first 6 months of being freed of the managers.
Sadly, it didn't last. They re-hired the full hierarchy of positions. And, the pace of work ground to a halt. Quality of work also suffered due to the artificial deadlines imposed by the managers-- combined with their shifting priorities based on which other manager(s) it was most politically expedient for them to please on any given day.
At another, the new VP of marketing said in a meeting, about 9 months into his tenure, "What?! We're a software company?" Imagine all the value he must have added for those prior nine months.
Yes, that's because managers are the quintessential bureaucratic worker, and bureaucracy is an antithesis to productivity. Unfortunately though, some amount of bureaucracy is inevitably needed to sustain an organization.
I agree with your sentiment but argue that rather than harming productivity, bureaucracy harms autonomy. This can cut both ways. On one hand, having a clear cut process is often a boon.
I suspect that this is the nature of org evolution. Any project has a certain probability of success/failure. When a failure means exit/promotion pause... then continuing to deliver projects is just rolling the dice. Eventually the smart people in an organization wise up and move to less measurable parts like management. It doesn't make sense to disallow this - as you smart/successful people moved into the bureaucracy and keep the training wheels on. On the other hand, it can get out of hand - particularly when hiring in a bureaucracy from the outside world.
I find this view interesting if you think the origin of the concept (of bureaucracy) illustrates the transition from arbitrary management towards a rule-based, rational (and very much productivity enhancing) approach...
Also great when you want national resources managed by policy and not by cronyism. I get the modern trope that bureaucracy = bad, the whole point I'm trying to make is: the concept was first proposed as an idea of improvement in administration in the 1800s.
And sometimes stealing everything that's not nailed down is the way work gets done, i.e. disruption. Trying to manage this out based on some anodyne rules out of a committee makes for a perfectly harmonious but completely static, risk-averse organization of little potential.
It's like trying to censor speech. You get rid of "bad" speech but you also get no interesting speech. Is it really worth it?
Most things have a golden middle amount, where its great in the right amount but sucks if you have too much or too little. Bureaucracy is no exception. Trying to make a large group of people work towards a common goal effectively is really hard without some management. Too much though is extremely stifling.
The thing is, it's needed. You can't have an organization without some level of bureaucracy. It's what ensures an organization, works and remains to be a functional organization.
But it's very nature is anti productive. By this I mean: documenting, discussing, approving, and creating boundaries, all work to slow down an organization, even though it's necessary to ensure the wellbeing of the organization. As a specific example, organizations often have separation of duties for certain things (like activities involving payment to prevent embezzlement from happening), but doing so naturally slows down the handling of these activities. If one person has to do his part, then write documentation to instruct what they're trying to do and what they need someone else to do, send those instructions to someone else, wait for their approval, and then send it to someone else to process it... all of this is slower than if the person who wrote the instructions, skipped writing the instructions, and approved and processed it themselves. But obviously that can result in some bad situations, and hence why some bureaucracy is inevitably necessary.
A lot of things that we categorize as bureaucracy were created as a reaction to something bad happening. Someone shipped the product with an obvious security flaw -> every new product needs security review; some product had a name that violated someone else's trademark -> making committee gets created; someone kept expensing insane meals -> let's create clear expense guidelines; managers keep approving things that violated the expense policy -> let's higher auditors who review every expense report.
This will keep happening to even the most incompetent person cannot do anymore harm. Meanwhile top performers leave. AFAIK the best way out of this has been Netflix's "freedom and responsibility". You expense crazy meals, you get a warning. You do it again, you are fired.
Tell me more about this Netflix “freedom and responsibility”. The natural trend towards inefficient “process for all the things” hits hard as a really deep insight.
Security for example. Every new things needs security review. How does this fit into the Netflix “freedom and responsibility” concept?
> bureaucracy were created as a reaction to something bad happening
Probably, but not every bad thing happening requires a response. Sometimes mistakes or bad things happen, and you just say, "use better sense next time", and then you move on.
that's still good. The missing piece is taking into account the cost of these "processes" throughout their lifetime when deciding whether or not to add yet another procedure.
This is a good way of explaining how the iron law of beurocracy appears to those on the ground as creep sets in. The first series of changes (security, legal, expense guidelines) seem to be reasonable solutions because they directly effect the output of the business and could expose huge liability.
The pernicious part happens when those ancillary functions become conflated with the business itself, at which point it is far too tempting to further expand the beurocracy to service those functions (i.e. auditors). My sense is that the most despised rules in most organizations are such second-order attempts to service the beurocracy.
An common example might be the procurement department, whose purpose was originally to facilitate and track purchases for the business. Maybe at first they managed and distributed credit cards to employees. However, this is still inconvenient when employees make innevitable mistakes. Instead of dealing with this inconvenience, credit cards are eventually taken away from employees and an online procurement portal is set up and/or people are expected to file reimbursement paperwork after trips. Now the beurocracy has effectively shifted its own burdens onto individual employees while making the process slower, more complex, and more expensive. Despite all of this procurement will now be considered a core pillar of the business because executives look at all that sunk cost and fallaciously conclude that the procurement beurocrats are indespensible.
Meanwhile, there isn't really a similar mechanism at play to protect people doing the actual work.
I don't have strong opinions about this but the working strategy I have come up with so far, when it comes to implementing my ideas is to keep it a secret/hidden from management until all the ground work is laid out and only then take on responsibility for it and publicly pursue it. As soon as management finds out it gets mananged into the least risky form that threatens the status quo minimally. I had many good ideas that were managed to death or inefficacy. The problem of perverse incentives is a pandemic at this point.
Even after whatever i did showed a ton of value for little cost of any kind, they will eventually find a way to manage it into an inefficient thing or replace it by something much less blame inducing.
As a worker, my focus is on generating value. Either I produce revenue or reduce risk and liability. For managers, this is a distant secondary concern, they are worried of what their boss might think and how they will appear in the management team and what the risk to them (not the company) would be if their reports fail or decide to leave.
So, I could do the best job ever but that might make my manager look like he can't control me. I know what those of you that work in startups might think, the manager should feel like they succeeded in extracting value out of me instead right? That's startup culture, a startup wants to extract all the value out of you to maxize their success. Every other large org has politics and incentives such that even CEOs can't shake things up without gathering support, they can't create a culture that maximizes profits and productivity because that means less people might be needed or would have to do more or the worst case, what irks me the most: "If we do all that now, we will look bad if we don't keep doing this much in the future", i.e.: if you are a rockstar now, that only hurts you when you inevitably become less than a rockstar. So the snowballing inefficiency in my opinion is a result of trying to keep the balance between doing as little as you can vs making some sort of a profit and burning through budget money so you look important and valuable (the enemy of open source!).
It really is frustrating if you get bored easy. I was surprised at the whole "quiet quitting" thing because I have been seeing people do that for a long time, people getting mad at me because now they think they look bad because I did anything more than the minimum.
But really, just observing not complaining. I am now understanding these reasons. But it is difficult to fall in line and comply.
In my opinion if you are creative, imaginative and have ideas - You should choke up on it.
Creative work, inventing things - it’s the most value able thing. Not the “management.” If you are in a non creative environment and you find you have all the ideas, your focus should be either on leaving to build your own thing or to “take over” by effectively being the one who writes all the plans and who everyone comes to for ideas.
Creative people who create value are rarely rewarded in most medium or large sized organizations.
I realized after seeing how larger organizations work: There is no winning.
It is like the red queen problem. The more you run, the faster you are expected to run. You will very rarely if ever be able to convert this into upward motion. Your manager is very non incentivized for you to get ahead.
I personally feel like startups are simply the way to go. There is a much much larger market, many more options, granted it pays less, but you will get seen and credit for your work.
And startup skillsets are generalist skills that are often much more transferable. And you are valued more in general as more depends on you.
Reading what you said here: You are maladapting to a corrupt environment.x
I know exactly what you are saying: I spent my career having my ideas snatched, ignored, implemented with great results and no recognition or reward or worse.
I think you should just go to smaller firms in general.
I'm replying to you here because your "Ask HN" post was flagged, can't comment there, but I think your statement about destructive behaviour [edit: was 'last statement'] is the important one. It is to be taken seriously.
There are probably very few people on HN qualified to help you with your situation. Even for those who are, a public forum is not an effective place to do it. No, a therapist won't magically fix anything. But therapists and psychiatrist are the "debugging experts". They have training and experience to help with problems like yours.
In effect, there is a magnifying glass which is making past events loom larger and larger. A therapist can help you get grounded, reversing the glass so to speak. A psychiatrist can help if there is some physical issue, such as OCD, that is feeding in to it.
I'm not qualified to help, but please be assured that many, many of us have experienced similiar situations. That doesn't mean "I know what you're feeling." We don't. You are you, your situations is unique to you (as with all people), and even if we knew exactly what you were experiencing that doesn't get rid of the feelings. But we can empathize and sympathize. You are not alone.
I would like to commend you on trying to handle things "the right way". That speaks well to you character. Please don't give up on it. Get the expert help.
No, as intended. As I tried to say, was unable to respond to another of that user's comments, but felt it was important to try and respond to them. Hopefully they will see it here.
I'm afraid it isn't that simple. My current work is realtively great. It wouldn't be easy to move to a startup since most startups don't invest in someone with my skillset. At least not until they get ~50 employees, but even then the perk of big companies is you get invaluable technical exposure.
> As a worker, my focus is on generating value. Either I produce revenue or reduce risk and liability. For managers, this is a distant secondary concern, they are worried of what their boss might think and how they will appear in the management team and what the risk to them (not the company) would be if their reports fail or decide to leave.
Honestly that description of a manager’s motivation (how they are seen by others who control their fate) is one that many engineers also adopt. In my experience, managers are actually focused on what you described for a worker (ensure the team generates value via revenue or reduced risk), while most engineers are typically focused on the quality of their craft.
I think for engineers the difference is that they (good ones anyway) don’t think so much about what other engineers might think, but rather about what future them will think when encountering the same thing again in two years.
I used to be like that years ago but as you get more experience you start thinking about why you get paid so you can get paid more and/or keep your job. Which means the "quality" of my work is only meaningful if that in some way (even indirect) benefits my employer. There's a lot of fun things I can do, I use to take weeks writing something in C because I like the language and it is fast where there is already a python module that lets me do that in 20 lines. But when it comes to work, the slower python code is ideal because less technical burden and the speed benefit of C is marginal, it provides no competitive advantage in those specific scenarios.
I am not one but I believe staff and principal SWEs start thinking more like this for comparison. (I am not a developer).
All management at big corps has taught me is that delivering the product you’re working on is not the focus but also super necessary at the same time. I’m surprised people aren’t having more meltdowns trying to live the impossible reality modern managers promote.
Said out loud: "How can we squeeze this in without re-prioritizing or impacting other planned work? Are we sure it's all estimated correctly?"
Silently implied: "Spend more hours working. Alter existing estimates enough to fit it in."
You can ask them if they're asking for overtime/crunch and they'll say, "No, work/life balance is important to us at BigCorp. It's just that this is as important as our existing planned work and it would make our team/department look amazing if we can get this done too.". Yada, yada, yada. You can keep pushing back but how many times can you do that before you're no longer considered a team player?
I worked for a startup for a few years that near the end, started bleeding (and firing) employees while added six more C-levels. For a while, they stopped coming into the office because they were blowing company money on lunches and wooing the same investor over and over. It was awful overall and I'm glad to be gone, but just like you say, that stretch where it was just developers in the office was by far the most productive. A major reason why is that we didn't get pulled off work to do fiddly little pet projects for our bosses.
I worked for a start up and I was at the bottom of the food chain with 3 managers Me->Supervisor->Manager->Director. They all managed the person below them and nobody else. One day I was at the corporate office and I got a hold of the head of HR and told him this was bullshit because I was getting worked like a rented mule because my work had to support three layers of management. The HR guy told me not to pay attention that I was the only employee and that I just need to look at the X's and O's and in a company an employee can't exist without a supervisor, a supervisor cannot exist without a manager and a manager cannot exist without a director, forget the $500,000 in costs for all these managers it's about the org chart. When I quit I called everyone one of them to resign and none of them answered the phone, I had to resign to some manager I never met. Each one did follow up with an email asking if they were the reason why I quit and I told each of them yes.
This is a common thread in the current outside-in analysis of Twitter.
Management exists to guide the priorities of those below them, so when management is gone, people feel liberated.
But the point of managers was to keep them on the tasks deemed most important to the long-term wellbeing of the company, even if those tasks seem boring and unimportant.
Sure, totally agree that not all management is good management, but it does exist for a reason (and often that reason will always be unappreciated by those being managed).
The function of management exists for a reason, but the question is who should do it. Many knowledge workers are self-managing and the "oversight" provided by the managerial class is superfluous at best.
In the past 6 years of my working career, a manager has meaningfully intervened in my work exactly once, and the outcome was weeks of time wasted. Manager-originated assignments have tended to be of inferior quality and impact to the ones I generate myself. I have not done a manager-assigned task for the company for 3 years, and I have not done a worthwhile management-assigned task for 6 years.
My personal example is probably extreme, but what I bet is not extreme is the lack of accountability. There was never a time where my choices were recognized as superior to the managerial choices, no matter how many times this was proven true. Instead, managers seemingly just lost interest in assigning me work and let me figure it out myself, which frees me to be one of the objectively most productive people in the organization.
> 6 weeks of wasted work is much better than 12 weeks of wasted work
If he had wasted 6 weeks less than would have otherwise been wasted, I would have given him credit for saving 6 weeks rather than blame for wasting 6 weeks, which is what actually happened. According to everyone involved, including reportedly the manager himself, though he wouldn't say it to my face.
> And how exactly did you know what work to do in the first place?
I'm a data scientist who helps people across the company with analytics. They make measurably better business decisions than they would have without me. Relationships, continuous service on existing products, and word of mouth generate more work.
Basically I run my own analytics consultancy inside the company.
What manager or director decided to fund & hire a data scientist with a charter to function as an internal
consultant? Or did you hire yourself or co-found the company?
A lot of managers are paper pushers instead of leaders. Their usefulness varies depending on circumstances.
Maybe no manager or director at all? Sometimes things happen in an organization in a self-organizing manner. Like people finding out who is able to help them with their problems and the word getting around.
It is actually my experience that the organizations which are able to organically evolve like this are the most effective ones.
Honestly, the best thing about my company is that the managers mostly don't get in the way of this organic process if the people involved have demonstrated they know what they're doing.
Based on my experience; many knowledge workers think they are self-managing because they are able to set objectives for themselves and reach those. But the lack on context means that those objectives are only loosely aligned with the direction of the underlying organisation as a whole.
Often times, this is because the general direction of the organisation itself is hard to define and/or poorly understood. When that's the case, it can be tempting to look at very "dry" numbers to measure ones contribution (My piece of code generates XYZ dollar-amount, it's the highest of the company, so I must be one of the objectively most productive people in the organization).
This is one way to contribute, but in those situation the most critical (and thus most productive/valuable) undertaking is to clarify the direction. This can be extremely hard to do, requires immense amount of work and often times the "right choice" is virtually impossible to define. Thus, the output of the people working on that absolutely essential task is blurry, at best.
When it's done correctly tho, it yields impressive results. A clear direction is set, people somehow know and understand it and you can quite literally let them figure out their work for themselves and get that often surpass what you could have hoped to get if you were involved. And like many things, doing it harder than it looks. And when it's done very well, it seems easy and effortless.
> But the lack on context means that those objectives are only loosely aligned with the direction of the underlying organisation as a whole
I feel like this is a failure of the organization, rather than of those managed.
I’m perfectly capable of prioritizing things correctly if given proper context, but chances are very real that I’ll still pay more attention to what is important 5 years down the line, rather than what will make manager X look good this month.
> I feel like this is a failure of the organization, rather than of those managed.
Very much agreed. Indeed, this is the most important job of the management. Many comments speak of engineering as something that would go off track if left to their own ways. But, the reason for that is lack of context and wrong incentives, in the first place. If engineers don't know why they are not being allowed to work on technical debt, it's a management failure.
It's simple enough to give ICs the correct context. The good ones, with adequate autonomy and purpose, will solve the company's problems in ways that will keep the machine running smoothly. That's not to say that every IC is good at prioritizing work appropriately. Some of them may go off into the weeds. But in my experience, it's much harder to provide context to management and business people, such that they truly understand the value of certain things. All too often, they march straight down a path that leads to pain, attrition, and gridlock, all the while, thinking they are maximizing efficiency. It's a story I've seen way too many times. Having said that, I have worked with two very effective managers. They were exceptional listeners, and knew when to compromise, and when to push back, on both sides of the fence. Interestingly, they were both former ICs and were very well acquainted with the technical side of things.
> You’re at Amazon, in 2001 and you know that in 5 years there will be a thing called AWS and that’s going to become the most important thing?
Much of this is attributed to the email Jeff Bezos sent telling people to productionize internal APIs.
My guess is: yes. People would be building what would have become AWS early on by solving the root problem for any given issue, establishing a decent API for it, and then consuming that API in some business logic.
Bezos' big contribution was telling people to do what they would have usually done.
> I’m perfectly capable of prioritizing things correctly if given proper context
A large part of a managers job is to have that context. Making everyone aware of wider context in a large org is untenable. ICs need to be able to focus on their immediate context so they can get shit done.
There's a reason staff+ eng aren't writing code all the time. They need to focus their time and energy on higher level tasks that enable other ICs to write code.
Personally I would love to have more context on everything, but I've got a glimpse of how much stuff my manager and PM are involved with and I definitely can't keep up with everything and also investigate issues, write code, etc.
> The function of management exists for a reason, but the question is who should do it. Many knowledge workers are self-managing and the "oversight" provided by the managerial class is superfluous at best.
I know it feels like you can be self-managing, but you can't (outside of a tiny startup). For a long time I felt that way. After all, I know the product code inside out better than anyone. I can see what needs to be done both short and long term. I can lay out the road to get there and execute on it very well. What else is needed?
What's needed is alignment with all the other parts of the company. Marketing, sales, infosec, project management, executive wishes, etc. Who is doing that? Oh, I can do it. And I can. But by the time I'm done, I'm left with like 30 minutes a week to write code. So I can't actually do both full-time.
I think that some of the lessons from the book Essence of Decision might be relevant.
A challenge I've seen in management-heavy organizations is that the many layers of management largely function to make good management impossible. The many layers of command between ICs and the source of many decisions means that the people responsible for relaying information up the chain of command are incentivized to put their own spin on information as they relay it, in part in order to help secure their own positions within the hierarchy. The other side of that coin is that the many layers of communication between senior decisionmakers and what's actually happening on the ground mean that the information they get is often of insufficient fidelity to support accurate decisionmaking.
I suspect it exists because the person above them just wants one person to yell at and doesn't want to learn the names of everyone below them.
The manager isn't a genius and the employees aren't morons. The business objectives could be explained to those employees and they could coordinate with each other to fulfill them without necessitating a conductor. Deep hierarchies are archaic holdovers from military organizational thinking.
I see the opposite. Most often management guides priorities towards things that sound new and exciting, and will look good on their performance review and resumes. They tend to neglect the boring but necessary tasks that are good for the long term health of the company.
Management guides priorities toward the needs of the business, i.e. money, usually. You can sell and market new shiny things.
If you can’t quantify the boring necessary tasks with dollars and deliverables then don’t be surprised when you get “oh yeah whatever.”
I’ve had to fight so damn hard with my own teammates who rail on and on about tech debt but won’t do an ounce of lift to turn the kvetching into an actual business proposal. For some reason devs have such a hard time conceptualizing that they are also one of the stakeholders to the business.
Here’s one that I made happen.
“Setting up new 3rd party integrations takes $x hours of work (here’s the cards) costing roughly this much in engineer time. Based on our sales trajectory we expect to do this many next year costing this much. The team believes that if we develop a framework for these integrations we can cut the time spent for each one to this. Our metric for success will be measured by having a dev who didn’t work on the framework convert an existing integration in the test environment.”
I’ve never gotten a green light so fast from our product management.
This is great. I think there should be more resources that explain this dynamic and especially how to have productive conversations around tech debt with management.
The benefits of addressing some tech debt can be hard to quantify. An architectural change could enable you to add new integrations or otherwise build new features faster, but you can't always predict the magnitude I'm advance. I agree that some devs can exaggerate the importance of this though.
I still think you need to sometimes look at software as requiring some base level of regular maintenance funding, like a fleet of vehicles gets regular cyclic maintenance in any transport company.
It's true that they guide priorities toward the need of the business but it's also true that they don't. There's empire building, favors and horse trading to be done between managers. There's also battles to be waged for territory.
And while I do agree that's important to learn how to frame things in terms of the business benefit there are going to be things that aren't as simple to translate into a straightforward benefit and KPIs. If you're working on something that just increases developer happiness to help with things like general productivity and retention measuring the benefit for any one thing isn't always going to be feasible.
Every manager I've had apparently thinks making sure the Standards of Business conduct training being done before any other group has their SBC training done is the most important part of their business. Their second most important part is their bonus followed by lying to their employees about nonexistent funding cuts and the high-end of pay bands. I've had lots of managers, I've had managers I talk to multiple times a week and managers that I never spoke to but they all seem to have one thing in common and that's to get the most out of me with the least in return. It wasn't until I started looking at other position did I suddenly start getting merit increases and large bonuses, funny how that works.
I had a SVP keep pushing for an innovative approach to X. I told my boss it must be in her development plan.
