> Stewart Butterfield, former CEO of Slack, recently described a dynamic within tech companies behind much of the over-hiring. He noted on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast in late May that when there’s no real constraint on hiring, “you hire someone, and the first thing that person wants to do is hire other people.” The reason is that “the more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in the organization…So every budgeting process is, ‘I really want to hire,’ and that to me is the root of all the excess.”
I’ve seen this first hand. One place where I worked HR even had a table of team size vs manager compensation. When I pointed out that it may not be the best idea to directly incentivize managers to hire more people they were less than understanding. Of course it went totally out of control.
But sadly there just is no counteracting force (except perhaps mr Musk). When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?”, and they won’t be impressed when you say “I managed to keep it down to four people”. It’s just something that resonates very strongly with the primitive side of our brains (“You say you were the chief, how big was your tribe?”).
It's called "empire building" and is also part of the principal-agent problem where the manager is the agent and is assumed to have the firm's best interests in mind, but in reality doesn't. As a result, the principal (for example an owner) has to come up with methods to keep their management honest (example... tying most compensation to stock price - although I think this just makes management short sighted).
I was once in a meeting where an IT manager was told his group would have to handle the install for a piece of software that like 2 engineers used. The guy asked for 3 additional head count and my jaw dropped. If someone has ever seen the Avatar Airbender show, I was like Prince Zuko speaking up at his father's meeting. You see I was there as a courtesy and tried to point out that even one headcount seemed like a lot for something that should take less than a week of work for a single employee. At the time I didn't understand that the manager understood this, but was playing for more staff to build their own importance. I didn't understand the games they play. As part of the game...you always say your people are swamped no matter what...or refer to a massive backlog of work even though that backlog is all super low priority and existing employees can be reprioritized.
A common miscommunication in an R&D organization is asking another team to do a task, and getting the reply that they're willing to do the task if you provide headcount. You're not asking them to grow their team in perpetuity. You're asking them to reprioritize their existing work to accommodate one request.
(I know this isn't really a miscommunication. It's misaligned incentives leading to an exasperating kind of logrolling.)
> the manager is the agent and is assumed to have the firm's best interests in mind, but in reality doesn't.
Every manager I had at every major multinational company only had the interest of their own career progression in mind, not the company's, not their team's. You as an employee under them were just a means to their goal, nothing more. I naively assumed that making them look good and doing the overtime when needed to achieve their idiotic deadlines would also guarantee my ascension later, but boy was I gullible and wrong.
Going the extra mile for your boss might work out for you when everything goes smooth in the org in times of economic prosperity when there's room for everyone to move up, but when the org or economy went tits up, and things were being put on chopping block, those managers didn't hesitate to grab the only parachute for themselves and let their team sink or throw them under the bus to save themselves at the tune of "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish", so I learned the valuable lesson to not go the extra mile for any boss unless I have written guarantees of a reward.
It's the way the reward system is set up in these companies. Climb the ladder and kick it under you after you dangle the carrot in front of naive idiots to push you up that ladder for rewards they might never see. I think someone called it "the GE way".
> handle the install for a piece of software that like 2 engineers used.
Ah yes .. current prios remain in place, more context switching, operational ownership, unplanned fallout, holidays, meetings ...
cutting the pie in more pieces does not give you more pie ... people still seem to think that ...
"To comprehend Factor I, we must picture a civil servant called A who finds himself overworked. Whether this overwork is real or imaginary is immaterial; but we should observe, in passing, that A’s sensation (or illusion) might easily result from his own decreasing energy—a normal symptom of middle-age. For this real or imagined overwork there are, broadly speaking, three possible remedies
(1) He may resign.
(2) He may ask to halve the work with a colleague called B.
(3) He may demand the assistance of two subordinates, to be called C and D.
There is probably no instance in civil service history of A choosing any but the third alternative. By resignation he would lose his pension rights. By having B appointed, on his own level in the hierarchy, he would merely bring in a rival for promotion to W’s vacancy when W (at long last) retires. So A would rather have C and D, junior men, below him. They will add to his consequence; and, by dividing the work into two categories, as between C and D, he will have the merit of being the only man who comprehends them both."
