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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
>> 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.
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.
>>"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
"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...)
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
Gary Hamel here. I co-wrote this piece for HBR a few years ago. Since then, the problem of bureaucratic drag has only gotten worse. Our most recent estimate is that an excess of bureaucracy and lack of empowerment reduces economic output by $18 trillion dollars per year across the OECD. The average Fortune 500 company has 8 layers of management, and few truly new ideas survive the journey up the chain of command. As per Gallup, only 1 in 5 employees believe their ideas matter at work, and only 1 in 11 are free to experiment with new methods, tools and products. If you want some practical ideas on how to bust bureaucracy, whatever your role or title, check out my book “Humanocracy” (available at Amazon), or “The New Human Movement” video series on YouTube. Love all your comments.
> If you want some practical ideas on how to bust bureaucracy, whatever your role or title, check out my book “Humanocracy” (available at Amazon), or “The New Human Movement” video series on YouTube.
Didn’t know about your book/YT and haven’t read/watched them.
That said, isn’t it a very fast road to nowhere and burnout? I’ve tried many times to fix bad management and its impact on software quality/customers (can’t help it, i hate avoidable toil). Every single time it achieved nothing whatsoever in the long term (the minuscule improvements I managed to make over 12–18 months were undone a few weeks after I left). But I had expanded large amount of energy and political capital resulting in having to leave the companies to protect my sanity followed by months to recover from the burnout.
Is there a point in fixing companies that don’t want to be helped (which seems to be the vast majority)? It’s their cash to set on fire after all and changing jobs regularly to keep it fresh (every company has a slightly different twist on dysfunctional) seems to be a better strategy for the individual cog.
> Is there a point in fixing companies that don’t want to be helped
It depends? One way of thinking could be, that if a company's business idea isn't useful for society, then, don't bother fixing the company?
Examples might be online poker games, or high frequency trading. How is it helpful for society, if traders make a bit more money, or if the poker gaming company manages to tie people to their laptops some more hours each week?
In the second example, more managers could be better (since the business idea is slightly negative to society?).
What did the companies you tried to fix, do, if I can ask?
> fixing companies that don’t want to be helped
Hmm, I wonder if it can be helpful to think about individuals rather than companies. Then the question becomes more similar to:
"Is there a point in explaining to a manager that it's better for the company if s/he fires him- / herself?"
Thanks for your work. I have a lot of experience being the engineering in inefficient organizations and I don't see how society would survive if all the dead weight was fired.
The 10% of us that do real actual work would make 90% of the wages and the management class would live in poverty or be forced to take manual labor or customer service jobs. But there wouldn't be enough customer service job available because there are so few of us actual productive employees, and this problem would only get worse as those of us that understand technology are able to leverage it to remove the need for even more people.
Excess management can be seen as a form of Universal Basic Income? For people in management. Just that to get this UBI, one needs to sit on an office chair and be in pointless meetings.
And if society is partly built on this for-some-people UBI, and it's suddenly removed and there aren't enough jobs, then yes I suppose some chaos would ensue?
... Hmm but what if there was real Universal Basic Income. Maybe then it'd be simpler to keep organization more slim and effective (not "the end of the world" if a manager lost his/her job and there was nothing else).
@Gary H -- yes thanks for your work and thanks for linking to the book :-) I'm checking it out
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.
"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")
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> “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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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LOL, my current team does 2 hours of meetings per week (at most!) and we are incredibly productive. I hope we never work together!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
-Oscar Wilde
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.
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.
Didn’t know about your book/YT and haven’t read/watched them.
That said, isn’t it a very fast road to nowhere and burnout? I’ve tried many times to fix bad management and its impact on software quality/customers (can’t help it, i hate avoidable toil). Every single time it achieved nothing whatsoever in the long term (the minuscule improvements I managed to make over 12–18 months were undone a few weeks after I left). But I had expanded large amount of energy and political capital resulting in having to leave the companies to protect my sanity followed by months to recover from the burnout.
Is there a point in fixing companies that don’t want to be helped (which seems to be the vast majority)? It’s their cash to set on fire after all and changing jobs regularly to keep it fresh (every company has a slightly different twist on dysfunctional) seems to be a better strategy for the individual cog.
It depends? One way of thinking could be, that if a company's business idea isn't useful for society, then, don't bother fixing the company?
Examples might be online poker games, or high frequency trading. How is it helpful for society, if traders make a bit more money, or if the poker gaming company manages to tie people to their laptops some more hours each week?
In the second example, more managers could be better (since the business idea is slightly negative to society?).
What did the companies you tried to fix, do, if I can ask?
> fixing companies that don’t want to be helped
Hmm, I wonder if it can be helpful to think about individuals rather than companies. Then the question becomes more similar to:
"Is there a point in explaining to a manager that it's better for the company if s/he fires him- / herself?"
The 10% of us that do real actual work would make 90% of the wages and the management class would live in poverty or be forced to take manual labor or customer service jobs. But there wouldn't be enough customer service job available because there are so few of us actual productive employees, and this problem would only get worse as those of us that understand technology are able to leverage it to remove the need for even more people.
And if society is partly built on this for-some-people UBI, and it's suddenly removed and there aren't enough jobs, then yes I suppose some chaos would ensue?
... Hmm but what if there was real Universal Basic Income. Maybe then it'd be simpler to keep organization more slim and effective (not "the end of the world" if a manager lost his/her job and there was nothing else).
@Gary H -- yes thanks for your work and thanks for linking to the book :-) I'm checking it out
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.
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")
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.
In business:
1. success => more budget
2. failure => budget gets cut
In government:
1. success => budget gets cut
2. failure => more budget
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
1. Spend all your budget => equal or greater budget
2. Spend less than your budget => budget gets cut
So the US military has been failing for 70 odd years then?
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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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5723395
* 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.
[1] https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2022/12/02/harvard-employs-...
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.
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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 dont think its just in our time either. I'm sure Rome had quite a bureocracy in its day.
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"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.
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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.