My bosses laughed, but it’s true, even VPs have development plans and when the CEO tells them to do something “innovative”, well, they make sure they do it, feasibility or need be damned.
Yup, when I was early in my career I wondered why management had so many meetings.
Then when I got more senior and closer to the decision making, I realize just how hard it is to keep large organizations on track. I've worked at companies that do it poorly and it's a mess - everyone is busy, but the company is just spinning it's wheels. Everyone with an oar is paddling in a different direction.
I've worked under leaders who are really good at providing direction. It's a very valuable skill when done right.
I'm starting to realize this and it's a really interesting realization.
My first taste of this was leading a small project of myself and 2 other devs, and wondering how the hell you're supposed to get other people to do what you want.
Doing a good job of leading a large number of people seems extremely difficult, and I'm glad I don't have to deal with that yet.
I worked in a 1,000 person org doing a product launch and leadership did a great job aligning everyone.
Launch goals? There were 3 short ones and not fluff like “drive sales”. Everyone on the team knew what the goals are and why. What should you be working on? Just look at the 3 launch goals. And leadership constantly reinforced them and empowered people to stop doing things that didn’t work towards them.
And I’ve worked in smaller teams where everyone had their own idea of what needed to be done. Leadership would keep changing goals (or they were so vague that anything fit them) or making exceptions. None of the pieces fit together and it was a total disaster. People got frustrated when they did great work but other critical parts weren’t done because something shiny or “cool” distracted other teams.
For people writing the checks "productive" also means "staying on good terms with the PMC". If you are outed from these circles, your career takes a nosedive.
Startups were a breath of fresh air, but as we continue falling towards the monopolization regime, the nepotism will permeate anything of value. Beyond these networks only soul-crushing work will remain, basically production of datasets for our replacements.
Essentially middle management and maybe project management. Project management's inclusion depending on how much power it has over decision making in an organization.
Productivity at an org level is not intuitive. For example, the whole org working at 25% capacity on the same thing sounds terrible, but it could produce better results than everyone working at 90% capacity on different things. For ICs, the first scenario feels bad and wrong.
> management was an active impediment of getting work done
That's kind of the point of bureaucracy, isn't it? To slow the rate of change in a system?
The trick is adding bureaucracy (management layers) once something is not only working now but working in a way you'd like it to X-many years in the future. Then you freeze-ray your process with bureaucracy.
Side note: that's also why a large, bureaucratic government is supposed to be good - it means it will be stable and only accept small, slow change.
Reminds me of some clips from "Yes Minister" (old comedy show) where the official assisting the minister declares that the purpose of government is continuity/stability, etc.
While funny, it's extra funny because it's true. Slow gradual change is much safer than massive revolutions -- regardless of whether your talking product development or politics.
Big change in complex systems are best done gradually.
"Ugh, artificial deadlines are the worst. They hurt morale, productivity, and quality."
But sometimes/often required to actually get things done and shipped.
On the flipside, waiting around for an engineer to overoptimize something that matters only in their head, or doing something they believe is necessary when it totally isn't...not stellar for overall team performance either.
(I am speaking in general, not referring to the parent comments...)
Well. If you treat adults like children, they will start behaving like children. If you treat them like adults, they will be more responsible.
Or then they will rob you blind. Your mileage may vary and is very much dependent on other things like the general work culture.
Anyway, failing to treat people like they would deserve to be treated is the most basic managerial failure. Any manager worth their salt should have an idea how their underlings need to be treated.
> Or then they will rob you blind. Your mileage may vary and is very much dependent on other things like the general work culture.
Seems like quite a wide variation -- so your proposed approach results in either the desired outcome or the worst case possible outcome? There's no middle ground?
> Anyway, failing to treat people like they would deserve to be treated is the most basic managerial failure. Any manager worth their salt should have an idea how their underlings need to be treated.
Have you managed a team before? I ask because the most basic managerial failure isn't "failing to treat people like they would deserve to be treated" but rather operating a team who delivers more value to the company than they cost, and ideally at or exceeding the level that leadership expects. That's it. That often requires the following:
1) Hiring high potential, high performance employees
2) Managing out low performance employees
3) Unlocking extra performance from employees where possible
Of these three activities, it's only the third one that approaches what you've mentioned. Why haven't you mentioned the other two?
This overall thread is interesting because it keeps bouncing back and forth, almost literally, between it being managers or engineers who like to work on things unimportant. As an engineer who has never managed outside of interns, I find both can be equally damaging.
Although, an engineer pre-accustomed to in the weeds work who has no management guiding what to work on can be the worse because they can create work for the other engineers that can have zero motivating context, other than they think it’s what needs to be done. And they will report to management all these technical details that somehow appear to bolster the need but don’t actually. I am no fan of management, but working with these types of engineers can be infuriating because you end up getting sucked into their random deep dive that is messy and full of edge cases that ultimately matters zilch. I will pretty actively communicate to management that, look, if you don’t step in we’ll be following this engineer to the ends of the earth.
An example I can think of is one engineer being obsessed with making a once a year report being as optimized and performant as possible, while also being obsessed with “cleaning up” the data and fixing so-called discrepancies at the report level, making little hot fix patches everywhere, rather than working with the teams that were generating the supposedly bad data in the first place. I did everything I could to avoid working on that because it was nothing but being mired in details and things that literally no one but them cared about. These types of engineers can be black holes of productivity.
That’s after a very-long (nearly three decade) career as an IC in “big tech”.
I think my take on this is not surprisingly different than yours.
As a first-level manager my job is all about execution and getting things done. Being in 20+ hours of meetings a week gives me a lot more perspective on the big picture than the ICs on my team.
They often think certain work is important because they have a very myopic view of what we do. I am always looking for the ICs to drive our work, and expect the more senior people to come to the table with ideas. Sometimes those ideas are great, and they have a low-level perspective that I am missing because my nose isn’t in the code as much as it once was (it still is, and I still commit code, but it’s opportunistic and not that frequent). But often they get stuck on fixing whatever the most recent thing that bothered them about our code rather than on what actually impacts customers in the long or short term.
There is a lot of management above first-level that doesn’t seem to add a lot of value, but I’m not sure how much of that is inherent versus the specifics of who is in those roles. I expect my manager to be focused on strategy, long-term direction, team composition, building relationships with other orgs, etc. Up a level from that, again an even broader perspective. Depending on who is filling those roles I may or may not see those behaviors.
It’s very common and convenient to focus on personal productivity as an IC, but if 25% or 50% or 90% of that effort is going towards things that ultimately don’t have impact for customers, it’s not very productive after all.
If I’m reading this correctly, you’re saying that there needs to be someone on a higher level to ensure that the correct work gets done.
How do you balance the additional work needed to provide the necessary transparency to this decision-maker?
Providing this additional reporting often becomes an unreasonably (I think) large part of the job, creates friction, and unexpected changes of direction interrupt flow.
As a manager with experience and sensibility for both the importance of doing the right thing and productivity, satisfaction and flow - what are some ways you lower the cost of managing?
One way to lower the cost of managing is to promote transparency within the organisation: allow and encourage manager to read the PR and the discussion around them, this will give them some sense of the progress of the projects. Provide KPI/OKR about the state of the company on a very regular basis, allow and encourage IC to take a look at them. Announce good and bad news on dedicated channels, allow and encourage employees to read them.
Because information is freely accessible, there is less need for dedicated "reporting" processes every time a manager is added into the system.
Agreed for small companies in certain business contexts, but just “reading through the PRs” doesn’t scale or may not be that valuable to decision makers at different levels of the hierarchy, and not all ICs want to be involved in the decision making. I don’t think there’s a one size fits all option besides having smart people who know what they’re talking about and not going too heavy on process and hierarchy too fast.
> As a first-level manager my job is all about execution and getting things done. Being in 20+ hours of meetings a week gives me a lot more perspective on the big picture than the ICs on my team.
> They often think certain work is important because they have a very myopic view of what we do. I am always looking for the ICs to drive our work, and expect the more senior people to come to the table with ideas. Sometimes those ideas are great, and they have a low-level perspective that I am missing because my nose isn’t in the code as much as it once was (it still is, and I still commit code, but it’s opportunistic and not that frequent). But often they get stuck on fixing whatever the most recent thing that bothered them about our code rather than on what actually impacts customers in the long or short term.
I would love to hear your perspective (or pointers to other resources that might explain this better) on how one can effectively communicate this kinda of context with ICs.
I've worked with managers who have been from "fully transparent about org dynamics" to "Ill shield you from shit (i.e. politics)". Personally, I prefer the former approach as an IC since I respect honesty and the truth, so e.g. if its a political decision I can simply stop trying to push for another direction. However, I understand that this kind of radical transparency might come at a cost and might only work with certain kinds of ICs.
There’s “shield you from shit” as in “don’t let upper management abuse you” and then there’s “treat you like a mushroom.” Some managers conflate the two.
My best ever manager was both. Radically transparent but also a human shield against the onslaught of political bullshit that was going on. He made it clear what we were up against, stood tall for us but also told us when he did all he could and we were going to have to deal with whatever decision was coming down from on high.
Day to day shielding from nonsense wasn't his best feature but it was a contributing factor in having such a productive relationship.
Well it's my experience that managers almost never think about the product or the customer, and almost never feel the need to justify their focus to the engineers who are (at least sometimes) thinking about the product and the customer.
I've never once had a manager say anything along the lines of "I just think we're building a bad experience if we release this early." I have heard them say all sorts of politics like "If we get this out now, then that'll prove massive impact that will free us up politically down the line"
Or for example I worked at a known location-sharing startup, and managers gave 0% thought to concerns like "hey is battery life impact worth measuring?" and kept pushing random integrations (like with Italian telecom company) hoping to get some huge amount of customers (which never payed off in my experience).
When I picture managers and directors I think of the idiots at Yahoo managing to fail to understand I need more than 15megs of storage or a spam filter (can't imagine what those managers were wasting their time ona), while a company of mostly engineers with scarcely any management builds gmail and eats their whole market.
> I've never once had a manager say anything along the lines of "I just think we're building a bad experience if we release this early."
Then perhaps you had less-than-great managers, and I could think of a variety of reasons for that.
Maybe it was as simple as you claim: no consideration was made to introducing an undercooked user experience. But if a software development manager is green lighting that, likely causing more work for customer service and perhaps sales, I would hope there’s more to the story than that.
Maybe this manager didn’t communicate why releasing a bad experience by a specific date was, perhaps, mandatory to fulfill a contractual obligation. Or maybe you were not able to sort that out from the limited amount of information they gave you.
Maybe they didn’t see the bad UX as truly as bad as you, and perhaps your team, thought it was. Maybe where you thought the feature’s UX passed the 80/20 rule was different than many customers.
I’ve had (product and project, not as often people) managers who have pushed to hold on delivering a half-baked implementation. And I’ve been a manager who has done that. Those better managers exist
Did you ever get feedback or do something to reevaluate why the bad experience was shipped?
The experiences you describe do sound like clueless folks making calls, but know that there are folks in management positions not just wildly flailing about.
Problem is with this argument is both sides are aruging their group is better. I find whether not you care about outcome usually irrelevant to the title / role.
There's a couple of things going on here:
- Personal ambition. Usually this is about money, especially the higher up the org you are, but it might also be about becoming a better at tech, or keeping a stable job to pay your mortgage.
- Incentives. How the company rewards things it wants. This might be shares, commission, salary, or bonuses. But it's also about how the company measures and manages those things.
- Ethics. What you're willing to do to achieve your goals. Both individually, and at an org level.
It doesn't take long industry to realise that the few people are actually interested in helping orgs make money. This is shown by developers focusing on irrelevant shit all day long, and it's shown by the lack of incentives and rewards that drive the correct behaviour, so all you get is a whole bunch of personal ambition.
Of course, some people do, but when faced with a company that allows people to focus on short sighted personal ambition, they'll either fall in-line or move along.
Google deciding to give everyone literally 100x or 66x more free space than their competitors did manage to acquire a lot of the email market, which meant non-negligible hardware costs. It spent three years in internal development of Gmail. I have no idea why you think managers weren't involved in those decisions.
Meanwhile, I have no idea if battery life impact is worth measuring in your use-case. My assumption would be "no" because I would imagine the battery life impact would vary too widely to yield useful data and I don't see what I could do with that information anyway other than recommend some people not use the app. But I'm not really thinking deeply about it now, so I'd love to be enlightened. Meanwhile, trying to get more customers is a good thing, even if it fails.
It's probably important to put this into context of Google's views towards management, especially back then. At one point they even experimented (briefly) with having no middle management. My understanding is that they still try to limit the number of managers and their ability to harm the organization by using tactics like higher ratios of developers for each manager. They actively try to reduce negative behaviors like micro-management by middle managers.
It's not exactly common for an organization to actively attempt to mitigate the negative aspects of middle management so it's almost an apples to oranges comparison. But since we're on the topic of Google, maybe making management reduction one of an organization's goals is the correct strategy to reduce the bloat and increase the productivity of ICs.
>My understanding is that they still try to limit the number of managers
IMHO this is really the point. Somebody has to hire devs, run the evaluation/promotion stuff, facilitate communication to/from upper management, and so on.
I've just never been to a place that couldn't do that with 1/2 to 1/3 of the EMs they have. For whatever reason the standard is one EM per team. A better ratio is on EM per 2-4 teams.
From what I've been told, you need to "change something" in order to get promoted at Google. Doesn't much matter what, as long as it's a visible change, presumably at least marginally improving things.
And that illustrates what releasing half-baked stuff and not caring much about tech debt is all about - visibility. This seems to be true across industries. Not releasing something, even if it's not ready gives impression of not doing enough, not delivering, always being late, etc. Releasing stuff shows you (the manager) are the person who delivers. If it's crap, you'll get even more resources to throw at fixing stuff that's already delivered. And you're the hero again (even if it's "techies" who did 80-hour weeks to make it happen).
This doesn't even break down too much in physical product world. "Deliver" could mean sales, first to the market, we'll add copy&paste in 3.0, and so on...
I feel like this happens at every tech company I've worked for. The management in charge of promotions is not tech savvy, so 'under the hood' improvements and general maintenance goes completely unappreciated, while flashy, superficial UI updates are bestowed with gold medals and promotions.
Gmail wasn't just built by a team of "engineers" that ate Yahoo's break fast. There was also a great designer and product manager on the team as well [1]. I have seen engineers hold the misstaken belief that a "heroic" engineer or team of engineers could out-box a traditional product team with an engineering manager, product manager, designer, and engineering lead, but it's just not the truth.
Presumably, in your case, you're talking about an engineering manager. But you haven't mentioned if there's an engineering manager and no accompanying trained product manager. Engineering managers aren't formally trained in doing the hard work of talking to the customers to figure out what the market actually wants, so if leadership at your organization did not build it out to include this role, you would end up being in a tough spot.
Based on you saying that your manager made the decision to build a random integration which had questionable value to the org it sounds like this was the case. Depending on the size of the team, an engineering manager may even be dead weight and engineers should report to a technical founder or GM. But regardless, you actually are making the case that more rather than less product ownership and management is necessary to ensure that a product isn't dead on arrival -- after all, the symptoms you mention are of poor prioritization and product discovery/strategy (symptoms of poor/nonexistant active product management) rather than of poor engineering management (endless tech debt, production outages, awful on-call support, inability for the team to deliver features, unrealistic delivery roadmaps causing endless late nights with poor quality and buggy software delivery, attrition and difficulty recruiting).
What your comment, in other words, boils down to this: managers, directors, VPs, etc, just build their empires by hiring more and people. That's why it is possible that "25% or 50% or 90% of that effort [personal productivity] is going towards things that ultimately don’t have impact for customers, it’s not very productive after all."
Maybe, time to trim the fat from the top: get rid of these empires by downsizing. Also, companies at very high level should look at the bad effects of empire building, which happens in every large organization. Now one can ask "who gonna bell the cat"? If executive vice presidents start empire building, who gonna stop that? After all, CEO should give free reigns to his underling EVPs. Maybe, the majority stock holders should bell that cat; however, they have delegated that to the board of directors, who are different set of cats.
> What your comment, in other words, boils down to this: managers, directors, VPs, etc, just build their empires by hiring more and people.
No, my comment doesn't boil down to that. It boils down to many (not all) ICs, especially ones without a lot of experience, are more interested in focusing on problems that interest them than actual issues that customers want solved. So they go off and start working on interesting problems rather than important ones.
I have 20+ hours because I work cross-functionally across a huge company that is both designing hardware and writing software for it. The complexity of what we build and ship is many times that of anything I've worked on during most of my career. As a result, there are a large number of moving parts and a lot of coordination that needs to happen across teams.
I guess no one size fits all, but here is not 2 hours per IC, its two hours total with all ICs involved. We have a very async nature and mostly keep track of each other through tools, so maybe that helps.
I'm sure that 90% of the current team would quit if we suddenly had to attend 10X more meetings per week :P.
>> But often they get stuck on fixing whatever the most recent thing that bothered them about our code rather than on what actually impacts customers in the long or short term.
One company had a homegrown debug protocol and tool to interface with it. I needed to add some custom info screens for development, but it was very hard to add because the code was $h!t. So I started fixing it just to be able to add my new data. Not only was I told that Work should be "managed" and prioritized, it was later discarded even though I had done it.
When programmers do things to "make the code better", it may not have an impact on today's customer demands, but it is meant to make the programmers more efficient in the future. This is stuff that will - by definition - Never be a priority in management's eyes.
> This is stuff that will - by definition - Never be a priority in management's eyes.
I'm not sure why you think that is "by definition" not a priority. Of course it is if it's impacting being able to do new work that adds value.
The question is, is that a priority at the moment it's noticed, or something that should be added to a backlog to be addressed later?
If it's a small amount of code clean-up, it's usually easy to squeeze into current work without disruption. We always try to refactor as we go along. If it's "This 3000 lines needs to be redesigned and rewritten", it really amounts to feature work and should be added to a backlog and prioritized along with all the other work.
The phenomenon I'm talking about is ICs seeing something for the first time, and then deciding that must be the priority because it's so bad, and dropping everything else to fix that thing even if it's weeks worth of work. They see what's in front of them as the thing that's most important.
>>
The phenomenon I'm talking about is ICs seeing something for the first time, and then deciding that must be the priority because it's so bad, and dropping everything else to fix that thing even if it's weeks worth of work. They see what's in front of them as the thing that's most important.
Sometimes that new person is wrong, buy often there is truth in their assessment. If they're right that they've walked onto a bunch of garbage then their desire to fix it immediately is IMHO the correct thing to do with the exception of making critical (meaning contractual) deadlines for a customer.
The time to fix a disaster is when someone has that intrinsic motivation to do it.
Completely agree. A managers task isn't so much to make sure 'more work gets done'. They are there to make sure 'the right work gets done'.
And that the right people are there (and stay there), that the right tools are there (which does increase efficiency), that no work gets left behind, etcetera, etcetera.
It seems to me like a law of nature that every managerial function seeks to increase its influence and headcount by definition. Without a constant and vigilant effort to keep this tendency in check, every managerial organization will keep growing and adding bureaucracy just to justify its own existence and increase its reach and power.
I think the root cause of this tendency is the law of the least resistance. Creating new things is hard, especially if they go against the conventional wisdom. Supervising and managing things is easy, especially if the people being supervised are professional enough not to need much supervision. Then the managers job is basically just to stay out of the way, which is quite easy.
Of course even managers get eventually bored if they feel they have no impact. That's when the reorganizations start. That's also when the best time to actually create something new ends.
There are many situations, especially as a middle manager, where you are incentivized to play organizational games more than actually deliver.
We (I'm a middle manager myself) Aren't stupid, so we will.
More headcount and influence means more (at least potential) business impact, and often promotions. If the organization encourages us to fight with other managers to get more of that, that's what we'll do instead of running our organizations better.
This has been my experience too. I work for a Fortune 100 company. For the first 15 years we (a team consisting of 2 full time programmers, a qa person, and a few contractors) were embedded within the sales organization. Since they were sales and we were IT, they pretty much left us to our own devices. We got so much done (and were invited to all the sales parties, sales has a LOT of parties). Eventually someone high enough up in the actual IT org got wind of us and made a stink until we were moved into IT. Holy Meetings Batman. I had no idea it was possible to schedule so many meetings. Our productivity over the past 5 years has basically ground to a halt. We get as much done in a year as we used to get done in a month.
>>"All of our deferred maintenance issues, some dating back over a decade, were addressed in the first 6 months of being freed of the managers"
Right... So how many business goals got accomplished?
The techie in me hundred percent empathizes with you. I want a Clean system based on best practices and modern technology stack.
It took me a long time to understand that my technical OCD is irrelevant from business goals perspective. I don't know your full story but as presented, there's a possibility that while you enjoyed six months without management, business suffered for it. Or not - don't know the details. But it's important to understand that my techie perspective of what's important to accomplish, and business perspective, may differ. Management's job (amongst others) is to enact company strategy and prioritize business goals.
To wit, a business may be more successful with certain percentage of outstanding maintenance issues (his ibportant was that decade old issue really?? :) while having important new features built.
Quality of code is very relevant for business success for millions of reasons.
* good and self-respecting developers will not work on bad quality code. Business will be left with bad/mediocre devs who will implement bussiness needs slowly and with bad quality
* good code base and good dev practises make development much faster and with fewer errors, with easier new developer onboarding etc.