One of my pet peeves is how few people read past the first line of the essay and think Parkinson’s Law is the opening quip about work expanding to fill the time available.
> When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?”, and they won’t be impressed when you say “I managed to keep it down to four people”
I had this same interaction when applying for Staff+ software engineer (not manager) at two FAANGs.
One of the recruiters sniffed, or maybe negged, and said they expected X number people under you for that role.
Highly effective small teams was considered small-time, not a selling point. Also not-OK was leading engineering for an early startup. Nor was a cross-company Principal role interfacing with everyone.
(However, both companies were still open to me doing their new-grad Leetcode hazing battery or Python grunting automated screening test. Which isn't a sign that their culture is otherwise good, other than the team size fixation.)
Same for technology used. You won’t get much credit for keeping costs down and keeping things simple. The real money is in developing super complex systems. That will give you respect.
The flex reply here is to say how much value you created with your small team. Everyone is familiar with Instagram being acquired for $1B at 13 employees, and that track record would be sufficient to carry you a long way even if you did nothing more after.
If that doesn’t work for a given company, well, interviews go two ways :)
> One of the recruiters sniffed, or maybe negged, and said they expected X number people under you for that role.
Ridiculous. Essentially saying the staff role is management in all but name.
> Highly effective small teams was considered small-time, not a selling point. Also not-OK was leading engineering for an early startup. Nor was a cross-company Principal role interfacing with everyone.
Hilarious they insist on holding ICs feet to the fire for hiring while letting their own culture wither away to petty little fiefdoms.
The same kind of perverse incentive exists in other forms in other places, like what drives complexity growth in engineering. With people it’s called empire building. With systems I’ve heard it called “resume oriented programming.”
“I built a massively complex system to manage our cloud deployment” looks superficially more impressive than “I eliminated the need for a complex deployment by rearchitecting a bit and consolidating systems, so then I only had to manage a few things.”
The first person will have more code they can cite and more expertise wrangling more systems. They’ll be able to talk about all the big sexy “hyperscale” stuff they have managed with lots of terabytes and Kubernetes and terraform and helm charts. Most people would probably hire this person.
I’d hire the second person.
It’s basically the midwit meme, which is so popular because it illustrates something real.
There seems to be a core conflict in society between systems as things we build to do things vs systems as ends in themselves. Morons just do things. Geniuses just do things. Midwits get mixed up into the process of doing things and forget the point.
>“I eliminated the need for a complex deployment by rearchitecting a bit and consolidating systems, so then I only had to manage a few things.”
That is more of a marketing issue, write something like, "Improved efficiency of deployment by x% by re-architecting systems x, y, and z which saved $xxM/year."
Most companies will have a counter force, the 'cutter'.
The 'cutter's compensation is tied to how much they cut.
Of course, they will also need a team, to more efficiently cut other teams.
And they in turn will also be incentivized to grow their team, the manager of the cutting team isn't immune to wanting to grow their team.
But then it gets up to CEO, who has someone reporting to them who's only goal is cutting. The cutter has a team, with some managers of teams of cutters. It's turtles all the way up, but it does end at CEO.
Generally every big company I've worked for, yes, had empire building. But then also had people to cut empires.
So every few years there were layoffs to trim it up.
When I was at Intel 10+ years ago, they had this down to an art. They had a name for it, like, "the pool"; they'd reorg all the time. Everyone went into the pool, then the mgrs would pick teams. Your actual progress through your career was loosely tied to how quickly you were chosen. Especially bad IC's never got out of the pool; if you didn't have a req (or title) then you were let go after a year. This had the nice effect that mgrs rarely had to terminate employees: just wait for the reorg & don't pick out the bad ICs.
Managers want to hire more people because teams are way under-staffed. I’ve never worked on a team that had enough people to do the important things with leeway for sickness vacation and turnover. Maybe there is empire building going on, but I think it’s deeper than that.
Yes, this is frustrating when one cares about efficiency (I do). Whether number of people or amount of budget overall, you're seen as better the more you have.