How many of IT projects have had a rewrite a costly rewrite because it became unmanageable?
80% managers think only about business needs- even those who previously were developers themselves because it is convenient and they do not have sell that maintenance is also needed
Do you really think that OP doesn’t understand tech debt?
In my experience, both of others, and certainly of my own proclivities, if an IC is left to their own devices, the work they do will deviate further and further from business goals. Yes, that includes long term business goals like “not needing to do a big bang rewrite because everything goes to shit”.
These threads tend to give the impression that maintenance is a completely unique need that you need to be a Big Brain Developer to understand. Truth be told this is the case in loads of other fields. “Long term thinking”, “short term thinking”, and prioritising appropriately, are well and truly within the remit for people and these positions, and improper execution of the above is one id the things that separates good and bad managers/executives.
Barring a good pairing of a development team that always has the wider business context in mind, and a good management / executive team that understands the nuances of development, this back and forth over maintenance and housekeeping is always going to happen to an extent. And to be honest you don’t want a development team that has the wider business context in mind to the extent of whoever is “above” them. Past a point, it’s a distraction.
This comment made me think of the book The Goal, by Goldratt. I wonder who at the company was tasked with clarifying what the ultimate goal was to every employee? And if everyone measured success in that way?
In another great, although fiction book "Cryptonomicon" I found a life-changing passage about the ultimate raison d'être of every commercial company in the world: "increasing the value of shareholders". That goal can be achieved by paying dividends or by increasing company's capitalization. Those are still too abstract metrics for most of ICs, so as a manager I am using proxy metrics of revenue and new clients.
Not all work in an enterprise yields revenue. Security or compliance or HR are great examples of that. Also, very often work that you do doesn't bring immediate benefits. They are usually deferred by months or sometimes even years.
Okay. If not revenue or customers acquisition, there should be some other productivity metrics. Because lines of code committed or tickets moved to the right on Kanban board are definitely not those metrics
Obviously not the OP but are you trying to imply that mgmnt do sale's work? They don't. The sales people are important, a company can hardly function without them. Meanwhile you can fire all of the management and the company will still work just fine, if not better.
Sales people need something to sale. Soaring productivity should mean delivery of lots of features wanted by prospective clients, thus an occasion for sales people to contact those prospects, pitch them those features and close a lots of deals.
> Meanwhile you can fire all of the management and the company will still work just fine, if not better.
I wish you could try it and survive to tell the world that story.
The reward for success in most corporations is to be able to hire more people.
I can’t think of many situations where being successful means you get to degrade the quality of what you are doing.
The problem is peoples egos and signaling.
I once worked at a company and did this huge set of projects on a shoe string using creativity and hard work.
A manager was hired in another parallel group to mine and they got to immediately hire six people.
It made me so annoyed because it felt like I had demonstrated results and not gotten resourced.
It sets off these ego driven hiring wars.
Once one manager starts staffing up, you immediately felt threatened and under siege and at war.
If your competitor peers (they are never your friend) out hire you, then soon their people are coming into your area trying to take over work under you.
The entire thing is super corrupt. Like I personally don’t like over hiring but if you have never felt what it is like to be put in that position - it is quite threatening.
It also signals if you don’t hire the way other teams are hiring they you are a failure as a manager or as a team.
After this experience I realized how compromised you are being middle management: you lose skill and value and you become at the mercy of impossible to control politics coming from all directions.
And then what happens next? Well, many times the hiring manager who built their little empire leaves and dumps all the people they hired loose. They all end up in a sort of limbo. Original manager had an idea of what to do with them, now someone else ends up having to baby sit them, often without any vision for what to do.
This process of hiring and leaving just degrades the talent and dead weight: it’s such a sort of baked in disease and hard to get rid of.
I personally won’t be a middle manager ever again. At least not one that doesn’t report direct to a ceo.
Not necessarily true. In my company the rule is: 10 offshore devs/testers get nothing done => hire 20, if that that doesn't work, hire 50. The actual work could probably be done by 2 or 3 competent people.
Are you sure your company isn't doing government contract work? I made the expensive mistake of hiring government contractors once. They did a great job of sending me massive bills while accomplishing nothing at all. I fired them and refused to pay those bills. They threatened to sue. I replied I had all their documentation and progress reports that showed they accomplished nothing. Never heard from them again.
I’ve seen that in every sector (.com, .edu, and .gov) — there’s a huge management culture pushing untruths (e.g. “a good manager can manage anything”) and contempt for the actual workers which causes those pathological outcomes anywhere so afflicted. Part of what makes it popular is that when one contracting company produces another 8-9 figure write-off you can blame them and try again with the latest set of expensive suits swearing they’re completely different, but it’s harder to shirk responsibility if it’s people who report to you.
This is more common in government due to politics: if agencies aren’t allowed to hire competent technical staff, the contractors will be poorly supervised but when it fails the same people who cut staffing will use it to argue even more things need to be contracted out. Again, the problem isn’t the sector but the lack of an effective feedback loop.
Of course. The feedback loop for government is different from that for business. Failure in business means going out of business. This powerfully incentivizes business to stop rewarding failure. Like when Alexa lost $billions and Amazon cut off its funding.
No such feedback exists for government operations.
Feedback loops definitely exist for government: contracts are cut or sent to other companies, agency heads are grilled by Congress and replaced, budgets are cut / reallocated, entire agencies are combined or split apart, and politicians win or lose elections. They're not necessarily as effective as we'd like but they certainly exist.
I don't think your theory "Company efficient and rewards good work, Government inefficient and punishes good work" holds in reality. From what I have seen most large organizations are full of people that are good at navigating organizations but don't really care about the end product. And they keep hiring similar people so bureaucracy keeps growing. I have worked at Siemens, IBM and now a medical device company and it's been the same everywhere. Enormous amounts of money are spent on things that make no sense and nobody in power cares as long as they look good. And the paper pushers keep growing.
School performance is heavily politicized so many people have an incentive, sometimes financial, to say public schools are failing but what actually happens is what close to a century of research has shown: student performance tracks their household socioeconomic status, but we tend to approach the problem backwards for ideological reasons and see it as “improve school performance to fight poverty” when every bit of data says it should be “deal with poverty to improve school performance”.
You have to look at the details: for example, is the enrollment static or do you see things like more students requiring support services which we’ve chosen to put on schools rather than funding through a national health service like most of our peer countries? That one’s especially important when making historical comparisons because the United States no longer excludes special needs kids or tracks lower-performing poor kids into work. Comparisons with other countries are similar - people will talk about countries like Singapore being far ahead but once you compare similar SES cohort performance, the effect becomes much smaller.
Is it the case that the amount of money spent on infrastructure is increasing unnecessarily or because previous generations voted against maintenance until things failed completely?
Is spending going up due to teacher salaries or because the solution to perceived problems is adding more layers of much higher-compensated management who will reliably divert staff time away from education?
Again, I’m not saying that everything is perfect with no room for improvement but rather that there’s both deliberate misrepresentation (e.g. the charter school industry literally banks on this belief) and significant confusion caused by trying to find a cheap fix for complex social problems.
In the public schools, there is zero incentive to educate the kids. That doesn't bring in more money. Failing to educate brings in more money, after all, the laundry list of excuses are all there to justify more money.
That doesn't work in business. You fail, you go out of business. Nobody cares why you fail, nobody listens to excuses.
> I can't imagine many teachers feeling this way, seriously.
Even the most well-intentioned teachers behave according to their incentives.
> Not everything requires life-or-death financial pressure to encourage excellence.
I didn't say everything. After all, I work on D for free. But you simply cannot run an organization with tens of thousands of people in it and expect excellence when there is zero incentive for excellence. It just ain't gonna happen.
Teacher pay is 100% based on length of service and which college degree. Nothing else. Nothing. It matters naught whether a good job is done or not. Even if one wins "Teacher of the Year", it is worth exactly $0.
Financial incentives are not good motivators for excellence. Numerous studies have borne this out. When money is used as an incentive, people start cutting corners.
We're talking about people, not economies. Financial incentives work up to a point, and then they start perverting behaviour. Better motivations for people on an individual level within an organization are autonomy, mastery and purpose, eg. give them an objective that seems meaningful, and give them the freedom to master the skills needed achieve that goal in a way they know works for them.
I agree. You know these kids aren't just "variables". You learn to know them, build relationships with them and try to make them succeed as much as is possible.
Some people really are quite detatched from the social link.
She's a headmistress in the UK that specifically tailors her school's offerings to lower-socio kids who don't have educated/literate parents at home, and her GCSE results beat out the majority of middle-class schools.
There are some similar examples in Australia too. I know the previous principal of Frankston Primary School managed to get above average AIMS results from a cohort consisting of basically pure white trash.
I guess the point is that, even though this may be true overall, there are clearly examples where excellent schools have thrived in spite of poverty/illiteracy, and tailoring schools to the demographics of the local area could help millions of disadvantaged kids.
No Child Left Behind handled #1 by closing failing schools. The problem is that it was designed to close more things than it replaced, so eventually you'd run out of schools. Which is convenient if what you actually want to do is send everyone to private religious schools.
Anyway, this is an example of libertarian first principles thinking. The problem with first principles thinking is that in the real world it's literally always wrong (because there are always factors you forgot about), but that this doesn't convince people to stop doing it, because they know it must be true despite it never in practice being true. Does the profit motive actually stop Google or Uber from constantly doing useless makework projects and releasing unprofitable products?
> Does the profit motive actually stop Google or Uber from constantly doing useless makework projects and releasing unprofitable products?
Large companies are like mini-governments with their own kind of politics. We tolerate them because despite all the useless make-work that happens in a large company, we usually find that it's still far more efficient than a bunch of smaller companies would be.
And when a publicly-traded company gets too large for its own good, corporate raiders can step in, acquire it on the cheap and spin off its parts into leaner and meaner firms. The whole process is driven by the expectation of efficiency.
You mean companies never fail and go out of business? It happens all the time.
> Does the profit motive actually stop Google or Uber from constantly doing useless makework projects and releasing unprofitable products?
Did you read in the news recently that Amazon axed Alexa? Because it was losing $billions?
Besides, it's rarely possible to tell in advance whether a new product line will be successful or not. The thing to do is try it and see. If it fails, you axe it. If it succeeds, you put more investment into it.
It's like a TV series. "Yellowstone" was wildly successful, and Paramount is pouring money into prequels and sequels. "The Time Traveler's Wife" didn't do well, so no second season.
> You mean companies never fail and go out of business? It happens all the time.
It's true that "if you can't make payroll, the company goes out of business" but anything less unoptimal than that also happens all the time. Individual executives who cause the failures get promoted, bad products with price-insensitive customers/investors live on, unprofitable business lines in otherwise surviving companies can live forever, managers grow their teams for non-economic reasons, customer brands of failed companies get bought and relaunched by anonymous Chinese companies instead of disappearing.
(Wrt this website, capitalism has given former YC president Sam Altman multiple McLarens and a New Zealand apocalypse bunker despite his never having a known productive job in his life.)
> Did you read in the news recently that Amazon axed Alexa? Because it was losing $billions?
That wasn't a rational decision. Amazon started Alexa on a whim, didn't monetize it on a whim, and canceled it on a whim. In a large company, the R&D people who develop products are often walled off from knowing about finances because the execs don't want corporate finances to be widespread knowledge, and so their yearly performance reviews are based on inventing cool stuff rather than if they were profitable or not. So the execs just didn't decide to tell them to do profitable stuff, then got bored and cancelled it instead of doing that. Too bad for anyone who got laid off, but it wasn't their fault.
(It's strange for them to claim it was losing billions though. It sure seemed like they were selling a lot of licenses, and Amazon is usually known for good cost control. Where was it all going?)
> It's like a TV series. "Yellowstone" was wildly successful, and Paramount is pouring money into prequels and sequels. "The Time Traveler's Wife" didn't do well, so no second season.
The TV industry has lots of cost-insensitive customers because most people don't cancel their cable/streaming accounts every month even if they don't use it. So they don't have perfect signals here either.
Netflix in particular is famous recently for constantly cancelling series even if they're doing well. And when something underperforms just a little they also cancel it, when they probably could've invested a bit more to improve it instead. This is actually hurting them because it reduces customer trust, which suggests they really just like cancelling things - or at best, they're irrationally sensitive to the possibility actors might ask for a raise next season.
This just isn't true. In US public schools both individual and institutional compensation is tied to meeting or exceeding academic standards with sufficient numbers of students.
This feels like an oversimplification: it would be foolhardy for the government to cut funding for e.g. a bridge if it begins to run over, because paying $500M for an incomplete bridge is a significantly worse outcome than paying $600M for a finished bridge.
> it would be foolhardy for the government to cut funding for e.g. a bridge if it begins to run over
Exactly. They failed, so they get more budget. Happens with nearly all government projects. It's almost as if the department/contractor knows that if they fail they'll get more budget. Hmmm...
In which case, it seems like your blame is misplaced: the government is not particularly guilty of waste (although not innocent either), but is instead is mostly powerless to prevent private contractors from abusing the public's interest.
I'm talking about bridges. Depending on political proclivities, anybody can find an example of government waste to suit any particular argument.
The observation is very simple: if the government estimates and allocates $500 million for a bridge and finds a contractor that claims to be able to do it for that price, there's very little reasonable power we can grant them to make the contractor meet their claimed budget. We could allow the government to throw contractors in prison for bilking them but, well, we already allow that (and it doesn't recoup the costs anyways).
Regulatory capture and special interests seem to be the bigger problem here. Complaining about NASA without considering why the government so fecklessly pays Lockheed Martin et al. billions a year is short-sighted.
> anybody can find an example of government waste to suit any particular argument
True, as those examples are everywhere one looks.
The trick is to find one that is efficient.
> he observation is very simple: if the government estimates and allocates $500 million for a bridge and finds a contractor that claims to be able to do it for that price, there's very little reasonable power we can grant them to make the contractor meet their claimed budget.
Yet private companies contract stuff out to other companies all the time, and the contracts get done on time and on budget. For example, take Boeing. Boeing gets a contract from Delta to build, say, 50 airplanes for $5 billion, to be delivered on June 1. Every day Boeing is late, Boeing pays the airline a penalty. If Boeing runs over budget, Boeing eats the difference, not Delta. If Boeing fails to deliver Delta 50 airplanes, Boeing pays a big penalty to Delta.
Now, if Delta wants to change the spec after it is signed, well, they gotta pay Boeing. If Delta doesn't pay the bill, they get sued by Boeing. If Delta wants to reduce the number of planes they contracted for, Delta pays a penalty.
See how that works?
And Boeing does their damn-dest to be on time and on budget.
Very often contractors come in over time and over budget in private sector as well. I've cleaned up after contractors who have done it, and we've done it too. There's nothing magical about the private sector, it's the exact same problem. Do you want 4/5ths of an app that no one else will figure out how to finish in a reasonable time, or do you want to pay us more than we asked to finish? The choice is obvious, predictable, and observable if you've ever been involved in contractor relationships.
Oh, I have been involved in contractor relationships. If I don't meet the spec on time, I don't get paid.
I've also watched contractors who are paid a $$$ bonus for every day they are ahead of schedule. It's amazing how fast they work. I remember one group that received $10,000 each for delivering on time. This was back in the 80s, when that was real money. There was no way that project was going to be late.
May I suggest your outfit hire better contract lawyers.
Do you recall after that earthquake in LA the city hired a construction company to rebuild a freeway interchange that collapsed? They offered ONE MILLION DOLLARS PER DAY to complete it ahead of schedule.
The contractor broke all records and got it done months ahead of schedule. Everybody was happy.
Having to pay more money to a contractor mid-job is also a common theme in free-market home renovations/construction because the same incentives exist for the homeowner as they do for the government in your example. How has the free market solved it using tools the government refuses to use?
8% of construction projects from major companies ($5 billion+, publicly traded) are either on-time or on-budget. Obviously a smaller number are both.
If you can really solve this problem, you can make a ton of money.
Meanwhile, non-trivial projects with clauses like yours are less profitable and therefore tend to be the first delayed when resources are scarce. Which they frequently are. Unless you overpay by default. After all, "on budget" doesn't matter if the budget is 100x what other people are being quoted
Meanwhile, how you described Boeing contracts doesn't seem plausible.
> Exactly. They failed, so they get more budget. Happens with nearly all government projects
No it doesn't. Programs are cut or cancelled outright all the time. The important question is not whether they're failing or succeeding but whether they're believed to be necessary. Projects that are necessary get more funding if they are failing, like schools. Well duh.
Projects that are succeeding and have budget left get trimmed. Again, duh.
Projects that are unnecessary or no longer necessary get cut regardless of budget.
That's just good governance. The same pattern happens in the economy.
How about those zillions spent to eliminate homeless encampments? They're spending something like $50,000 per homeless person. Hasn't put a dent in it. What is happening?
More budget! It's called the Homeless Industrial Complex for a reason.
> Projects that are necessary get more funding if they are failing, like schools
Sometimes I feel I'm the only one on HN who is in favor of free markets.
It's also clear that apparently many people who respond have never heard anyone make a case for free markets before. It's amazing, because free markets have produced the prosperity and high standard of living we all enjoy. Leftism has never delivered the goods.
It might be because they’ve worked in the private sector but not the public sector. Once I’d worked in a team that spanned across different government departments it changed my view forever, it was like the most dysfunctional companies I’d worked for but with huge budgets and no chance of change through competition or being bought up etc. You can’t unsee waste like that.
My dad was a socialist as a young man. Being in the military for 23 years cured him of that. We lived on military bases for years, and seeing how they operated is worthy of much sad hilarity.
I also toured East Berlin in 1969 at the height of the Cold War. Modern folk often extol how great the USSR was. They'll tell me the Wall was built to keep the West out. Well, I've seen it with my own eyes. Dingy, gray, and sad.
The bus slipped right in through Checkpoint Charlie with just a passport check. Exiting was another story entirely. We all had to exit the bus while guards with machine guns gave it a very thorough search, including underneath.
I, for one, welcome you sharing your point of view. It’s a breath of fresh air. HN is certainly very different from around 15 years ago when the ethos used to be “libertarianism or GTFO”. I remember getting a heated response for merely suggesting that government might have some role. I guess the change is due to the shift from focus on startups to general technology. It’s just another form of eternal September.
I am afraid it's this forum's policy, as well. I got rate-limited since forever and my votes don't seem to count because I got into heated debates with leftists with clear agendas.
I used to think that I had a duty to educate and to offer an alternative to the anti-capitalist propaganda prevalent here. It doesn't seem that this is wanted, I am afraid.
I kinda' gave up, life is too short and my time is rather precious...
But I do deeply respect and appreciate your contributions, and your reputation and quality of arguments seems to protect you from the regular muzzling. Keep up the good work!
> Sometimes I feel I'm the only one on HN who is in favor of free markets.
Most people are for free markets that have no negative externalities. The problem is that very few, if any, markets have no negative externalities, therefore they cannot be completely free.
If you follow my posts, I have dealt with this issue many times. For example, pollution. The leftist viewpoint is using the banhammer along with the government micromanaging it with regulations. The free market viewpoint is to "internalize the externalities" by taxing the pollution.
Want less CO2 emissions? Tax the C content of fuels. That will work far, far better than all the "ban ICE car sales by 2035" and other blunderbuss approaches.
> The leftist viewpoint is using the banhammer along with the government micromanaging it with regulations. The free market viewpoint is to "internalize the externalities" by taxing the pollution.
Internalizing the externalities requires stringent regulations. That is a leftist position too.
> Want less CO2 emissions? Tax the C content of fuels.
If only it were that simple. This disproportionately impacts poorer people. This is why you create incentives for manufacturers to create alternatives, like EV, and then you can carbon tax fuels when those alternatives are available.
This sort of comment tends to generate poor outcomes in discussions on HN. No matter what your political views are, if you suggest that yours alone have a monopoly on logic and the views of others are determined by capricious emotion it's going to elicit negative responses and derail the thread. Framing it as a foregone conclusion is only going to magnify the perception of apathetic arrogance and increases the odds of it spiraling into a mess moderators will be left cleaning up.
This and your other comment in this post are such spot on sage advice and align so well with my own experience I feel we must have worked in the same companies. Thank you for putting words to some things.
Yes and thanks for sharing your perspective as a (former) manager.
I start thinking that many misbehaving managers, would stop over hiring and such bad things, if the organization was able to give them the right incentives. (But how? Hmm, there were some books mentioned in a comment elsewhere, by the author of the article.)
I mean that many managers want to do what's good for the organization, but because of they way things are, they cannot. (Because then some other manager, who prioritizes his/her own career and influence, "takes over everything".)
I wonder what would happen if a company added a rule: Max team size is 10. End of over hiring (well, up to 10)? But would have other odd consequences.
"The reward for success in most companies is to be able to hire more people"
This is because the more people you manage the more powerful you become, the guy with 100 reports is more valuable than the guy with 20 reports. Those 100 reports could sit in their chairs all day and drool but 100 is always better than 20.
Yes, and (maybe sounds silly), how does that actually work? I mean, companies aren't democracies -- then, how does it matter that one guy has 100 droolers^H^H reports and the other guy has 20?
Is it that everyone subconsciously thinks that "they are more people so they get to decide"?
I don't think this is formalized in any way? (There's no written rule that says "bigger team gets to decide")
Is there a particular reason you made every sentence into its own paragraph except for two of two sentences and one of three? Made this kind of hard to read.
Are there similar characteristics to be used or applied from the concept of induced demand (I suppose the traffic filling extra lanes example) with Parkinson's law?
Not sure it's the same? Parkinson talks about purposefully (whether conscious or not) generating increased work whereas I thought induced demand was mostly harvesting latent demand.
But I'm neither an economist nor traffic engineer --tell me more!
At my work you have to go up 3 levels before we have someone who’s actual job is just managing. and that person was primarily brought in to sort out issues on another team. I’m fortunate that a lot of our org is very functional and doing the work.
For years I've struggled to come up with a "theory of the firm" that's intellectually satisfying but not cynical. Why do we have management? I've only been able to come up with a couple of hypotheses:
1. Principal-agent problem. Who do the employees work for? Self interest. The customers? Self interest. Suppliers? Self interest. The company has to figure out how to reconcile the self interest of individual participants with the interest of the company. If you let everybody do whatever they want with no repercussions, they will (figuratively speaking) walk away with anything that isn't nailed down. So far the only way we know how to prevent this is to assign humans to guard the interest of the business.
2. Failure mode. John Gall claimed that all sufficiently complex systems operate in failure mode 100% of the time. What he meant was that some or all of the controls have been bypassed, and the system is being operated manually. Humans are (at least for now) uniquely capable of functioning in systems that are in failure mode, e.g., by breaking the rules when necessary. This is why I doubt that management can be automated.
Now, while managers are doing both of those things, perhaps even just instinctively, they can be doing good and productive things. I'm actually quite happy with my own boss.
Why are you melding agency theory with pop science systems theory to replace sound economics (transaction cost theory of the firm)? I think you'd like to read Coase (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm)
1 is not a particularly good explanation in my mind for two reasons:
(a) people are great at working not in their own interest, together, on something greater than themselves. In fact, I've observed a negative correlation between this and management, in that the spirit of being "in it together for the greater good" seems to be weakened in organisations with more management.
(b) if people inherently only work out of self interest, then so would managers and the whole thing would break down anyway.
> people are great at working not in their own interest, together, on something greater than themselves.
Only really true of small, tight-knit groups of people engaged in very similar kinds of work, where everyone knows that their contribution will be evaluated by everyone else. Hence small partnerships, co-ops or very early startups probably don't need management. These roles start to appear as scale increases.
> (a) people are great at working not in their own interest, together, on something greater than themselves. In fact, I've observed a negative correlation between this and management, in that the spirit of being "in it together for the greater good" seems to be weakened in organisations with more management.
This is entirely true, and almost nobody with either corporate or government power agrees with it. They're putting in massive effort to keep people in line because they're afraid of what happens when they aren't kept in line, despite evidence that people accomplish things just fine without constant threat of external discipline.
Because control systems are only sometimes a good replacement for human relationships (even formal / limited ones, such as you find at work).
There are natural scaling limits around this.
If you think about what a "manager-less" work experience looks like, it looks like being an uber driver. I think we have existence proofs that manager-less work experiences are possible at scale. But job responsibilities need to be well defined.
Naturally, uber head office does not work like this.
Manager-less might also be a partnership, for example lawyers,
hair stylists and sometimes software engineers. But say with software engineers as the “company” grows it is legally much simpler and also less
risky to hire new people than to make them partners.
> So far the only way we know how to prevent this is to assign humans to guard the interest of the business.
Managers very much work in their own self interest, along with the rest of us.
In an interview, an engineer might be asked something like, "how many nodes did you manager/how many lines of code/how many microservices/etc.," as a way of gauging their level of skill and expertise. There is an implicit understanding -- on both sides -- that the complexity of the systems the engineer dealt is directly correlated with their expertise and talent, even if that kind of proxy is irrational when you really think about it.
Managers deal the same thing, except their questions are more along the lines of, "how many people reported to you/how big was you budget/etc."
In fact, I'd argue that self-interest is even worse on the management side, because the career stakes are so much higher. I have seen, on several occasions, top management commit to a strategy that was objectively failing with no practical path to success, because admitting that the strategy had failed would have gotten them fired by the board. It can be extremely catastrophic to the company when it enters that kind of failure mode.
Workers are not an abstract unit. They are human beings with human concerns and human availability. This needs to be accounted for separately from their work output. Managers allow you to create departments which are abstract units as a convenient interface over this problem.
Information flows are not always efficient or desirable to have broadcast to all individual workers. Managers serve as a node in this company information graph to help manage the reality of these concerns, and to provide a mechanism where information can actually flow in the opposite direction without creating chaos.
I read the book "Reinventing Organizations" by Laloux a few years ago and I can't recommend it highly enough for a non-cynical take on how to create healthy organizations.
The first few chapters talk through the history of human organization, from dominance-based tribes ("I'm the biggest man so do what I say"), through to modern corporations, with nominally-meritocratic hierarchy of management. And organizations where "we're all equal". He doesn't hold his punches when talking about the downsides of these organizational approaches.
Then the rest of the book does a deep dive on a lot of organizational approaches that are being tried out in different organizations around the world, to talk aspirationally about what he thinks comes next in how humans coordinate.
I think his answers to your two questions would be something like:
> 1. Principal-agent problem. Who do the employees work for? Self interest.
No, this sounds circular but the employees work for each other (and your customers). Healthy teams care about each other as people, and if they can form emotional connections with your users they'll care far more about making them happy than they will about ever care about the annual budget. Its a cultural thing - but it can be supported by process. Set up a lot of conversations between the developers and the clients. A manufacturing company started sitting sales people with the line operators. If the sales person didn't sell enough parts for the team, there physically wasn't work for the operators that they're working with.
> 2. Failure mode. ... This is why I doubt that management can be automated.
Yeah, hard agree on that. So don't try to automate management! The job of management in healthy companies in Laloux's book is to support the actual work being done on the ground, mediate conflict, provide advice when asked and set up conversations between people. The people doing the actual work will always have more concrete information about whats happening in a day-to-day way than management will. So let engineers make and own decisions.
In the book they talk about the Advice Process, where basically anyone in the company can initiate any change - so long as they consult with people the change will affect and take feedback before doing it. (The bigger the change, the more feedback). Management processes need to be things people who aren't management (but are affected by the processes) actually want.
I think we (obviously) need to experiment more with this stuff more in the startup / tech space. Traditional management structures are nowhere near the ideal form of how we make companies.
This is still shockingly common method of how modern corporations are run. I've been in board rooms on numerous occasions where I was the shortest person by several inches and I'm statistically tall. Its not statistically possible for 20+ people to be in the 99.999th percentile taller than me unless its not random. In other words not much has changed in thousands of years.
I'm not sure what the big mystery is. Management exists to provide an abstraction for information cascade (both up and down) and centralized command and control. The amount of management needed decreases for rote work, and increases for more creative or novel work in competitive industries. In a healthy, well-functioning org a manager will have a reasonably deep understanding of everything going underneath them. This ladders up to where a CEO can get in a room with 5-6 execs and discuss the biggest problems for the company with a group that is A) small enough to have an actual dialogue and B) have as much breadth and depth of knowledge as is reasonably possible for such a small group. Like a balanced search tree, this structure means any necessary detail can theoretically be fished out by going through log(n) layers, which enables scaling to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees.
Of course you could also do this without managers by just having certain individual contributors be the subject matter experts of record, but such systems end up being more complicated because you lack the clarity of every person regardless of role or position having one and exactly one boss. Now this doesn't mean this is how work gets done, it just provides a substrate for decision making. In terms of actual work, more complex (read: non-DAG) networks are always needed (see Conway's Law), but when conflicts or inaction arise the manager hierarchy is what allows problems to be resolved decisively.
Now obviously in the real world people are people, and management is often the first place dysfunction shows up. This is partly because of the Peter Principle, partly because it's just easier to hide a lack of competence and play politics when you're in the fog of the middle layers, but that does not invalidate the function of management. The implication of this is that the primary job of senior leadership is bullshit detection.
Management's purpose is to ensure that an organization, remains and functions as an organization. So basically 1, but not exactly...
Basically, when you have a herd of sheep that you need to move, and you need to ensure all the sheep move someplace and none wander off. What do you do? You get a sheep dog, to ensure all the sheep move in unison and towards the same place. That's what a manager is, a sheep dog.
As another example, if person A is rowing the boat backwards, and person B is rowing the boat forwards, and person C decides to stop rowing because he doesn't know what direction to row in, you're not really working as an organization and are not going to get anywhere. Management is there to ensure everyone is rowing the boat together in unison and towards the goals of the organization. If something is preventing someone from rowing, he's suppose to investigate and remedy the situation, as well as find a way to prevent the obstacle from occurring again.
The irony is that they themselves become obstacles in a way.
There is a good way to do "lots of management": it's when a small amount of bureaucracy is distributed over management with plenty of autonomy so that managers get to spend 80 % of their time with technical work and only do a small amount of clerical work.
That creates skilled managers that can step in and substitute for individual contributors. It also teaches them what the day-to-day work actually looks like, what the culture of the company actually is, what the obstacles actually are, and so on. Technically active management is super powerful, and the only way to achieve it is with a large group of managers, because a small group won't have time to regularly dive into technical details.
The problem is that's never what happens. Any time managers have excess time on their hands, they don't find something valuable to do -- instead they invent more bureaucracy and administration to fill their time, and make the organisation less effective.
Why is that?
I genuinely want to know because if I ever get the opportunity to help shape an organisation, I would want technically active management. I think it's critical for success.
My workplace has a lot of managers, many of which I find to be rather redundant; however, my manager is the first one that I have ever had in my career that is particularly "good". He's less technical than some of the people on the team, but what he is very good at is limiting the ability for other departments to interfere with my team's work. He's almost like a border guard and diplomat for our team. Any sort of potential project involving co-operation between departments always goes to him first to figure out whether it fits our team. He also has our team's back in saying, "no, that is not my team's fault" --- in other words, he won't throw us under the bus. He lets us get our work done, and also provides us with clear higher level direction by managing how other departments interact with us. When a big project involving multiple departments develops, he is the one responsible for scheduling and...leading, for lack of a better word. I think some people bristle at the idea of being led, but a good leader is worth their weight in gold. A lot of bad managers are ultimately simply bad leaders.
Now, can every department have what my team has? I don't know. But, I can say that his work as a manager has actively improved team productivity and task completion. It's very refreshing once you have a good manager. You're free to just work while he manages the teams bureaucracy, that is other departments pushing the team in a thousand directions at once.
I'm a bit skeptical of this idea of the manager as an immune system protecting the organisation from itself. I believe this is a symptom of something else that has gone wrong, rather than an ideal to strive for.
The same reason all politicians are corrupt. If you choose to be the one doing good in a world of political backstabbing and make work. While your opponents spend 90% of their time figuring oout how to take your share. Guess what happens to your share.
This doesn't even include the fact that since you are doing real work eventually you will make a mistake. Meanwhile your competitors are waiting for this and doing nothing real so they can point out your failing and how much better they know than you and how you should be replaced with some guy they are good friends with that would be really great to replace you.
the most tangible leech-vichy of the capitalist ranks cost capitalists three trillion a year you say? surely theyve some organ meats that could be salvaged!
Every control/alignment system has overhead. That is exactly why distributes systems are both hard and slow, just look and Spanner/Cockroach and compare them so single node PSQL.
To get rid of managers, you will need to solve comms problem.
The opposite argument is that we should make managers more effective at unlocking their team and org’s potential. And that the number is just about right (when you consider two pizza teams and the managers of managers in larger orgs).
Good managers help organize the most effective thing known to humans: humans.
You mean the VP of Equity Diversity and climate relations and 1000 people under them are costing companies but not contributing to actual productivity and products ?
Of course not having a direct connection to products and productivity doesn’t mean there is no value provided. Things like private campuses, private buses, chefs, ping ping etc. may or may not improve product productivity but they provide value. Sorta akin to “home makers”, it would be easy to infer a lack of economic productivity as having no value.
> “we believe a concerted effort to reverse the rising tide of bureaucracy offers a more immediate and less speculative route to enhanced economic performance”
David sacks was on episode of show “UnHeard”. Hit nail on head. ‘professional elite’ or ‘surplus elites’ he called them.
sacks came at it from politic angle. we know what happening but media and everyone quiet. this manager class say right politically correct thing.
in two big tech company me saw anti pattern where so many managers who give no real output. directors.. product and engineering management.. all involved in increasing headcount fight territory battles.
product manager and managers of product managers who just have meetings. product same thing as it existed 2 year ago..3 year ago.. 5 year ago. no innovation. maybe find way to show more ad.
me immigrant in this country. what me saw is h1b and other visa farm. entire industry of importing from other country. people sit idle.
if stock price $100 a share this organization not contributing even 1$ to that price. revenue is from legacy ad business. managers just bureaucratic up charge and organization so slow and resistant to change they contribution maybe -5$ or lower negative number.
What is the role of an engineering manager exactly? I've been thinking about this question for awhile and I get wildly different answers depending on who I ask. It seems to me that an engineering manager contributes to the intellectual product, attempts to solve communication issues between teams, and fills in gaps for what the team needs. It is amazing to me that there is so much variance for something that should be a well defined role.
The best engineering managers I've seen help remove unhelpful friction for the team. This includes helping the team make decisions quickly, facilitating interactions with other teams, shielding them from unnecessary meetings, etc.
It's because most companies agree an EM and PM are different roles but since most teams are setup up per project with an EM&PM per team they tend to have huge overlap.
Most are "facilitators", working out communication and coordination issues. Very rarely do they contribute to the actual product. Often they simply don't have time, because there are too many meetings.
Earlier in my career, the engineering managers were more hands on, more of a tech lead + people manager hybrid. They would work on the spec, understand the product, and do some coding that was out of the critical path. You still find those types in some companies, but it's become rarer (at least for me.)
Remove friction and annoyance from the team, help with scheduling, ensure you're pointed at useful work rather than what you personally want to do, hire new people, write performance reviews, politely stack rank you.
Especially good lower level managers also hang onto some of their tasks from when they were an IC.
I spent some time as a middle manager, talked way too much with friends in similar situations at other places and I learned the following:
* It is very easy to be both very busy and do nothing useful at all. Just accept and schedule a bunch of meetings.
* Your potential of improving things depends mostly on the C-level suite. Trying to get buy-in from other levels of management is a waste of time.
* Middle managers are quite often recreating other orgs they aspire to without any thought if their prescriptions are suitable for their orgs.
* The C-level are actually behaving more like individual contributors than managers. The CEO is typically working mostly on closing deals and attracting investors.
* Lower level managers are often created from senior or valuable employees because a title change is the only way of rewarding them and using their experience
* Some of the best managers are HR professionals, but they are completely sidelined. HR is working to protect the companies which for good and evil can clash with your goals.
* No one is a prophet in their own village, not matter how loyal you are climbing the ladder, and how much you learn along the way chances are they are still going to hire someone from the outside to be your boss that knows less than you. It's better to switch orgs when making big jumps in your career.
* There are certain pure management skills (everything with budgets) which are quite valuable, and managers are either undertrained
So, if I ever run my own company of over a 100 people this is what I'm going to do:
- make sure executives / senior managers are doing as much decision making as possible, while accepting input from every senior person in the company, manager or not.
- Promote only experts in their fields, preferably from your own ranks as managers.
- Instead of introducing hierarchy, consider instead providing managers with experts in management as deputies. Recruit fresh MBAs or experienced HR professionals. This way they help instead of hindering.
- Make sure every role has ways to grow while remaining individual contributors. Just give them levels, like Software Engineer lvl 12. Make sure they have free capacity to get delegated tasks or for their own initiatives.
> * Lower level managers are often created from senior or valuable employees because a title change is the only way of rewarding them and using their experience
Ah, yes, because there's some made up BS chart in HR that shows how much each job pays. "Oh, we can't pay you more than $X." BS, you can - you just won't for some stupid made up reason.
>>>>* Lower level managers are often created from senior or valuable employees because a title change is the only way of rewarding them and using their experience
This is the part I’ll never understand. In order to give a larger (than managers) salary you will have to change the title.
Why?
>- Instead of introducing hierarchy, consider instead providing managers with experts in management as deputies. Recruit fresh MBAs or experienced HR professionals. This way they help instead of hindering.
Genuinely losing my mind at how good of an idea this is. Imagine the effectiveness boost if even half of some large tech company's managers were instead engineers with a manager deputy. They'd probably be the next letter shoved into FAANG.
I assumed employees that are generally high-skilled. So pretty much all of them don't apply if that isn't the case.
Technical Experts-managers are unnecessary where the work is menial, very physical or low-skilled. Or simply best practices or standards are established and followed uniformly. Or regulations are so strict there is little variation on how things are done.
Or the company is driven mostly by brands or advertising.
I am pretty sure that you can improve the productivity of almost all companies by firing half of middle management and using the money saved to hire skilled people who do the actual work.
The most productive and successful company I worked for have zero middle management (150+ staff). The worst most dysfunctional company I have worked for had more middle managers than software developers (50+ staff).
This might even work, but see how much poison Elon Musk got out of his attempt?
For this guild these careers are their lifeblood, and the process of minting these (I.e. ensuring the pathway for leeching from fortune500 profits exists for eternity) is a sacred, maybe even inherited, secret. Any interruption of this dynamic is sacrilege and they will fight tooth and nail to discourage anyone who tries.
There needs something to be done here, but it won't be easy. Those who will approach this lightly will perish.
Those are pretty small companies. Imo discussions at that scale should be separate than mega corps; though people leverage the same criticism at both.
It seems like bureaucracy is at worst inevitable and at best actually provides a lot of competitive value. For example has there ever been a successful empire without a strong bureaucracy? And aren’t mega corps just modern empires?
I think it works the same whether it is a small company or an empire. The key is the bureaucracy to worker ratio. You need just enough bureaucracy to glue things together. But anything more than that starts being counter productive.
In my examples the productive company had a bureaucracy/staff ratio of close to 0. The dysfunctional company had a bureaucracy/staff ratio of more than 2. Enough said.
I think this dovetails nicely with Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" [0] thesis. From the Wikipedia entry, it looks like 37% of Britons polled thought their jobs were "bullshit", with the HVB article talking about an excess management of around 17%.
I wonder how much overhead is "natural/health" and whether the amount of "bullshit" jobs is related to a "full employment" mentality, maybe even subsidized by the government.
Polling doesn't necessarily find you the truth here. It's like when you poll business owners in California and they say it's a bad environment for business, by which they mean they want lower taxes, not that somewhere else would actually get them more customers.
Steve Bannon, the old Trump goon, I forget his actual position, had talked about the growth of the "administrative state" when referring to government.
I don't agree with his politics over all, but on this front I do and see similar trends in other institutions, the education system being one of the most obvious.
We see the growth of the "administrator class/caste" in education at the cost of rising tuition while seeing no improvement in student/teacher ratios, etc. At the same time teachers who rightly spend their time doing their job, which is teaching, are often in a place where they then have to fight the shit rolling downhill from the expanded administrative caste. They could fight the administrator class, but the administrators do this all day every day as their actual job, it's fun to them. The teacher's actual job is teaching, the time and energy needed to fight these battles mean the administrator class wins.
I think this dynamic plays out at our tech companies with the expansion of various non-product roles like HR that impose more trainings or "re-education"/box-checking. Or ERGs, employee resource groups for every different employee because our current times are ones of sensitivities. Or the new DEI orgs, agree or disagree, they didn't exist a decade or two ago but are now prevalent in all spaces and DEI consultants are one of the most widely growing positions inside Fortune 500.
If I'm not mistaken, the US has one of the, if not the, highest per capita spend per student in the world...but most of it goes into administrative costs and students never see it. It's a big problem. It's unfortunate that many of the people saying this also have questionable politics on other serious topics that drown this point out. Democrats are beholden to the unions in education, so they won't bring it up.
> Democrats are beholden to the unions in education, so they won't bring it up.
I think you could jettison this. It seems like pro forma both-siderism. I don't know any Democratic-leaning people who are unwilling to bring this up. If you're afraid of rocking boats you can -- as has been done in these comments -- differentiate between the noble teachers and the parasitic administrators.
That being said, I know that in my own company we have benefited from adding managers (I am not one myself). Communicating with people, budgeting, scheduling, managing expectations, keeping track of legal obligations, and so forth are non-trivial work which, for the most part, engineers are not skilled at or enthusiastic about. I imagine the same is true for academia. This isn't to say a vast bureaucracy can't acquire inefficiency. I'm sure there is a problem. But it's facile to wave your hand at other people whose jobs are a black box to you and say they are redundant.
I think the problem with the people "saying this" with questionable politics is that they don't have a serious analysis of the problem. They have political enemies they want to disempower and the "deep state" is a useful cover story. They want to destroy academia, not fix it.
Maybe give the power/obligation to the "engineers" (well, here it's about universities, but I know far more about managerial duties of engineering associations than of a university; though much should translate), which can pawn off the non-engineering work to some sort of group-shared secretaries. I.e., the managers aren't the ones owning the power, but the engineers are. The latter just don't want to do the daily tasks that require holding the power, so they hire a delegate to hold the power and take care of day-to-day duties.
And because each "engineer" doesn't have enough non-engineering work to keep their own secretary occupied during the times of day the secretary needs to be available (for answering phones, interacting with the "engineer", etc.), groups of engineers come together and hire a small team of secretaries to keep up the availability even in cases of sick days. Small team as in, like, on the order of 3-7. Given their already-required organization skills, a flat hierarchy among them with escalations directed to an elected board of "engineers" should suffice, giving a natural damper on secretary team size due to scaling limits of such a flat hierarchy (and organizational charta/codebook restrictions that prevent any middle manager/secretary-overseer from holding actual power).