When shopping for vendors to achieve something, my instinct is to try to find a way to do more with less. But I'm told that's dumb, I need to spend all the budget and ask for more, lest I be seen as a loser.
Stuart describes one type of mentality. I’ve recently joined a small company as the senior person. My goal is to understand our deliverables, our timing, and can we do it?
In enterprise companies like the one I recently left, management is incentivized to kiss up try and do more with less, but wants more people to buttress their role as well as help determine the role above them. My prior boss in this same organization had multiple teams but rather than have the teams talk about their work insisted on being the one to present upward and rarely invited his teams to join.
I like your nuanced observation here. It reminds me of a quote I come back to often when I am seeing toxic behaviour in some organisations.
> Dysfunctional behaviour is ubiquitous and systemic, not because people are wicked but because the requirement to serve the hierarchy competes with the requirements to serve customers. People's ingenuity is engaged in survival, not improvement.
It also dovetails nicely with the old, "If you don't spend all your budget, you lose it next year" management strategy. I can't count the number of times over my career where I heard a boss say, "we need to spend the rest of this before end of year."
I'm not sure why this article bothers attributing this insight to the former Slack CEO, this dynamic is nothing new and was a problem well before Slack or the current round of tech companies were around.
> But sadly there just is no counteracting force (except perhaps mr Musk). When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?”, and they won’t be impressed when you say “I managed to keep it down to four people”.
I honestly would strongly prefer 4 people who are highly smart (think prodigy- or genius-level) below me than 20 "somewhat intelligent" employees (i.e. what at least 95 % of employees are).
In general I agree, but Prodigy-level people can come with their own challenges too. Eg. They're going to be coming up with a million ideas for how to improve things, so you'd better be prepared to listen and support them, which often will require changing the way the organisation works. If you don't (or can't) support them, be prepared for them to get demotivated quickly and move on. The other 90% are generally a little less high maintenance, but I agree that they will never achieve as much.
IMO your best bet is to pick and choose who you need based on the situation. Your already-in-production CRUD app may benefit from a few extra 50th percentile coders to help with the workload, but if you're building a ground breaking product from scratch, then a deliberately small team of top echelon nerds may make the difference between success and hard fail.
You don't think having 4 people do the work of 20 people is going to backfire at some point? Nevermind the looming Bus factor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
Lol… reminds me of a place I worked at where there were 2 developers on the project but 4 project managers. When the project was running late -> they hired 2 more managers!!
This is my current workplace. Projects have 1 developer and 2 project managers. The project managers are in meetings all day every day, doing what? And the developer is constantly being demanded to work impossibly tight deadlines, and deal with the project managers backtracking on the requirements. :/
The large corporations I've worked for also scored you on "leadership" at the end of the year. This score usually contributes to your bonus and annual pay raise. It is hard to get a high leadership score if you don't have some formal subordinates, so this is another reason people are always looking to get someone working under them, even if they aren't ready for it or maybe don't even need it.
Here’s the real culprit that a CEO could do something about:
> when there’s no real constraint on hiring
Of course there’s empire building because of prestige. And even more, the enthusiasm of people who joined your growth company to make an impact, who then see all the possibilities if they just hired a little.
Keeping all those bad and good instincts balanced with the actual company needs is the task of management.
That's a great idea. Or just keep your people / sales < then your comps in your industry.
Coming at this problem from the manager / owner point of view: If your company is bootstrapped or hasn't raised a lot of money headcount can be a first guess at valuation. Or how seriously another partner in business takes you. Companies that balloon in size tend to be taken very seriously while small profitable ones get less attention. So the pressure can go both ways.
Worked at a large global financial company 10 years ago in tech. It was well known that the bonus pool was finite per division, but it was also allocated on ratios based on performance reviews and retention. Everyone knew the more people, the smaller the pool -- but then again, tech was a "cost center" so it wasn't like adding technology people (with the exception of quants) earn the bank more money.
I suspect if you incentivized managers to keep their teams small, through a bonus pool, it would definitely result in smaller teams, but also with the danger of overworked ones. That seems self-fulfilling though, if you're overworked but you know there's a reward with it.