I'd actually be happy to hear about the practicalities of such a structure for an engineering collective/organization (lacking any sort of CEO presiding over the engineers)...
> They have political enemies they want to disempower and the "deep state" is a useful cover story.
Given that the alternative to disempowering those orgs is throwing good money after bad, there's nothing wrong with a bit of benign disruption to the existing power structure. Fixing things is not rocket science; educational systems outside the U.S. don't have these dysfunctions to anywhere near the same extent.
The Democrat platform has a 3,200 word section covering education[0]. It covers dozens of topics, but doesn't appear to contain a single word about administrative bloat or poor use of resources on the part of the public schools system.
It's safe to say that this issue isn't something that Democrats want to talk about, and I think the parent comment is spot-on as to the reason why.
Bureocracy is easy to create and almost impossible to destroy. I think its one of the main reasons start ups beat out established competitors who on paper can bring much more resources to bear.
I dont think its just in our time either. I'm sure Rome had quite a bureocracy in its day.
This is one thing that's always fascinated me in corporate and government: why is bureaucracy easy to create and hard to destroy?
Or to put it another way, bureaucracy increases as a result of systems. E.g. 'We want to do a new thing, let's set up a new team to do it'
But there rarely seems to be continuous, automatic counter-system in place. I.e. a generic, regularly re-run reaping process that exists solely to decrease the number of teams/orgs/rules
You have periodic, CFO-org-led centralization / re-orgs, but those are default: status quo. Someone explicitly has to decide to decommission a thing, and that turns into a political struggle.
Is there a reason more companies don't have something like stack-ranking-by-utility for teams/orgs/rules? Where the default is "It's gone"?
> Is there a reason more companies don't have something like stack-ranking-by-utility for teams/orgs/rules? Where the default is "It's gone"?
Isn't that called an audit? They're rare because you can't force bureaucrats to always be making the argument for their usefulness without impacting their actual work. Impact assessment for policy is also gaining some ground, at least wrt. government. So that when a policy fails to achieve its goals, that failure is a matter of shared knowledge.
That's why, in my experience, it usually comes out of the CFO org. At the end of the day, they have the actual opex/capex numbers.
And I am sympathetic to the other side of the equation: continually asking people to justify their work ends up with a lot of useless-but-visible or sub-optimal work being prioritized (e.g. Google's lack of strategic attention to bugs/maintenance).
Self-destructing, temporary policies and teams seems like a nice balance. And maybe a cultural expectation that most teams will be disbanded and reformed after X years.
It'd also be curious to have an org where manager-back-to-IC was more normalized. IOW, manager is a role everyone is expected to serve a stint in, but then relinquish without salary/title penalty.
>This is one thing that's always fascinated me in corporate and government: why is bureaucracy easy to create and hard to destroy?
Because bureaucracy is people (management, employees) reaching for more power.
Why would they ever reach for less power?
And if some management unit implemented such "stack ranking" and discarded other units, they'd make enemies quickly, and be undermined, as other (not yet discard people and units) would be fearing for their position.
Not to mention that management being about personal power, their "stack ranking" would basically be based on "does this unit/product/team/etc furthers my power"?
I like how to tried to come off as unbiased by agreeing with Bannon on this one issue
but calling him a "goon" and saying you don't agree with his other politics. However you then make this obvious right wing statement.
"of various non-product roles like H.R that impose more trainings or "re-education"/box-checking Or ERGs, employee resource groups for every different employee because our current times are ones of sensitivities."
Who are you to say that certain groups of people don't deserve to have their own resources when they may face similar issues of racism or sexism. Maybe they feel more comfortable talking amongst people like them about sensitive issues. How many more HR people do you think it takes to set these groups up when they are mostly just employees.
You also talk about training impying that it's only for "box checking", which is a obvious right wing red flag. Basically, you assume that no one really cares, everything is for show, simply because you don't care.
You just have no empathy and therefore any resources allocated at companies that wouldn't help you are useless.
Sorry, could you elaborate? Are you saying that it’s impossible for someone right wing to dislike Steve Bannon, or that no one should express right wing opinions on HN, or something else?
I don't like manipulative arguments. This person tried to set themselves up as being unbiased or "above the situation". This is done so that others, who normally tune out certain types of people or have a bias (which to be fair is wrong but natural), will take their arguement more seriously.
It's like when the wise old man in a movie finally speaks on a contentious issue Everyone listens more closely and places a higher initial value on their opinion.
This is entire conversation was about excess administratiors/managers, whether that's the case at all or some companies has almost nothing to do with employee groups, like a group of Black employees. These groups are self managed by employees with the backing of HR.
This person is so right wing that they couldn't help make a point about how overly sensitive we are and that these groups are unneeded due to that. This is Glenn Beck at a chalkboard connecting everything negative (bloated management) to a view of opposing political force. It's so transparent that I blew my head gasket.
Alone that would be annoying but combined with the "I normally hate X and disagree with X but this view has some merit" BS guided my response
You don't say that. If you had said it I wouldn't need to ask for clarification. I'm just trying to understand what you did mean. [EDIT: you subsequently added an explanation, thanks]
While I don't agree with your politics I do understand the desire to raise issues you feel passionate about even if they're only indirectly or tangentially connected to the topic at hand. However, if you had focused exclusively on managerial and administrative overhead without trying to connect it with your political grievances, real or imagined, the discussion would be vastly improved by being less divisive and more constructive.
It is funny when the dog catches its tail, but having worked for Harvard as an individual contributor for quite some time until recently, I think this is more an artifact of how many things Harvard does rather than some vast bureaucratic inefficiency. It's forestry program, pharmaceutical research, real estate development, giant dining organization, handful of public theaters, 72 (seriously) libraries, most being domain specific, police department that has the third largest jurisdiction in the state (on paper but they really only deal with university stuff,) their hospitals, and the zillions of other things they do can only take so much centralization. It's a bloated bureaucracy, for sure, but it doesn't hold a candle to The Fed, and IBM beats them both by a mile.
But then ask why does Harvard need to do all of those things? European universities don't have dining organizations. They don't have police forces. They don't need much real estate development because they don't have this type of mission creep. And that's just out of the things you mentioned. There's a lot more fat to cut.
University police forces are common in the United States, and are an explicit legacy of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights protests, and the Kent State Massacre in particular. The idea is that the kids are less likely to be beaten or killed by police that answer to the university.
The marketing may be that interests align but the reality is that police that answer to the university will jump to answer calls that local police forces would get to when they get to, like petty theft of university property, public drunkenness, etc.
Transit police, university police, capitol police, boutique police forces like that exist for one reason and one reason only: to prioritize things that the police who would otherwise have jurisdiction would laugh at.
Universities are also generally exempt from all the taxes that pay for municipal police, so they provide their own.
It (sometimes) has a dual educational purpose where they run a law enforcement or criminal justice curriculum and the campus police service provides practical experience for students.
We had a great Atlanta PD major do a Q&A on the GT campus after a string of thefts/muggings.
She straight up said something to the effect of "I'm doing the best I can with the resources I have. Your zone also includes Midtown, with bars and commercial. If crime goes up there, owners with more political connections and tax revenue than the university gripe. So that's where most of my resources are."
If you follow that to its logical conclusion the police would never show up in certain areas of the city. Personally I don't want my country to turn into Sao Paulo or Mexico City.
Hell why not a subscription plan for the police? 911 please enter your customer credentials.
To some degree this already happens though it's less of a direct subscription or denial of services and more of a function of the taxes and connections in an area. Police officers often have entirely different response times, presence, escalation/deescalation strategies and enforcement policies for wealthy and poor parts of a city.
Because the people who currently have a lot of influence over current policing would be up in arms when that "certain neighborhood" police never show up in roll their own minimum viable solution that a) is not up to their standards b) they cannot exert political influence over.
Somebody somewhere would be doing these things. Does it matter that that somebody is called “Harvard”? It’s not like it’s all run top-down; it’s just a bunch of affiliated organizations that have contractual relationships. I.e. an economy.
The people who run those theatres et al aren’t directly benefitting from the donations of Harvard alumni; they’re rather benefitting from the (presumably) Harvard College(s) of Performing Arts paying them for use of the space—same business model as any commercial theatre. Those affiliated businesses aren’t “Harvard” (the University) per se, any more than the people working for businesses in a food court in an airport work for the airport.
Yes, but Harvard duplicates existing services. e.g. when Harvard runs a dining org, that service is already provided by local restaurants and grocery stores. The only things Harvard needs to provide are things that you can't already get in Boston. Classrooms, libraries, labs, etc. It's just like engineering. Anything that can easily be offloaded to a third party tool should be.
Do those existing local businesses have the capacity to fulfil the customers that Harvard currently is, if Harvard were to suddenly tomorrow withdraw that service entirely?
Unless Harvard was to sell its facilities for someone else to operate, local businesses never could... Not without serious change in local governance. Not close to enough commercial space. You'd have to demolish a bunch of buildings to make larger facilities to handle the load.
You seem to be missing that harvard attracts exceptional (and well connected) people. Expanding the business to suit their skills is a natural evolution.
>...dining...
Uh, Harvard throws a huge number of fund raising events that have to be catered and no one cares about the name of the catering company if the food is trash. It's in the best interest of Harvard to set their own standards for their events
They have a cafeteria, dining halls, and other eateries. Do you know how long it would take a student to walk off campus to a find a grocery store or restaurant? Sometimes quite a walk depending on your location
But you could say that about anything. If there's one restaurant in town and somebody opens up a second, you could say, "There was already a restaurant and you're just duplicating existing services." Yeah that's true, but so what? Same with Harvard. If they want to build services that compete with other local services, why is that worse than anyone else doing the same?
It is also pretty common for large companies in the US to have some sort of dining services, for what it’s worth. (I’m surprised this isn’t a thing in Europe, off the cuff “cafeteria” doesn’t look like an Americanism to me, but maybe it is).
Dining services for students make sense to me. Students are generally young folks with a lot going on. They might be on their own for the first time. It is helpful to have a place where they can just go grab some food without too much thought. Dining services might be priced into the student’s tuition, so parents can be confident that their kids will get meals, rather than spending their budget on partying, haha.
Plus, actually this is probably a more practical reason and I should have lead with it: dorms usually have limited cooking facilities. And imagine the messes which would be created in the shared kitchen, if everyone was using it. Eating out is nice, but most people don’t do it every day. Dining services handle the unexciting daily meals well — so really, this isn’t a redundant service to local restaurants.
I totally agree with you that providing healthy and affordable meals for the students is a very good idea. So let me tell you how that was and is organized in my alma mater, the Helsinki University.
Both student meals and healthcare are managed by independent student organizations, which have grown quite wealthy during the two hundred years they have existed. The company running the dozens of cafeterias, Unicafe, is entirely owned by the student organization HYY, which also owns several valuable properties in the city center of Helsinki. The healthcare is organized around the Finnish Student Health Service, which is a foundation managed by the students themselves. At least during my time the almost free healthcare and the affordable lunches were a significant benefit for the poor but hard-working students.
Both of these branches are totally independent of the actual university and are basically independent societies founded and run by the students themselves.
Interesting. Actually I think there are shops and cafeterias that are student run at some US universities. It just doesn’t seem as widespread as what you describe. Health insurance seems like a high stakes thing to be student-run! Is it run entirely by current students or do alums help out?
In any case, I’m certainly not going to pretend that US students aren’t coddled a bit. School here has a been a little bit infected with the customer-service mentality… like pretty much everything else. It is what it is I guess.
Economies of scale diminish with size. Merge 1000 small companies? Huge benefit. Merge 10 big companies? Minor benefit, and sometimes the loss in specialization can actually be negative
Most companies contributing to open source do it either because they (1) consume projects directly or (2) want access to the community. For (1) it is no longer considered a waste of money as the corporation directly benefits from such changes. (2) is slightly harder to directly quantify however by opensourcing tools like tensorflow or react companies directly have access to talent pools which otherwise would not exist and they can cut costs on train ing. Its also free marketing for companies. In the end there really is no salary lost.
That's another question That's much more complicated. The gp said they should cut their administrators not "Harvard should reduce services so they can then cut administrators"
A) United States universities offer a broader, more general education than the more compact, specialized education conferred by most European universities. B) Harvard's enrollment is more than 22k, many of whom live in campus dorms. That requires a lot of infrastructure. Plus it's a giant research organization with an endowment of 53 billion dollars. Centralizing makes complete sense in many areas. As any large organization does, they outsource things, like security patrols, when it works out better. C) They don't just do those things for the heck of it. The research alone contributes a huge amount to society, as do it's graduates. Those 72 libraries hold some of the world's most precious documents and objects. D) Saying that European universities simply don't have dining services that run their cafeterias and events shows you don't understand what the term dining services means. Lots of Harvard gatherings get food from local restaurants but sending thousands of residential freshmen into Harvard Square for breakfast every morning would be ludicrously inefficient. E) Tieing up Cambridge PD's officers responding to loud parties, petty theft, etc. would be dumb. Not having a centralized organization to handle or monitor crime that takes place in the many municipal jurisdictions that Harvard has facilities would also be dumb.
Harvard does have a large bureaucracy that could trim some fat, but your sweeping assumptions about what they don't need without even considering why they have them are pretty uninformed.
If the Harvard Business School could lay off people it didn't employ, that would be a good cost-saving strategy they might consider. Another requirement would be that they'd have to conflate administrators with managers. But a good strategy otherwise. Put it in the 'maybe' pile.
It's not "from" HBS. HBR is a publication. While both authors likely have HBS affiliation in their past, I think neither was at HBS at the time of this particular article.
They seem instead to have created some other management consulting thing called "Humanocracy".
I'm not defending any of it, but HBR articles are not necessarily from HBS.
When I worked at efficient tech companies, I had a hard time understanding these articles. If anything, it felt like we had too few managers to handle typical management things and the engineers were often losing time to dealing with things that could have been more efficiently handled by a responsible manager.
Then I took a job at a management-heavy company. They had people with different manager titles for absolutely everything. I ended up on a small group where we somehow ended up with more managers than engineers.
Some of the excess managers used the situation to do very little. They'd join a couple meetings, maybe respond to a couple e-mails, then basically disappear. Others started inventing work to fill the time. It wasn't uncommon for us to be scheduled for 4-5 hours of meetings in a single day because different managers felt like they needed to make themselves visible and point to things on the calendar to show that they were working.
The weirdest part was how everyone sort of acknowledged that the situation wasn't good, but refused to do anything about it. When I tried to push back on some of the meetings, our CTO recommended that our team should join the meetings but continue to code during the meetings. It turned into this weird circus where we were spending most of our days in virtual meetings, trying to do work while managers would pepper us with questions.
When we had layoffs, they laid off mostly engineers. The ratio of managers to engineers went up. More meetings ensued.
When the CEO got angry that engineering wasn't producing enough, management's first reaction was to request more headcount for more managers. They insisted that with more managers they could more effectively manage the engineers. So they hired more managers, who scheduled more meetings...
The lesson I learned was that once a company becomes infected with managerial excess, your situation is only going to get worse. Get out and move to a company that understands how to operate and how to manage their managers.
It's not humorous but been through exactly that. When the CEO sees degrading performance in the engineering team (and he has little technical knowledge or little knowledge of what's going on in the engineering department), his first intuition is to hire either managers or consultants to understand what's going on and improve the situation. Of course, for him, it would be crazy to just go down and ask a couple engineers what's exactly going wrong.
None of the managers is going to admit that the problem is theirs. They fully know that and they know that it being uncovered is the end of their jobs. So they'll keep at it until the whole thing burn down to the ground. The only savior here is a new CEO/CTO.
I think your experience is a bit of an aberration. I’ve much more frequently witnessed purges of the middle management layer. So much so that I thought it was a meme? Office Space “I talk to the engineers so the customers don’t have to”.
I’m curious as to what kind of business this company was in.
> Some of the excess managers used the situation to do very little. They'd join a couple meetings, maybe respond to a couple e-mails, then basically disappear.
I'm currently at a huge company and this rings true for me. I work with a team of maybe 6-7 ICs during a quarter, but when we compile a slide deck and present the work to higherups I find that the middle-managers (who have never joined a single meeting on this project) have added their names to the slide deck too. I have no idea what they do or how they're involved in the work at all; none of the ICs even mention them during the quarter.
Nobody wants to say anything about it, probably because those managers hold power in their position.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadAt one place, a director and the VP she reported to both retired. A temporary director was hired under contract who was mostly hands-off (and remote), but she immediately fired the manager who was her direct report. The group I worked in had reported to the fired manager.
Without managers, productivity soared. We literally got more accomplished in a year without managers than we did in the prior five years combined. All of our deferred maintenance issues, some dating back over a decade, were addressed in the first 6 months of being freed of the managers.
Sadly, it didn't last. They re-hired the full hierarchy of positions. And, the pace of work ground to a halt. Quality of work also suffered due to the artificial deadlines imposed by the managers-- combined with their shifting priorities based on which other manager(s) it was most politically expedient for them to please on any given day.
At another, the new VP of marketing said in a meeting, about 9 months into his tenure, "What?! We're a software company?" Imagine all the value he must have added for those prior nine months.
The other half think it's bad because they can't steal everything that's not nailed down.
It's like trying to censor speech. You get rid of "bad" speech but you also get no interesting speech. Is it really worth it?
But it's very nature is anti productive. By this I mean: documenting, discussing, approving, and creating boundaries, all work to slow down an organization, even though it's necessary to ensure the wellbeing of the organization. As a specific example, organizations often have separation of duties for certain things (like activities involving payment to prevent embezzlement from happening), but doing so naturally slows down the handling of these activities. If one person has to do his part, then write documentation to instruct what they're trying to do and what they need someone else to do, send those instructions to someone else, wait for their approval, and then send it to someone else to process it... all of this is slower than if the person who wrote the instructions, skipped writing the instructions, and approved and processed it themselves. But obviously that can result in some bad situations, and hence why some bureaucracy is inevitably necessary.
This will keep happening to even the most incompetent person cannot do anymore harm. Meanwhile top performers leave. AFAIK the best way out of this has been Netflix's "freedom and responsibility". You expense crazy meals, you get a warning. You do it again, you are fired.
Security for example. Every new things needs security review. How does this fit into the Netflix “freedom and responsibility” concept?
Probably, but not every bad thing happening requires a response. Sometimes mistakes or bad things happen, and you just say, "use better sense next time", and then you move on.
The pernicious part happens when those ancillary functions become conflated with the business itself, at which point it is far too tempting to further expand the beurocracy to service those functions (i.e. auditors). My sense is that the most despised rules in most organizations are such second-order attempts to service the beurocracy.
An common example might be the procurement department, whose purpose was originally to facilitate and track purchases for the business. Maybe at first they managed and distributed credit cards to employees. However, this is still inconvenient when employees make innevitable mistakes. Instead of dealing with this inconvenience, credit cards are eventually taken away from employees and an online procurement portal is set up and/or people are expected to file reimbursement paperwork after trips. Now the beurocracy has effectively shifted its own burdens onto individual employees while making the process slower, more complex, and more expensive. Despite all of this procurement will now be considered a core pillar of the business because executives look at all that sunk cost and fallaciously conclude that the procurement beurocrats are indespensible.
Meanwhile, there isn't really a similar mechanism at play to protect people doing the actual work.
Even after whatever i did showed a ton of value for little cost of any kind, they will eventually find a way to manage it into an inefficient thing or replace it by something much less blame inducing.
As a worker, my focus is on generating value. Either I produce revenue or reduce risk and liability. For managers, this is a distant secondary concern, they are worried of what their boss might think and how they will appear in the management team and what the risk to them (not the company) would be if their reports fail or decide to leave.
So, I could do the best job ever but that might make my manager look like he can't control me. I know what those of you that work in startups might think, the manager should feel like they succeeded in extracting value out of me instead right? That's startup culture, a startup wants to extract all the value out of you to maxize their success. Every other large org has politics and incentives such that even CEOs can't shake things up without gathering support, they can't create a culture that maximizes profits and productivity because that means less people might be needed or would have to do more or the worst case, what irks me the most: "If we do all that now, we will look bad if we don't keep doing this much in the future", i.e.: if you are a rockstar now, that only hurts you when you inevitably become less than a rockstar. So the snowballing inefficiency in my opinion is a result of trying to keep the balance between doing as little as you can vs making some sort of a profit and burning through budget money so you look important and valuable (the enemy of open source!).
It really is frustrating if you get bored easy. I was surprised at the whole "quiet quitting" thing because I have been seeing people do that for a long time, people getting mad at me because now they think they look bad because I did anything more than the minimum.
But really, just observing not complaining. I am now understanding these reasons. But it is difficult to fall in line and comply.
Creative work, inventing things - it’s the most value able thing. Not the “management.” If you are in a non creative environment and you find you have all the ideas, your focus should be either on leaving to build your own thing or to “take over” by effectively being the one who writes all the plans and who everyone comes to for ideas.
Creative people who create value are rarely rewarded in most medium or large sized organizations.
I realized after seeing how larger organizations work: There is no winning.
It is like the red queen problem. The more you run, the faster you are expected to run. You will very rarely if ever be able to convert this into upward motion. Your manager is very non incentivized for you to get ahead.
I personally feel like startups are simply the way to go. There is a much much larger market, many more options, granted it pays less, but you will get seen and credit for your work.
And startup skillsets are generalist skills that are often much more transferable. And you are valued more in general as more depends on you.
Reading what you said here: You are maladapting to a corrupt environment.x
I know exactly what you are saying: I spent my career having my ideas snatched, ignored, implemented with great results and no recognition or reward or worse.
I think you should just go to smaller firms in general.
There are probably very few people on HN qualified to help you with your situation. Even for those who are, a public forum is not an effective place to do it. No, a therapist won't magically fix anything. But therapists and psychiatrist are the "debugging experts". They have training and experience to help with problems like yours.
In effect, there is a magnifying glass which is making past events loom larger and larger. A therapist can help you get grounded, reversing the glass so to speak. A psychiatrist can help if there is some physical issue, such as OCD, that is feeding in to it.
I'm not qualified to help, but please be assured that many, many of us have experienced similiar situations. That doesn't mean "I know what you're feeling." We don't. You are you, your situations is unique to you (as with all people), and even if we knew exactly what you were experiencing that doesn't get rid of the feelings. But we can empathize and sympathize. You are not alone.
I would like to commend you on trying to handle things "the right way". That speaks well to you character. Please don't give up on it. Get the expert help.
Honestly that description of a manager’s motivation (how they are seen by others who control their fate) is one that many engineers also adopt. In my experience, managers are actually focused on what you described for a worker (ensure the team generates value via revenue or reduced risk), while most engineers are typically focused on the quality of their craft.
I am not one but I believe staff and principal SWEs start thinking more like this for comparison. (I am not a developer).
Silently implied: "Spend more hours working. Alter existing estimates enough to fit it in."
You can ask them if they're asking for overtime/crunch and they'll say, "No, work/life balance is important to us at BigCorp. It's just that this is as important as our existing planned work and it would make our team/department look amazing if we can get this done too.". Yada, yada, yada. You can keep pushing back but how many times can you do that before you're no longer considered a team player?
-Oscar Wilde
Management exists to guide the priorities of those below them, so when management is gone, people feel liberated.
But the point of managers was to keep them on the tasks deemed most important to the long-term wellbeing of the company, even if those tasks seem boring and unimportant.
In the past 6 years of my working career, a manager has meaningfully intervened in my work exactly once, and the outcome was weeks of time wasted. Manager-originated assignments have tended to be of inferior quality and impact to the ones I generate myself. I have not done a manager-assigned task for the company for 3 years, and I have not done a worthwhile management-assigned task for 6 years.
My personal example is probably extreme, but what I bet is not extreme is the lack of accountability. There was never a time where my choices were recognized as superior to the managerial choices, no matter how many times this was proven true. Instead, managers seemingly just lost interest in assigning me work and let me figure it out myself, which frees me to be one of the objectively most productive people in the organization.
6 weeks of wasted work is much better than 12 weeks of wasted work.
And how exactly did you know what work to do in the first place?
If he had wasted 6 weeks less than would have otherwise been wasted, I would have given him credit for saving 6 weeks rather than blame for wasting 6 weeks, which is what actually happened. According to everyone involved, including reportedly the manager himself, though he wouldn't say it to my face.
> And how exactly did you know what work to do in the first place?
I'm a data scientist who helps people across the company with analytics. They make measurably better business decisions than they would have without me. Relationships, continuous service on existing products, and word of mouth generate more work.
Basically I run my own analytics consultancy inside the company.
A lot of managers are paper pushers instead of leaders. Their usefulness varies depending on circumstances.
It is actually my experience that the organizations which are able to organically evolve like this are the most effective ones.
My manager tends to have a lot more context on my wider team and things in the pipeline than I do. You can only self-manage in the context you know.
Based on my experience; many knowledge workers think they are self-managing because they are able to set objectives for themselves and reach those. But the lack on context means that those objectives are only loosely aligned with the direction of the underlying organisation as a whole.
Often times, this is because the general direction of the organisation itself is hard to define and/or poorly understood. When that's the case, it can be tempting to look at very "dry" numbers to measure ones contribution (My piece of code generates XYZ dollar-amount, it's the highest of the company, so I must be one of the objectively most productive people in the organization).
This is one way to contribute, but in those situation the most critical (and thus most productive/valuable) undertaking is to clarify the direction. This can be extremely hard to do, requires immense amount of work and often times the "right choice" is virtually impossible to define. Thus, the output of the people working on that absolutely essential task is blurry, at best.
When it's done correctly tho, it yields impressive results. A clear direction is set, people somehow know and understand it and you can quite literally let them figure out their work for themselves and get that often surpass what you could have hoped to get if you were involved. And like many things, doing it harder than it looks. And when it's done very well, it seems easy and effortless.
I feel like this is a failure of the organization, rather than of those managed.
I’m perfectly capable of prioritizing things correctly if given proper context, but chances are very real that I’ll still pay more attention to what is important 5 years down the line, rather than what will make manager X look good this month.
Very much agreed. Indeed, this is the most important job of the management. Many comments speak of engineering as something that would go off track if left to their own ways. But, the reason for that is lack of context and wrong incentives, in the first place. If engineers don't know why they are not being allowed to work on technical debt, it's a management failure.
Probably, but how much effort does that take? Why are you duplicating that effort along with all the other ICs?
You’re at Amazon, in 2001 and you know that in 5 years there will be a thing called AWS and that’s going to become the most important thing?
Much of this is attributed to the email Jeff Bezos sent telling people to productionize internal APIs.
My guess is: yes. People would be building what would have become AWS early on by solving the root problem for any given issue, establishing a decent API for it, and then consuming that API in some business logic.
Bezos' big contribution was telling people to do what they would have usually done.
A large part of a managers job is to have that context. Making everyone aware of wider context in a large org is untenable. ICs need to be able to focus on their immediate context so they can get shit done.
There's a reason staff+ eng aren't writing code all the time. They need to focus their time and energy on higher level tasks that enable other ICs to write code.
Personally I would love to have more context on everything, but I've got a glimpse of how much stuff my manager and PM are involved with and I definitely can't keep up with everything and also investigate issues, write code, etc.
I know it feels like you can be self-managing, but you can't (outside of a tiny startup). For a long time I felt that way. After all, I know the product code inside out better than anyone. I can see what needs to be done both short and long term. I can lay out the road to get there and execute on it very well. What else is needed?
What's needed is alignment with all the other parts of the company. Marketing, sales, infosec, project management, executive wishes, etc. Who is doing that? Oh, I can do it. And I can. But by the time I'm done, I'm left with like 30 minutes a week to write code. So I can't actually do both full-time.
A challenge I've seen in management-heavy organizations is that the many layers of management largely function to make good management impossible. The many layers of command between ICs and the source of many decisions means that the people responsible for relaying information up the chain of command are incentivized to put their own spin on information as they relay it, in part in order to help secure their own positions within the hierarchy. The other side of that coin is that the many layers of communication between senior decisionmakers and what's actually happening on the ground mean that the information they get is often of insufficient fidelity to support accurate decisionmaking.
The manager isn't a genius and the employees aren't morons. The business objectives could be explained to those employees and they could coordinate with each other to fulfill them without necessitating a conductor. Deep hierarchies are archaic holdovers from military organizational thinking.
If you can’t quantify the boring necessary tasks with dollars and deliverables then don’t be surprised when you get “oh yeah whatever.”
I’ve had to fight so damn hard with my own teammates who rail on and on about tech debt but won’t do an ounce of lift to turn the kvetching into an actual business proposal. For some reason devs have such a hard time conceptualizing that they are also one of the stakeholders to the business.
Here’s one that I made happen.
“Setting up new 3rd party integrations takes $x hours of work (here’s the cards) costing roughly this much in engineer time. Based on our sales trajectory we expect to do this many next year costing this much. The team believes that if we develop a framework for these integrations we can cut the time spent for each one to this. Our metric for success will be measured by having a dev who didn’t work on the framework convert an existing integration in the test environment.”
I’ve never gotten a green light so fast from our product management.
I still think you need to sometimes look at software as requiring some base level of regular maintenance funding, like a fleet of vehicles gets regular cyclic maintenance in any transport company.
And while I do agree that's important to learn how to frame things in terms of the business benefit there are going to be things that aren't as simple to translate into a straightforward benefit and KPIs. If you're working on something that just increases developer happiness to help with things like general productivity and retention measuring the benefit for any one thing isn't always going to be feasible.
I had a SVP keep pushing for an innovative approach to X. I told my boss it must be in her development plan.
My bosses laughed, but it’s true, even VPs have development plans and when the CEO tells them to do something “innovative”, well, they make sure they do it, feasibility or need be damned.
Then when I got more senior and closer to the decision making, I realize just how hard it is to keep large organizations on track. I've worked at companies that do it poorly and it's a mess - everyone is busy, but the company is just spinning it's wheels. Everyone with an oar is paddling in a different direction.
I've worked under leaders who are really good at providing direction. It's a very valuable skill when done right.
My first taste of this was leading a small project of myself and 2 other devs, and wondering how the hell you're supposed to get other people to do what you want.
Doing a good job of leading a large number of people seems extremely difficult, and I'm glad I don't have to deal with that yet.
Your explanation of companies doing this poorly sounds exactly like the example I gave in a comment I just wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34295803.
Launch goals? There were 3 short ones and not fluff like “drive sales”. Everyone on the team knew what the goals are and why. What should you be working on? Just look at the 3 launch goals. And leadership constantly reinforced them and empowered people to stop doing things that didn’t work towards them.
And I’ve worked in smaller teams where everyone had their own idea of what needed to be done. Leadership would keep changing goals (or they were so vague that anything fit them) or making exceptions. None of the pieces fit together and it was a total disaster. People got frustrated when they did great work but other critical parts weren’t done because something shiny or “cool” distracted other teams.
Effective leadership makes a huge difference.
Startups were a breath of fresh air, but as we continue falling towards the monopolization regime, the nepotism will permeate anything of value. Beyond these networks only soul-crushing work will remain, basically production of datasets for our replacements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingman%27s_formula
Since c_a, c_s and tau are out of your control, focus on the left part (rho / (1-rho)):
25% vs 90% utilization: .25/.75 vs .9/.1 = 27x increase in lead time.
That's kind of the point of bureaucracy, isn't it? To slow the rate of change in a system?
The trick is adding bureaucracy (management layers) once something is not only working now but working in a way you'd like it to X-many years in the future. Then you freeze-ray your process with bureaucracy.
Side note: that's also why a large, bureaucratic government is supposed to be good - it means it will be stable and only accept small, slow change.
While funny, it's extra funny because it's true. Slow gradual change is much safer than massive revolutions -- regardless of whether your talking product development or politics.
Big change in complex systems are best done gradually.
Ugh, artificial deadlines are the worst. They hurt morale, productivity, and quality.
But sometimes/often required to actually get things done and shipped.
On the flipside, waiting around for an engineer to overoptimize something that matters only in their head, or doing something they believe is necessary when it totally isn't...not stellar for overall team performance either.
(I am speaking in general, not referring to the parent comments...)
Or then they will rob you blind. Your mileage may vary and is very much dependent on other things like the general work culture.
Anyway, failing to treat people like they would deserve to be treated is the most basic managerial failure. Any manager worth their salt should have an idea how their underlings need to be treated.
Seems like quite a wide variation -- so your proposed approach results in either the desired outcome or the worst case possible outcome? There's no middle ground?
> Anyway, failing to treat people like they would deserve to be treated is the most basic managerial failure. Any manager worth their salt should have an idea how their underlings need to be treated.
Have you managed a team before? I ask because the most basic managerial failure isn't "failing to treat people like they would deserve to be treated" but rather operating a team who delivers more value to the company than they cost, and ideally at or exceeding the level that leadership expects. That's it. That often requires the following:
1) Hiring high potential, high performance employees 2) Managing out low performance employees 3) Unlocking extra performance from employees where possible
Of these three activities, it's only the third one that approaches what you've mentioned. Why haven't you mentioned the other two?
Although, an engineer pre-accustomed to in the weeds work who has no management guiding what to work on can be the worse because they can create work for the other engineers that can have zero motivating context, other than they think it’s what needs to be done. And they will report to management all these technical details that somehow appear to bolster the need but don’t actually. I am no fan of management, but working with these types of engineers can be infuriating because you end up getting sucked into their random deep dive that is messy and full of edge cases that ultimately matters zilch. I will pretty actively communicate to management that, look, if you don’t step in we’ll be following this engineer to the ends of the earth.
An example I can think of is one engineer being obsessed with making a once a year report being as optimized and performant as possible, while also being obsessed with “cleaning up” the data and fixing so-called discrepancies at the report level, making little hot fix patches everywhere, rather than working with the teams that were generating the supposedly bad data in the first place. I did everything I could to avoid working on that because it was nothing but being mired in details and things that literally no one but them cared about. These types of engineers can be black holes of productivity.
That’s after a very-long (nearly three decade) career as an IC in “big tech”.
I think my take on this is not surprisingly different than yours.
As a first-level manager my job is all about execution and getting things done. Being in 20+ hours of meetings a week gives me a lot more perspective on the big picture than the ICs on my team.
They often think certain work is important because they have a very myopic view of what we do. I am always looking for the ICs to drive our work, and expect the more senior people to come to the table with ideas. Sometimes those ideas are great, and they have a low-level perspective that I am missing because my nose isn’t in the code as much as it once was (it still is, and I still commit code, but it’s opportunistic and not that frequent). But often they get stuck on fixing whatever the most recent thing that bothered them about our code rather than on what actually impacts customers in the long or short term.
There is a lot of management above first-level that doesn’t seem to add a lot of value, but I’m not sure how much of that is inherent versus the specifics of who is in those roles. I expect my manager to be focused on strategy, long-term direction, team composition, building relationships with other orgs, etc. Up a level from that, again an even broader perspective. Depending on who is filling those roles I may or may not see those behaviors.
It’s very common and convenient to focus on personal productivity as an IC, but if 25% or 50% or 90% of that effort is going towards things that ultimately don’t have impact for customers, it’s not very productive after all.
How do you balance the additional work needed to provide the necessary transparency to this decision-maker?
Providing this additional reporting often becomes an unreasonably (I think) large part of the job, creates friction, and unexpected changes of direction interrupt flow.
As a manager with experience and sensibility for both the importance of doing the right thing and productivity, satisfaction and flow - what are some ways you lower the cost of managing?
Because information is freely accessible, there is less need for dedicated "reporting" processes every time a manager is added into the system.
> They often think certain work is important because they have a very myopic view of what we do. I am always looking for the ICs to drive our work, and expect the more senior people to come to the table with ideas. Sometimes those ideas are great, and they have a low-level perspective that I am missing because my nose isn’t in the code as much as it once was (it still is, and I still commit code, but it’s opportunistic and not that frequent). But often they get stuck on fixing whatever the most recent thing that bothered them about our code rather than on what actually impacts customers in the long or short term.
I would love to hear your perspective (or pointers to other resources that might explain this better) on how one can effectively communicate this kinda of context with ICs.
I've worked with managers who have been from "fully transparent about org dynamics" to "Ill shield you from shit (i.e. politics)". Personally, I prefer the former approach as an IC since I respect honesty and the truth, so e.g. if its a political decision I can simply stop trying to push for another direction. However, I understand that this kind of radical transparency might come at a cost and might only work with certain kinds of ICs.
No I will not.
Day to day shielding from nonsense wasn't his best feature but it was a contributing factor in having such a productive relationship.
I've never once had a manager say anything along the lines of "I just think we're building a bad experience if we release this early." I have heard them say all sorts of politics like "If we get this out now, then that'll prove massive impact that will free us up politically down the line"
Or for example I worked at a known location-sharing startup, and managers gave 0% thought to concerns like "hey is battery life impact worth measuring?" and kept pushing random integrations (like with Italian telecom company) hoping to get some huge amount of customers (which never payed off in my experience).
When I picture managers and directors I think of the idiots at Yahoo managing to fail to understand I need more than 15megs of storage or a spam filter (can't imagine what those managers were wasting their time ona), while a company of mostly engineers with scarcely any management builds gmail and eats their whole market.
Then perhaps you had less-than-great managers, and I could think of a variety of reasons for that.
Maybe it was as simple as you claim: no consideration was made to introducing an undercooked user experience. But if a software development manager is green lighting that, likely causing more work for customer service and perhaps sales, I would hope there’s more to the story than that.
Maybe this manager didn’t communicate why releasing a bad experience by a specific date was, perhaps, mandatory to fulfill a contractual obligation. Or maybe you were not able to sort that out from the limited amount of information they gave you.
Maybe they didn’t see the bad UX as truly as bad as you, and perhaps your team, thought it was. Maybe where you thought the feature’s UX passed the 80/20 rule was different than many customers.
I’ve had (product and project, not as often people) managers who have pushed to hold on delivering a half-baked implementation. And I’ve been a manager who has done that. Those better managers exist
Did you ever get feedback or do something to reevaluate why the bad experience was shipped?
The experiences you describe do sound like clueless folks making calls, but know that there are folks in management positions not just wildly flailing about.
There's a couple of things going on here:
It doesn't take long industry to realise that the few people are actually interested in helping orgs make money. This is shown by developers focusing on irrelevant shit all day long, and it's shown by the lack of incentives and rewards that drive the correct behaviour, so all you get is a whole bunch of personal ambition.Of course, some people do, but when faced with a company that allows people to focus on short sighted personal ambition, they'll either fall in-line or move along.
And/or that the personal work experience they themselves have had, would be representative for people in general.
(Not saying that the posters above necessarily did now)
> couple of things going on here ... few people are actually interested in helping orgs make mone ...
Yes, nicely written :-)
Maybe in many cases they are "right" not to care, if the company doesn't contribute meaningfully to society anyway
Meanwhile, I have no idea if battery life impact is worth measuring in your use-case. My assumption would be "no" because I would imagine the battery life impact would vary too widely to yield useful data and I don't see what I could do with that information anyway other than recommend some people not use the app. But I'm not really thinking deeply about it now, so I'd love to be enlightened. Meanwhile, trying to get more customers is a good thing, even if it fails.
It's not exactly common for an organization to actively attempt to mitigate the negative aspects of middle management so it's almost an apples to oranges comparison. But since we're on the topic of Google, maybe making management reduction one of an organization's goals is the correct strategy to reduce the bloat and increase the productivity of ICs.
IMHO this is really the point. Somebody has to hire devs, run the evaluation/promotion stuff, facilitate communication to/from upper management, and so on.
I've just never been to a place that couldn't do that with 1/2 to 1/3 of the EMs they have. For whatever reason the standard is one EM per team. A better ratio is on EM per 2-4 teams.
And that illustrates what releasing half-baked stuff and not caring much about tech debt is all about - visibility. This seems to be true across industries. Not releasing something, even if it's not ready gives impression of not doing enough, not delivering, always being late, etc. Releasing stuff shows you (the manager) are the person who delivers. If it's crap, you'll get even more resources to throw at fixing stuff that's already delivered. And you're the hero again (even if it's "techies" who did 80-hour weeks to make it happen).
This doesn't even break down too much in physical product world. "Deliver" could mean sales, first to the market, we'll add copy&paste in 3.0, and so on...
Presumably, in your case, you're talking about an engineering manager. But you haven't mentioned if there's an engineering manager and no accompanying trained product manager. Engineering managers aren't formally trained in doing the hard work of talking to the customers to figure out what the market actually wants, so if leadership at your organization did not build it out to include this role, you would end up being in a tough spot.
Based on you saying that your manager made the decision to build a random integration which had questionable value to the org it sounds like this was the case. Depending on the size of the team, an engineering manager may even be dead weight and engineers should report to a technical founder or GM. But regardless, you actually are making the case that more rather than less product ownership and management is necessary to ensure that a product isn't dead on arrival -- after all, the symptoms you mention are of poor prioritization and product discovery/strategy (symptoms of poor/nonexistant active product management) rather than of poor engineering management (endless tech debt, production outages, awful on-call support, inability for the team to deliver features, unrealistic delivery roadmaps causing endless late nights with poor quality and buggy software delivery, attrition and difficulty recruiting).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Internal_deve...
Maybe, time to trim the fat from the top: get rid of these empires by downsizing. Also, companies at very high level should look at the bad effects of empire building, which happens in every large organization. Now one can ask "who gonna bell the cat"? If executive vice presidents start empire building, who gonna stop that? After all, CEO should give free reigns to his underling EVPs. Maybe, the majority stock holders should bell that cat; however, they have delegated that to the board of directors, who are different set of cats.
The mice have a solution for the murderous cat: simply put a bell on the cat’s collar and then they will know when it’s coming.
But… who’s going to “bell the cat”? i.e. who is going to perform this unpleasant and possibly fatal job?
No, my comment doesn't boil down to that. It boils down to many (not all) ICs, especially ones without a lot of experience, are more interested in focusing on problems that interest them than actual issues that customers want solved. So they go off and start working on interesting problems rather than important ones.
LOL, my current team does 2 hours of meetings per week (at most!) and we are incredibly productive. I hope we never work together!
I have 20+ hours because I work cross-functionally across a huge company that is both designing hardware and writing software for it. The complexity of what we build and ship is many times that of anything I've worked on during most of my career. As a result, there are a large number of moving parts and a lot of coordination that needs to happen across teams.