That all being said, most places don't have bonus pools so it's a mute point.
Did you ever do a school project where yourself and maybe one other person did all the work, and everyone else (2-3 folks) mostly just tagged along on the ride because they were assigned? Or maybe even made it worse?
And everyone got the same grade?
That happens in corp land all the time too, and it’s extremely demotivating.
thats usually called a 'profit share' (though I've only seen it based on net profit and not gross revenue). It was quite nice on Wall Street back in the 80s...Especially since everyone got an equal share rather then the managers favorites getting the bulk of 'discretionary' bonuses.
Paired with a nice xmas bonus and year end review/raises, it basically meant no-one quit because you were never more then 6 months from a fat check.
My wife observed that in large orgs, headcount is currency. People constantly looking to justify headcount so they can say they have a 10-person org, a 50-person org, a 100-person org. I've seen managers get buy-in to spin up a new department to build a tool they could buy off the shelf for the price of 2 or 3 people. I'm constantly reminded of Mitt Romney's old saw, "corporations are people". Just an admixture of irrational, vain, fallible people. The successful ones make fewer mistakes than the rest.
Yeah, no. Well, perhaps if the role is just to manage it becomes somewhat relevant, but I have personally never experienced this in any interview (and have been in people manager roles for the past twenty years, at companies including F500 industrial, FAANG, and consulting).
It’s because companies are fat and happy and don’t have enough to do. There’s not alot of hunger for more comp or accomplishment because the org works and people are paid well.
Thats the same dynamic in civil service environments. Some people are motivated by dick measuring contests, and life will find a way to give those folks a metric. When I was a director at a large agency, one of my peers came into my office, proud as a peacock, to let me know that a re-org meant that he now had 113 employees. It smashed his soul when he realized I had more.
Wanting to grow isn’t a bad thing, the excess falls on the execs who approve the budgets. If your team has good economics then you should grow, if it doesn’t then the execs shouldn’t be funding it.
Lot of companies have terrible exec teams that are out of touch with the company
The other side of the point is that having manager with small team means those manager need managers, which means another layer. Big team manager means flatter hierarchy which may be desired by everyone.
But yeah following Goodhart's law it's bad if it makes managers hire new people instead of vanquishing other managers and taking other employees under their direct command.
I love Hacker News. So many people here strive to work for FAANG or some other bloated SV tech company with a free-money grow-or-die mindset, and proceed adopt this view of management as if it’s an immoveable, universal truth.
Without me, my team would drown in less than a week. Say what you want about that implying a lack of resilience, or that I’m not teaching a man to fish, but it’s the current reality. I work insanely hard to ensure that they can do their best work, that their best work always gets better, and that they get the most out of their time in my team, distraction-free. I work insanely hard to smooth over organisational politics, communications failures, and so many other things that every day without fail so many people in this community bitch and moan about.
This is an anonymous account, there’s no benefit to me self-promoting. I’d never be this confidently candid were my name attached, no matter who I was talking to.
Maybe you should go find a better team to work for.
Managers are definitely needed. The problem is the amount and their tendency to accrue unnecessary "fat" in their teams. It's not an uncommon in big companies to see people who have multiple managers at once and have to report to the multiple people/teams. Or having ridiculously high manager/worker ratio.
> When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?”
Just lie. Then you will see it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not sure how to recruit for managers in a huge corporation, I don’t think even huge corporations necessarily know.
One thing’s for sure: a big difference between some ICs and Managers, at least the managers you actually want to work for, is that those most non-manager ICs seem to be really fucking bought into some very reductive points of view.
I am not convinced. Reading the whole article it seems that Bayer is moving to a system better known as QBR, mixed with OKRs and most likely some sort of agile model.
There is no no-hierarchies. Working in a 3 month cadence on an organizational level puts a lot of pressure on all people. Usually QBRs work top down and there is more monitoring along the process.
What sounds great is more or less success theatre as well as inflexibility. No one wants to lack behind in a QBR report. Risking 4 times a year being red flagged in a report sparks fear.