I'm sure that 90% of the current team would quit if we suddenly had to attend 10X more meetings per week :P.
One company had a homegrown debug protocol and tool to interface with it. I needed to add some custom info screens for development, but it was very hard to add because the code was $h!t. So I started fixing it just to be able to add my new data. Not only was I told that Work should be "managed" and prioritized, it was later discarded even though I had done it.
When programmers do things to "make the code better", it may not have an impact on today's customer demands, but it is meant to make the programmers more efficient in the future. This is stuff that will - by definition - Never be a priority in management's eyes.
I'm not sure why you think that is "by definition" not a priority. Of course it is if it's impacting being able to do new work that adds value.
The question is, is that a priority at the moment it's noticed, or something that should be added to a backlog to be addressed later?
If it's a small amount of code clean-up, it's usually easy to squeeze into current work without disruption. We always try to refactor as we go along. If it's "This 3000 lines needs to be redesigned and rewritten", it really amounts to feature work and should be added to a backlog and prioritized along with all the other work.
The phenomenon I'm talking about is ICs seeing something for the first time, and then deciding that must be the priority because it's so bad, and dropping everything else to fix that thing even if it's weeks worth of work. They see what's in front of them as the thing that's most important.
Sometimes that new person is wrong, buy often there is truth in their assessment. If they're right that they've walked onto a bunch of garbage then their desire to fix it immediately is IMHO the correct thing to do with the exception of making critical (meaning contractual) deadlines for a customer.
The time to fix a disaster is when someone has that intrinsic motivation to do it.
And that the right people are there (and stay there), that the right tools are there (which does increase efficiency), that no work gets left behind, etcetera, etcetera.
I think the root cause of this tendency is the law of the least resistance. Creating new things is hard, especially if they go against the conventional wisdom. Supervising and managing things is easy, especially if the people being supervised are professional enough not to need much supervision. Then the managers job is basically just to stay out of the way, which is quite easy.
Of course even managers get eventually bored if they feel they have no impact. That's when the reorganizations start. That's also when the best time to actually create something new ends.
We (I'm a middle manager myself) Aren't stupid, so we will.
More headcount and influence means more (at least potential) business impact, and often promotions. If the organization encourages us to fight with other managers to get more of that, that's what we'll do instead of running our organizations better.
Right... So how many business goals got accomplished?
The techie in me hundred percent empathizes with you. I want a Clean system based on best practices and modern technology stack.
It took me a long time to understand that my technical OCD is irrelevant from business goals perspective. I don't know your full story but as presented, there's a possibility that while you enjoyed six months without management, business suffered for it. Or not - don't know the details. But it's important to understand that my techie perspective of what's important to accomplish, and business perspective, may differ. Management's job (amongst others) is to enact company strategy and prioritize business goals.
To wit, a business may be more successful with certain percentage of outstanding maintenance issues (his ibportant was that decade old issue really?? :) while having important new features built.
* good and self-respecting developers will not work on bad quality code. Business will be left with bad/mediocre devs who will implement bussiness needs slowly and with bad quality
* good code base and good dev practises make development much faster and with fewer errors, with easier new developer onboarding etc.
How many of IT projects have had a rewrite a costly rewrite because it became unmanageable?
80% managers think only about business needs- even those who previously were developers themselves because it is convenient and they do not have sell that maintenance is also needed
In my experience, both of others, and certainly of my own proclivities, if an IC is left to their own devices, the work they do will deviate further and further from business goals. Yes, that includes long term business goals like “not needing to do a big bang rewrite because everything goes to shit”.
These threads tend to give the impression that maintenance is a completely unique need that you need to be a Big Brain Developer to understand. Truth be told this is the case in loads of other fields. “Long term thinking”, “short term thinking”, and prioritising appropriately, are well and truly within the remit for people and these positions, and improper execution of the above is one id the things that separates good and bad managers/executives.
Barring a good pairing of a development team that always has the wider business context in mind, and a good management / executive team that understands the nuances of development, this back and forth over maintenance and housekeeping is always going to happen to an extent. And to be honest you don’t want a development team that has the wider business context in mind to the extent of whoever is “above” them. Past a point, it’s a distraction.
So, the revenue that year increased dramatically? How many new clients your company acquired?
Not all work in an enterprise yields revenue. Security or compliance or HR are great examples of that. Also, very often work that you do doesn't bring immediate benefits. They are usually deferred by months or sometimes even years.
> Meanwhile you can fire all of the management and the company will still work just fine, if not better.
I wish you could try it and survive to tell the world that story.
I can’t think of many situations where being successful means you get to degrade the quality of what you are doing.
The problem is peoples egos and signaling.
I once worked at a company and did this huge set of projects on a shoe string using creativity and hard work.
A manager was hired in another parallel group to mine and they got to immediately hire six people.
It made me so annoyed because it felt like I had demonstrated results and not gotten resourced.
It sets off these ego driven hiring wars.
Once one manager starts staffing up, you immediately felt threatened and under siege and at war.
If your competitor peers (they are never your friend) out hire you, then soon their people are coming into your area trying to take over work under you.
The entire thing is super corrupt. Like I personally don’t like over hiring but if you have never felt what it is like to be put in that position - it is quite threatening.
It also signals if you don’t hire the way other teams are hiring they you are a failure as a manager or as a team.
After this experience I realized how compromised you are being middle management: you lose skill and value and you become at the mercy of impossible to control politics coming from all directions.
And then what happens next? Well, many times the hiring manager who built their little empire leaves and dumps all the people they hired loose. They all end up in a sort of limbo. Original manager had an idea of what to do with them, now someone else ends up having to baby sit them, often without any vision for what to do.
This process of hiring and leaving just degrades the talent and dead weight: it’s such a sort of baked in disease and hard to get rid of.
I personally won’t be a middle manager ever again. At least not one that doesn’t report direct to a ceo.
In business:
1. success => more budget
2. failure => budget gets cut
In government:
1. success => budget gets cut
2. failure => more budget
This is more common in government due to politics: if agencies aren’t allowed to hire competent technical staff, the contractors will be poorly supervised but when it fails the same people who cut staffing will use it to argue even more things need to be contracted out. Again, the problem isn’t the sector but the lack of an effective feedback loop.
Of course. The feedback loop for government is different from that for business. Failure in business means going out of business. This powerfully incentivizes business to stop rewarding failure. Like when Alexa lost $billions and Amazon cut off its funding.
No such feedback exists for government operations.
I didn't say otherwise. I said they were different loops.
But government departments and agencies are never axed, no matter how useless they are.
1. fail to get kids to meet grade academic standards => teachers get a raise and more budget
2. gifted programs succeed => gifted programs get canceled
School performance is heavily politicized so many people have an incentive, sometimes financial, to say public schools are failing but what actually happens is what close to a century of research has shown: student performance tracks their household socioeconomic status, but we tend to approach the problem backwards for ideological reasons and see it as “improve school performance to fight poverty” when every bit of data says it should be “deal with poverty to improve school performance”.
Is it the case that the amount of money spent on infrastructure is increasing unnecessarily or because previous generations voted against maintenance until things failed completely?
Is spending going up due to teacher salaries or because the solution to perceived problems is adding more layers of much higher-compensated management who will reliably divert staff time away from education?
Again, I’m not saying that everything is perfect with no room for improvement but rather that there’s both deliberate misrepresentation (e.g. the charter school industry literally banks on this belief) and significant confusion caused by trying to find a cheap fix for complex social problems.
That doesn't work in business. You fail, you go out of business. Nobody cares why you fail, nobody listens to excuses.
I can't imagine many teachers feeling this way, seriously. Not everything requires life-or-death financial pressure to encourage excellence.
Even the most well-intentioned teachers behave according to their incentives.
> Not everything requires life-or-death financial pressure to encourage excellence.
I didn't say everything. After all, I work on D for free. But you simply cannot run an organization with tens of thousands of people in it and expect excellence when there is zero incentive for excellence. It just ain't gonna happen.
Teacher pay is 100% based on length of service and which college degree. Nothing else. Nothing. It matters naught whether a good job is done or not. Even if one wins "Teacher of the Year", it is worth exactly $0.
Yet they drive the entire economy. They work better than anything else. Other systems have been tried repeatedly that rely on:
1. the lash
2. altruism and ideology
3. threats of going to hell
are pretty lousy motivators.
Giving people autonomy, mastery, and purpose can help, but that simply does not scale.
She's a headmistress in the UK that specifically tailors her school's offerings to lower-socio kids who don't have educated/literate parents at home, and her GCSE results beat out the majority of middle-class schools.
There are some similar examples in Australia too. I know the previous principal of Frankston Primary School managed to get above average AIMS results from a cohort consisting of basically pure white trash.
I guess the point is that, even though this may be true overall, there are clearly examples where excellent schools have thrived in spite of poverty/illiteracy, and tailoring schools to the demographics of the local area could help millions of disadvantaged kids.
The most famous case is that of Jaime Escalante:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante
The school system worked hard to undermine and destroy his work.
In my country they are experimenting with giving them a bonus but it just isn't worth it.
Anyway, this is an example of libertarian first principles thinking. The problem with first principles thinking is that in the real world it's literally always wrong (because there are always factors you forgot about), but that this doesn't convince people to stop doing it, because they know it must be true despite it never in practice being true. Does the profit motive actually stop Google or Uber from constantly doing useless makework projects and releasing unprofitable products?
Large companies are like mini-governments with their own kind of politics. We tolerate them because despite all the useless make-work that happens in a large company, we usually find that it's still far more efficient than a bunch of smaller companies would be.
And when a publicly-traded company gets too large for its own good, corporate raiders can step in, acquire it on the cheap and spin off its parts into leaner and meaner firms. The whole process is driven by the expectation of efficiency.
You mean companies never fail and go out of business? It happens all the time.
> Does the profit motive actually stop Google or Uber from constantly doing useless makework projects and releasing unprofitable products?
Did you read in the news recently that Amazon axed Alexa? Because it was losing $billions?
Besides, it's rarely possible to tell in advance whether a new product line will be successful or not. The thing to do is try it and see. If it fails, you axe it. If it succeeds, you put more investment into it.
It's like a TV series. "Yellowstone" was wildly successful, and Paramount is pouring money into prequels and sequels. "The Time Traveler's Wife" didn't do well, so no second season.
Exactly as free market principles predict.
It's true that "if you can't make payroll, the company goes out of business" but anything less unoptimal than that also happens all the time. Individual executives who cause the failures get promoted, bad products with price-insensitive customers/investors live on, unprofitable business lines in otherwise surviving companies can live forever, managers grow their teams for non-economic reasons, customer brands of failed companies get bought and relaunched by anonymous Chinese companies instead of disappearing.
(Wrt this website, capitalism has given former YC president Sam Altman multiple McLarens and a New Zealand apocalypse bunker despite his never having a known productive job in his life.)
> Did you read in the news recently that Amazon axed Alexa? Because it was losing $billions?
That wasn't a rational decision. Amazon started Alexa on a whim, didn't monetize it on a whim, and canceled it on a whim. In a large company, the R&D people who develop products are often walled off from knowing about finances because the execs don't want corporate finances to be widespread knowledge, and so their yearly performance reviews are based on inventing cool stuff rather than if they were profitable or not. So the execs just didn't decide to tell them to do profitable stuff, then got bored and cancelled it instead of doing that. Too bad for anyone who got laid off, but it wasn't their fault.
(It's strange for them to claim it was losing billions though. It sure seemed like they were selling a lot of licenses, and Amazon is usually known for good cost control. Where was it all going?)
> It's like a TV series. "Yellowstone" was wildly successful, and Paramount is pouring money into prequels and sequels. "The Time Traveler's Wife" didn't do well, so no second season.
The TV industry has lots of cost-insensitive customers because most people don't cancel their cable/streaming accounts every month even if they don't use it. So they don't have perfect signals here either.
Netflix in particular is famous recently for constantly cancelling series even if they're doing well. And when something underperforms just a little they also cancel it, when they probably could've invested a bit more to improve it instead. This is actually hurting them because it reduces customer trust, which suggests they really just like cancelling things - or at best, they're irrationally sensitive to the possibility actors might ask for a raise next season.
That's why there's always opportunity for a competitor to step in, do better, and take their lunch. Happens all the time.
> Amazon started Alexa on a whim, didn't monetize it on a whim, and canceled it on a whim
How do you know this?
Besides, I can see from your post that you know how to run businesses better. Maybe you do. I recommend you start one - you'll get rich!
That's not a cite. Please cite your evidence.
Exactly. They failed, so they get more budget. Happens with nearly all government projects. It's almost as if the department/contractor knows that if they fail they'll get more budget. Hmmm...
Sorry, but LOL. For one fine example, the cost of a NASA launch vs the cost of a SpaceX launch.
> is mostly powerless to prevent private contractors from abusing the public's interest.
The government? Powerless? The government writes the contracts. There are a vast array of regulations specifically aimed at government contractors.
The observation is very simple: if the government estimates and allocates $500 million for a bridge and finds a contractor that claims to be able to do it for that price, there's very little reasonable power we can grant them to make the contractor meet their claimed budget. We could allow the government to throw contractors in prison for bilking them but, well, we already allow that (and it doesn't recoup the costs anyways).
Regulatory capture and special interests seem to be the bigger problem here. Complaining about NASA without considering why the government so fecklessly pays Lockheed Martin et al. billions a year is short-sighted.
True, as those examples are everywhere one looks.
The trick is to find one that is efficient.
> he observation is very simple: if the government estimates and allocates $500 million for a bridge and finds a contractor that claims to be able to do it for that price, there's very little reasonable power we can grant them to make the contractor meet their claimed budget.
Yet private companies contract stuff out to other companies all the time, and the contracts get done on time and on budget. For example, take Boeing. Boeing gets a contract from Delta to build, say, 50 airplanes for $5 billion, to be delivered on June 1. Every day Boeing is late, Boeing pays the airline a penalty. If Boeing runs over budget, Boeing eats the difference, not Delta. If Boeing fails to deliver Delta 50 airplanes, Boeing pays a big penalty to Delta.
Now, if Delta wants to change the spec after it is signed, well, they gotta pay Boeing. If Delta doesn't pay the bill, they get sued by Boeing. If Delta wants to reduce the number of planes they contracted for, Delta pays a penalty.
See how that works?
And Boeing does their damn-dest to be on time and on budget.
I've also watched contractors who are paid a $$$ bonus for every day they are ahead of schedule. It's amazing how fast they work. I remember one group that received $10,000 each for delivering on time. This was back in the 80s, when that was real money. There was no way that project was going to be late.
May I suggest your outfit hire better contract lawyers.
Do you recall after that earthquake in LA the city hired a construction company to rebuild a freeway interchange that collapsed? They offered ONE MILLION DOLLARS PER DAY to complete it ahead of schedule.
The contractor broke all records and got it done months ahead of schedule. Everybody was happy.
Isn't it amazing how that works?
I've hired contractors to renovate. They get paid the contractual amount if they complete it. If they fail, they don't get paid till they fix it.
It's not rocket science. See this thread for what happens with Boeing and their customers.
The free market solves this problem by a thing called "Contract Law" which is enforced by the courts.
If you can really solve this problem, you can make a ton of money.
Meanwhile, non-trivial projects with clauses like yours are less profitable and therefore tend to be the first delayed when resources are scarce. Which they frequently are. Unless you overpay by default. After all, "on budget" doesn't matter if the budget is 100x what other people are being quoted
Meanwhile, how you described Boeing contracts doesn't seem plausible.
No it doesn't. Programs are cut or cancelled outright all the time. The important question is not whether they're failing or succeeding but whether they're believed to be necessary. Projects that are necessary get more funding if they are failing, like schools. Well duh.
Projects that are succeeding and have budget left get trimmed. Again, duh.
Projects that are unnecessary or no longer necessary get cut regardless of budget.
That's just good governance. The same pattern happens in the economy.
How about those zillions spent to eliminate homeless encampments? They're spending something like $50,000 per homeless person. Hasn't put a dent in it. What is happening?
More budget! It's called the Homeless Industrial Complex for a reason.
> Projects that are necessary get more funding if they are failing, like schools
Yup, failing means more budget!
1. Spend all your budget => equal or greater budget
2. Spend less than your budget => budget gets cut
It's also clear that apparently many people who respond have never heard anyone make a case for free markets before. It's amazing, because free markets have produced the prosperity and high standard of living we all enjoy. Leftism has never delivered the goods.
Maybe I make a dent, maybe not.
I also toured East Berlin in 1969 at the height of the Cold War. Modern folk often extol how great the USSR was. They'll tell me the Wall was built to keep the West out. Well, I've seen it with my own eyes. Dingy, gray, and sad.
The bus slipped right in through Checkpoint Charlie with just a passport check. Exiting was another story entirely. We all had to exit the bus while guards with machine guns gave it a very thorough search, including underneath.
I used to think that I had a duty to educate and to offer an alternative to the anti-capitalist propaganda prevalent here. It doesn't seem that this is wanted, I am afraid.
I kinda' gave up, life is too short and my time is rather precious...
But I do deeply respect and appreciate your contributions, and your reputation and quality of arguments seems to protect you from the regular muzzling. Keep up the good work!
For example, I criticize leftist ideas, not leftist people.
Most people are for free markets that have no negative externalities. The problem is that very few, if any, markets have no negative externalities, therefore they cannot be completely free.
Want less CO2 emissions? Tax the C content of fuels. That will work far, far better than all the "ban ICE car sales by 2035" and other blunderbuss approaches.
Internalizing the externalities requires stringent regulations. That is a leftist position too.
> Want less CO2 emissions? Tax the C content of fuels.
If only it were that simple. This disproportionately impacts poorer people. This is why you create incentives for manufacturers to create alternatives, like EV, and then you can carbon tax fuels when those alternatives are available.
So the US military has been failing for 70 odd years then?
I start thinking that many misbehaving managers, would stop over hiring and such bad things, if the organization was able to give them the right incentives. (But how? Hmm, there were some books mentioned in a comment elsewhere, by the author of the article.)
I mean that many managers want to do what's good for the organization, but because of they way things are, they cannot. (Because then some other manager, who prioritizes his/her own career and influence, "takes over everything".)
I wonder what would happen if a company added a rule: Max team size is 10. End of over hiring (well, up to 10)? But would have other odd consequences.
This is because the more people you manage the more powerful you become, the guy with 100 reports is more valuable than the guy with 20 reports. Those 100 reports could sit in their chairs all day and drool but 100 is always better than 20.
Is it that everyone subconsciously thinks that "they are more people so they get to decide"?
I don't think this is formalized in any way? (There's no written rule that says "bigger team gets to decide")
https://archive.ph/HnGhE
There should be no sinecures if we strive for fairness.
no, really, this is fully laid out in his essays from the 1950s.
If you have not read them, you should. They are easy and insightful.
But I'm neither an economist nor traffic engineer --tell me more!
1. Principal-agent problem. Who do the employees work for? Self interest. The customers? Self interest. Suppliers? Self interest. The company has to figure out how to reconcile the self interest of individual participants with the interest of the company. If you let everybody do whatever they want with no repercussions, they will (figuratively speaking) walk away with anything that isn't nailed down. So far the only way we know how to prevent this is to assign humans to guard the interest of the business.
2. Failure mode. John Gall claimed that all sufficiently complex systems operate in failure mode 100% of the time. What he meant was that some or all of the controls have been bypassed, and the system is being operated manually. Humans are (at least for now) uniquely capable of functioning in systems that are in failure mode, e.g., by breaking the rules when necessary. This is why I doubt that management can be automated.
Now, while managers are doing both of those things, perhaps even just instinctively, they can be doing good and productive things. I'm actually quite happy with my own boss.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5723395
(a) people are great at working not in their own interest, together, on something greater than themselves. In fact, I've observed a negative correlation between this and management, in that the spirit of being "in it together for the greater good" seems to be weakened in organisations with more management.
(b) if people inherently only work out of self interest, then so would managers and the whole thing would break down anyway.
Only really true of small, tight-knit groups of people engaged in very similar kinds of work, where everyone knows that their contribution will be evaluated by everyone else. Hence small partnerships, co-ops or very early startups probably don't need management. These roles start to appear as scale increases.
This is entirely true, and almost nobody with either corporate or government power agrees with it. They're putting in massive effort to keep people in line because they're afraid of what happens when they aren't kept in line, despite evidence that people accomplish things just fine without constant threat of external discipline.
There are natural scaling limits around this.
If you think about what a "manager-less" work experience looks like, it looks like being an uber driver. I think we have existence proofs that manager-less work experiences are possible at scale. But job responsibilities need to be well defined.
Naturally, uber head office does not work like this.
Managers very much work in their own self interest, along with the rest of us.
In an interview, an engineer might be asked something like, "how many nodes did you manager/how many lines of code/how many microservices/etc.," as a way of gauging their level of skill and expertise. There is an implicit understanding -- on both sides -- that the complexity of the systems the engineer dealt is directly correlated with their expertise and talent, even if that kind of proxy is irrational when you really think about it.
Managers deal the same thing, except their questions are more along the lines of, "how many people reported to you/how big was you budget/etc."
In fact, I'd argue that self-interest is even worse on the management side, because the career stakes are so much higher. I have seen, on several occasions, top management commit to a strategy that was objectively failing with no practical path to success, because admitting that the strategy had failed would have gotten them fired by the board. It can be extremely catastrophic to the company when it enters that kind of failure mode.
Workers are not an abstract unit. They are human beings with human concerns and human availability. This needs to be accounted for separately from their work output. Managers allow you to create departments which are abstract units as a convenient interface over this problem.
Information flows are not always efficient or desirable to have broadcast to all individual workers. Managers serve as a node in this company information graph to help manage the reality of these concerns, and to provide a mechanism where information can actually flow in the opposite direction without creating chaos.
They're am imperfect solution to a worse problem.
The first few chapters talk through the history of human organization, from dominance-based tribes ("I'm the biggest man so do what I say"), through to modern corporations, with nominally-meritocratic hierarchy of management. And organizations where "we're all equal". He doesn't hold his punches when talking about the downsides of these organizational approaches.
Then the rest of the book does a deep dive on a lot of organizational approaches that are being tried out in different organizations around the world, to talk aspirationally about what he thinks comes next in how humans coordinate.
I think his answers to your two questions would be something like:
> 1. Principal-agent problem. Who do the employees work for? Self interest.
No, this sounds circular but the employees work for each other (and your customers). Healthy teams care about each other as people, and if they can form emotional connections with your users they'll care far more about making them happy than they will about ever care about the annual budget. Its a cultural thing - but it can be supported by process. Set up a lot of conversations between the developers and the clients. A manufacturing company started sitting sales people with the line operators. If the sales person didn't sell enough parts for the team, there physically wasn't work for the operators that they're working with.
> 2. Failure mode. ... This is why I doubt that management can be automated.
Yeah, hard agree on that. So don't try to automate management! The job of management in healthy companies in Laloux's book is to support the actual work being done on the ground, mediate conflict, provide advice when asked and set up conversations between people. The people doing the actual work will always have more concrete information about whats happening in a day-to-day way than management will. So let engineers make and own decisions.
In the book they talk about the Advice Process, where basically anyone in the company can initiate any change - so long as they consult with people the change will affect and take feedback before doing it. (The bigger the change, the more feedback). Management processes need to be things people who aren't management (but are affected by the processes) actually want.
I think we (obviously) need to experiment more with this stuff more in the startup / tech space. Traditional management structures are nowhere near the ideal form of how we make companies.
This is still shockingly common method of how modern corporations are run. I've been in board rooms on numerous occasions where I was the shortest person by several inches and I'm statistically tall. Its not statistically possible for 20+ people to be in the 99.999th percentile taller than me unless its not random. In other words not much has changed in thousands of years.
Of course you could also do this without managers by just having certain individual contributors be the subject matter experts of record, but such systems end up being more complicated because you lack the clarity of every person regardless of role or position having one and exactly one boss. Now this doesn't mean this is how work gets done, it just provides a substrate for decision making. In terms of actual work, more complex (read: non-DAG) networks are always needed (see Conway's Law), but when conflicts or inaction arise the manager hierarchy is what allows problems to be resolved decisively.
Now obviously in the real world people are people, and management is often the first place dysfunction shows up. This is partly because of the Peter Principle, partly because it's just easier to hide a lack of competence and play politics when you're in the fog of the middle layers, but that does not invalidate the function of management. The implication of this is that the primary job of senior leadership is bullshit detection.
Management's purpose is to ensure that an organization, remains and functions as an organization. So basically 1, but not exactly...
Basically, when you have a herd of sheep that you need to move, and you need to ensure all the sheep move someplace and none wander off. What do you do? You get a sheep dog, to ensure all the sheep move in unison and towards the same place. That's what a manager is, a sheep dog.
As another example, if person A is rowing the boat backwards, and person B is rowing the boat forwards, and person C decides to stop rowing because he doesn't know what direction to row in, you're not really working as an organization and are not going to get anywhere. Management is there to ensure everyone is rowing the boat together in unison and towards the goals of the organization. If something is preventing someone from rowing, he's suppose to investigate and remedy the situation, as well as find a way to prevent the obstacle from occurring again.
The irony is that they themselves become obstacles in a way.
That creates skilled managers that can step in and substitute for individual contributors. It also teaches them what the day-to-day work actually looks like, what the culture of the company actually is, what the obstacles actually are, and so on. Technically active management is super powerful, and the only way to achieve it is with a large group of managers, because a small group won't have time to regularly dive into technical details.
The problem is that's never what happens. Any time managers have excess time on their hands, they don't find something valuable to do -- instead they invent more bureaucracy and administration to fill their time, and make the organisation less effective.
Why is that?
I genuinely want to know because if I ever get the opportunity to help shape an organisation, I would want technically active management. I think it's critical for success.
Now, can every department have what my team has? I don't know. But, I can say that his work as a manager has actively improved team productivity and task completion. It's very refreshing once you have a good manager. You're free to just work while he manages the teams bureaucracy, that is other departments pushing the team in a thousand directions at once.
This doesn't even include the fact that since you are doing real work eventually you will make a mistake. Meanwhile your competitors are waiting for this and doing nothing real so they can point out your failing and how much better they know than you and how you should be replaced with some guy they are good friends with that would be really great to replace you.
Huh? Why exclude IT?
To get rid of managers, you will need to solve comms problem.
The opposite argument is that we should make managers more effective at unlocking their team and org’s potential. And that the number is just about right (when you consider two pizza teams and the managers of managers in larger orgs).
Good managers help organize the most effective thing known to humans: humans.
David sacks was on episode of show “UnHeard”. Hit nail on head. ‘professional elite’ or ‘surplus elites’ he called them.
sacks came at it from politic angle. we know what happening but media and everyone quiet. this manager class say right politically correct thing.
in two big tech company me saw anti pattern where so many managers who give no real output. directors.. product and engineering management.. all involved in increasing headcount fight territory battles.
product manager and managers of product managers who just have meetings. product same thing as it existed 2 year ago..3 year ago.. 5 year ago. no innovation. maybe find way to show more ad.
me immigrant in this country. what me saw is h1b and other visa farm. entire industry of importing from other country. people sit idle.
if stock price $100 a share this organization not contributing even 1$ to that price. revenue is from legacy ad business. managers just bureaucratic up charge and organization so slow and resistant to change they contribution maybe -5$ or lower negative number.
Earlier in my career, the engineering managers were more hands on, more of a tech lead + people manager hybrid. They would work on the spec, understand the product, and do some coding that was out of the critical path. You still find those types in some companies, but it's become rarer (at least for me.)
Especially good lower level managers also hang onto some of their tasks from when they were an IC.
* It is very easy to be both very busy and do nothing useful at all. Just accept and schedule a bunch of meetings.
* Your potential of improving things depends mostly on the C-level suite. Trying to get buy-in from other levels of management is a waste of time.
* Middle managers are quite often recreating other orgs they aspire to without any thought if their prescriptions are suitable for their orgs.
* The C-level are actually behaving more like individual contributors than managers. The CEO is typically working mostly on closing deals and attracting investors.
* Lower level managers are often created from senior or valuable employees because a title change is the only way of rewarding them and using their experience
* Some of the best managers are HR professionals, but they are completely sidelined. HR is working to protect the companies which for good and evil can clash with your goals.
* No one is a prophet in their own village, not matter how loyal you are climbing the ladder, and how much you learn along the way chances are they are still going to hire someone from the outside to be your boss that knows less than you. It's better to switch orgs when making big jumps in your career.
* There are certain pure management skills (everything with budgets) which are quite valuable, and managers are either undertrained
So, if I ever run my own company of over a 100 people this is what I'm going to do:
- make sure executives / senior managers are doing as much decision making as possible, while accepting input from every senior person in the company, manager or not.
- Promote only experts in their fields, preferably from your own ranks as managers.
- Instead of introducing hierarchy, consider instead providing managers with experts in management as deputies. Recruit fresh MBAs or experienced HR professionals. This way they help instead of hindering.
- Make sure every role has ways to grow while remaining individual contributors. Just give them levels, like Software Engineer lvl 12. Make sure they have free capacity to get delegated tasks or for their own initiatives.
Ah, yes, because there's some made up BS chart in HR that shows how much each job pays. "Oh, we can't pay you more than $X." BS, you can - you just won't for some stupid made up reason.
This is the part I’ll never understand. In order to give a larger (than managers) salary you will have to change the title. Why?
Genuinely losing my mind at how good of an idea this is. Imagine the effectiveness boost if even half of some large tech company's managers were instead engineers with a manager deputy. They'd probably be the next letter shoved into FAANG.
Technical Experts-managers are unnecessary where the work is menial, very physical or low-skilled. Or simply best practices or standards are established and followed uniformly. Or regulations are so strict there is little variation on how things are done.
Or the company is driven mostly by brands or advertising.
The most productive and successful company I worked for have zero middle management (150+ staff). The worst most dysfunctional company I have worked for had more middle managers than software developers (50+ staff).
For this guild these careers are their lifeblood, and the process of minting these (I.e. ensuring the pathway for leeching from fortune500 profits exists for eternity) is a sacred, maybe even inherited, secret. Any interruption of this dynamic is sacrilege and they will fight tooth and nail to discourage anyone who tries.
There needs something to be done here, but it won't be easy. Those who will approach this lightly will perish.
It seems like bureaucracy is at worst inevitable and at best actually provides a lot of competitive value. For example has there ever been a successful empire without a strong bureaucracy? And aren’t mega corps just modern empires?
In my examples the productive company had a bureaucracy/staff ratio of close to 0. The dysfunctional company had a bureaucracy/staff ratio of more than 2. Enough said.
I'd say in many modern industries, science, r&d this would not be the case in average.
I wonder how much overhead is "natural/health" and whether the amount of "bullshit" jobs is related to a "full employment" mentality, maybe even subsidized by the government.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
I've seen numbers as high as 70%+. Not everybody is ready to acknowledge that his/her work is meaningless.
If that's true, nothing would change if 3/4 of the workforce stopped working tomorrow.
And iff that's true (and I strongly suspect it is), than the basic income is the only logical outcome (imho).
[1] https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2022/12/02/harvard-employs-...
I don't agree with his politics over all, but on this front I do and see similar trends in other institutions, the education system being one of the most obvious.
We see the growth of the "administrator class/caste" in education at the cost of rising tuition while seeing no improvement in student/teacher ratios, etc. At the same time teachers who rightly spend their time doing their job, which is teaching, are often in a place where they then have to fight the shit rolling downhill from the expanded administrative caste. They could fight the administrator class, but the administrators do this all day every day as their actual job, it's fun to them. The teacher's actual job is teaching, the time and energy needed to fight these battles mean the administrator class wins.
I think this dynamic plays out at our tech companies with the expansion of various non-product roles like HR that impose more trainings or "re-education"/box-checking. Or ERGs, employee resource groups for every different employee because our current times are ones of sensitivities. Or the new DEI orgs, agree or disagree, they didn't exist a decade or two ago but are now prevalent in all spaces and DEI consultants are one of the most widely growing positions inside Fortune 500.
I think these things will continue to compound.
I think you could jettison this. It seems like pro forma both-siderism. I don't know any Democratic-leaning people who are unwilling to bring this up. If you're afraid of rocking boats you can -- as has been done in these comments -- differentiate between the noble teachers and the parasitic administrators.
That being said, I know that in my own company we have benefited from adding managers (I am not one myself). Communicating with people, budgeting, scheduling, managing expectations, keeping track of legal obligations, and so forth are non-trivial work which, for the most part, engineers are not skilled at or enthusiastic about. I imagine the same is true for academia. This isn't to say a vast bureaucracy can't acquire inefficiency. I'm sure there is a problem. But it's facile to wave your hand at other people whose jobs are a black box to you and say they are redundant.
I think the problem with the people "saying this" with questionable politics is that they don't have a serious analysis of the problem. They have political enemies they want to disempower and the "deep state" is a useful cover story. They want to destroy academia, not fix it.
And because each "engineer" doesn't have enough non-engineering work to keep their own secretary occupied during the times of day the secretary needs to be available (for answering phones, interacting with the "engineer", etc.), groups of engineers come together and hire a small team of secretaries to keep up the availability even in cases of sick days. Small team as in, like, on the order of 3-7. Given their already-required organization skills, a flat hierarchy among them with escalations directed to an elected board of "engineers" should suffice, giving a natural damper on secretary team size due to scaling limits of such a flat hierarchy (and organizational charta/codebook restrictions that prevent any middle manager/secretary-overseer from holding actual power).
I'd actually be happy to hear about the practicalities of such a structure for an engineering collective/organization (lacking any sort of CEO presiding over the engineers)...
Given that the alternative to disempowering those orgs is throwing good money after bad, there's nothing wrong with a bit of benign disruption to the existing power structure. Fixing things is not rocket science; educational systems outside the U.S. don't have these dysfunctions to anywhere near the same extent.
Assuming by rocket science you mean difficult but not impossible why are you assuming it's not difficult to fix any problem?
The Democrat platform has a 3,200 word section covering education[0]. It covers dozens of topics, but doesn't appear to contain a single word about administrative bloat or poor use of resources on the part of the public schools system.
It's safe to say that this issue isn't something that Democrats want to talk about, and I think the parent comment is spot-on as to the reason why.
[0] https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/providin...
Source?
I dont think its just in our time either. I'm sure Rome had quite a bureocracy in its day.
Or to put it another way, bureaucracy increases as a result of systems. E.g. 'We want to do a new thing, let's set up a new team to do it'
But there rarely seems to be continuous, automatic counter-system in place. I.e. a generic, regularly re-run reaping process that exists solely to decrease the number of teams/orgs/rules
You have periodic, CFO-org-led centralization / re-orgs, but those are default: status quo. Someone explicitly has to decide to decommission a thing, and that turns into a political struggle.
Is there a reason more companies don't have something like stack-ranking-by-utility for teams/orgs/rules? Where the default is "It's gone"?
Isn't that called an audit? They're rare because you can't force bureaucrats to always be making the argument for their usefulness without impacting their actual work. Impact assessment for policy is also gaining some ground, at least wrt. government. So that when a policy fails to achieve its goals, that failure is a matter of shared knowledge.
And I am sympathetic to the other side of the equation: continually asking people to justify their work ends up with a lot of useless-but-visible or sub-optimal work being prioritized (e.g. Google's lack of strategic attention to bugs/maintenance).
Self-destructing, temporary policies and teams seems like a nice balance. And maybe a cultural expectation that most teams will be disbanded and reformed after X years.
It'd also be curious to have an org where manager-back-to-IC was more normalized. IOW, manager is a role everyone is expected to serve a stint in, but then relinquish without salary/title penalty.
Because bureaucracy is people (management, employees) reaching for more power.
Why would they ever reach for less power?
And if some management unit implemented such "stack ranking" and discarded other units, they'd make enemies quickly, and be undermined, as other (not yet discard people and units) would be fearing for their position.
Not to mention that management being about personal power, their "stack ranking" would basically be based on "does this unit/product/team/etc furthers my power"?
"of various non-product roles like H.R that impose more trainings or "re-education"/box-checking Or ERGs, employee resource groups for every different employee because our current times are ones of sensitivities."
Who are you to say that certain groups of people don't deserve to have their own resources when they may face similar issues of racism or sexism. Maybe they feel more comfortable talking amongst people like them about sensitive issues. How many more HR people do you think it takes to set these groups up when they are mostly just employees.
You also talk about training impying that it's only for "box checking", which is a obvious right wing red flag. Basically, you assume that no one really cares, everything is for show, simply because you don't care.
You just have no empathy and therefore any resources allocated at companies that wouldn't help you are useless.
I don't like manipulative arguments. This person tried to set themselves up as being unbiased or "above the situation". This is done so that others, who normally tune out certain types of people or have a bias (which to be fair is wrong but natural), will take their arguement more seriously.
It's like when the wise old man in a movie finally speaks on a contentious issue Everyone listens more closely and places a higher initial value on their opinion.
This is entire conversation was about excess administratiors/managers, whether that's the case at all or some companies has almost nothing to do with employee groups, like a group of Black employees. These groups are self managed by employees with the backing of HR.
This person is so right wing that they couldn't help make a point about how overly sensitive we are and that these groups are unneeded due to that. This is Glenn Beck at a chalkboard connecting everything negative (bloated management) to a view of opposing political force. It's so transparent that I blew my head gasket.
Alone that would be annoying but combined with the "I normally hate X and disagree with X but this view has some merit" BS guided my response
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/29/9069841/university-of-cincinna...
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/09/colleg...
Transit police, university police, capitol police, boutique police forces like that exist for one reason and one reason only: to prioritize things that the police who would otherwise have jurisdiction would laugh at.
It (sometimes) has a dual educational purpose where they run a law enforcement or criminal justice curriculum and the campus police service provides practical experience for students.
She straight up said something to the effect of "I'm doing the best I can with the resources I have. Your zone also includes Midtown, with bars and commercial. If crime goes up there, owners with more political connections and tax revenue than the university gripe. So that's where most of my resources are."
Gotta respect honesty.
Because the people who currently have a lot of influence over current policing would be up in arms when that "certain neighborhood" police never show up in roll their own minimum viable solution that a) is not up to their standards b) they cannot exert political influence over.
Kids not being beaten up or killed by the police in general wasn't an option?
The people who run those theatres et al aren’t directly benefitting from the donations of Harvard alumni; they’re rather benefitting from the (presumably) Harvard College(s) of Performing Arts paying them for use of the space—same business model as any commercial theatre. Those affiliated businesses aren’t “Harvard” (the University) per se, any more than the people working for businesses in a food court in an airport work for the airport.
Yes, but Harvard duplicates existing services. e.g. when Harvard runs a dining org, that service is already provided by local restaurants and grocery stores. The only things Harvard needs to provide are things that you can't already get in Boston. Classrooms, libraries, labs, etc. It's just like engineering. Anything that can easily be offloaded to a third party tool should be.
Also, opinion.
You seem to be missing that harvard attracts exceptional (and well connected) people. Expanding the business to suit their skills is a natural evolution.
>...dining...
Uh, Harvard throws a huge number of fund raising events that have to be catered and no one cares about the name of the catering company if the food is trash. It's in the best interest of Harvard to set their own standards for their events
Dining services for students make sense to me. Students are generally young folks with a lot going on. They might be on their own for the first time. It is helpful to have a place where they can just go grab some food without too much thought. Dining services might be priced into the student’s tuition, so parents can be confident that their kids will get meals, rather than spending their budget on partying, haha.
Plus, actually this is probably a more practical reason and I should have lead with it: dorms usually have limited cooking facilities. And imagine the messes which would be created in the shared kitchen, if everyone was using it. Eating out is nice, but most people don’t do it every day. Dining services handle the unexciting daily meals well — so really, this isn’t a redundant service to local restaurants.
Both student meals and healthcare are managed by independent student organizations, which have grown quite wealthy during the two hundred years they have existed. The company running the dozens of cafeterias, Unicafe, is entirely owned by the student organization HYY, which also owns several valuable properties in the city center of Helsinki. The healthcare is organized around the Finnish Student Health Service, which is a foundation managed by the students themselves. At least during my time the almost free healthcare and the affordable lunches were a significant benefit for the poor but hard-working students.
Both of these branches are totally independent of the actual university and are basically independent societies founded and run by the students themselves.
In any case, I’m certainly not going to pretend that US students aren’t coddled a bit. School here has a been a little bit infected with the customer-service mentality… like pretty much everything else. It is what it is I guess.
Harvard does have a large bureaucracy that could trim some fat, but your sweeping assumptions about what they don't need without even considering why they have them are pretty uninformed.
They seem instead to have created some other management consulting thing called "Humanocracy".
I'm not defending any of it, but HBR articles are not necessarily from HBS.
Then I took a job at a management-heavy company. They had people with different manager titles for absolutely everything. I ended up on a small group where we somehow ended up with more managers than engineers.
Some of the excess managers used the situation to do very little. They'd join a couple meetings, maybe respond to a couple e-mails, then basically disappear. Others started inventing work to fill the time. It wasn't uncommon for us to be scheduled for 4-5 hours of meetings in a single day because different managers felt like they needed to make themselves visible and point to things on the calendar to show that they were working.
The weirdest part was how everyone sort of acknowledged that the situation wasn't good, but refused to do anything about it. When I tried to push back on some of the meetings, our CTO recommended that our team should join the meetings but continue to code during the meetings. It turned into this weird circus where we were spending most of our days in virtual meetings, trying to do work while managers would pepper us with questions.
When we had layoffs, they laid off mostly engineers. The ratio of managers to engineers went up. More meetings ensued.
When the CEO got angry that engineering wasn't producing enough, management's first reaction was to request more headcount for more managers. They insisted that with more managers they could more effectively manage the engineers. So they hired more managers, who scheduled more meetings...
The lesson I learned was that once a company becomes infected with managerial excess, your situation is only going to get worse. Get out and move to a company that understands how to operate and how to manage their managers.
None of the managers is going to admit that the problem is theirs. They fully know that and they know that it being uncovered is the end of their jobs. So they'll keep at it until the whole thing burn down to the ground. The only savior here is a new CEO/CTO.
I’m curious as to what kind of business this company was in.
I'm currently at a huge company and this rings true for me. I work with a team of maybe 6-7 ICs during a quarter, but when we compile a slide deck and present the work to higherups I find that the middle-managers (who have never joined a single meeting on this project) have added their names to the slide deck too. I have no idea what they do or how they're involved in the work at all; none of the ICs even mention them during the quarter.
Nobody wants to say anything about it, probably because those managers hold power in their position.
Project owner work with the programers (when needed)
https://youtu.be/28S4CVkYhWA