Also approval processes and idea sharing are the first victims of such reorganizations. No one risks a 2 week sprint for some improvement sprint or working on technical debt in tech for example.
I’ve seen this within a company with 100k employees worldwide.
People will regret QBRs.
Usually companies want to get rid of the costs of middle managers, which are usually elder than normal staffers. Also companies want to include younger folks, because they are on average cheaper per resource from a controlling perspective.
Young guns without leadership with delivery pressure by an even older senior management layer means having a large gap and divide between them.
Senior management adds so called assistants to their staff, the hidden layer.
I watched a lot of mobbing at the lower level as a result. Fear of tumbling over mistakes aka receiving a bad performance review is rampant when you need to report all the time results.
Mixing teams every QBR sounds fun, but isn’t. It means even more being in constant competition. Who is the most flexible employee and most successful under different circumstances?
Large organizations are hard to manage. People will very soon miss their middle managers to cover things up in a human way.
QBRs don’t help if there is a clear product strategy missing.
There is no perfect system, but QBRs are some of the most toxic form of working and collaboration that I have witnessed so far.
I'm been really frustrated by OKRs specifically. The whole system does a great job of appearing to empower a bottom up approach while actually being implemented as a top down, authoritarian system.
It sounds great to be metric and goal driven, allowing employees to decide for themselves how to best reach those business goals. I've never seem it implemented this way though. Instead, I've seen leaders define goals and solutions together, paired with a list of metrics used to define success so specifically that annual reviews and layoffs become an almost mathematical, robotic process.
I always found it really interesting at Google that OKRs generally seemed to make sense at the CEO & PA level, but massively broke down somewhere between VP->Dir->Team level, to the extent that for the majority of teams it was nearly impossible to identify clear OKRs for themselves that trickled down (or flowed up) to the OKRs that should have been inheritable by their management chain. Some orgs manage to get to the Director level, but in others the break happened at the VP level, which just meant that entire large groups of Type A, highly productive people were mostly rudderless -- not to mention being at risk of poor performance reviews if their management chain weren't able to provide adequate air cover.
At my last company, managers success was defined by their reports success, so if we didn't achieve our KPIs by the end of the quarter, my manager would say "You worked really hard this quarter, and I want to make sure you get your full bonus!" then he would just lower the KPI metrics until we achieve ~80% of them (because our CEO believed if you are achieving more than 80% of your goals, then your goals aren't ambitious enough)
We're explicitly given top-down OKRs, which we're required to align our own "bottom-up" OKRs to, and then we're not empowered to meet our own OKRs, because product management alone steers the ship.
It's a critique from a feminist in the 70s account how the feminist movement's attempt to have no hierarchy created implicit hierarchies that were less accountable too the group than explicit hierarchies
Demands for non-hierarchical political forms have always scared me, and so often, how they are demanded by people whose main skill is to rabble-rouse. Of course, this is no coincidence.
This sounds so true. Before you had 1 or 2 bosses to report to, now you have 10, rotating in and out, whenever they please. If you've experienced the joy of a semi-yearly peer review system in a MegaCorp (e.g., Meta), imagine this happening all the time, with less structure, and even less shielding.
The problem with too many layers of management is mainly that they stop doing what they should do. Making decisions.
The lowest management layer cannot make any decisions alone, otherwise the next layer would have no reason to exist. The next layer might even have to hand over the decision to one layer above. Up there no one really understands the decision that needs to be made because they are too far away from the actual impact. The result is that the decision is not made at all. Instead they procrastinate by asking for more details about the decision and the options.
If you have only one layer you get a decision very fast.
There is some limit to how many people you can manage effectively. So, in a company with, say, 10,000 employees, you can't have just one layer of management between COs and ICs. You'd either need each manager to work with 500 direct reports, or you'd need the COs to work with 500 managers. If we look at 100,000 employee orgs, this gets even sillier.
If you even attempt something like this, what will actually happen will be a chaotic hierarchy arising within the larger group, with people playing politics to rise above their peers.
Edit: I should add that I absolutely believe a bottom-up organization can work, but it needs to be built with the right organizational model in place. You can't just say "no managers" and expect people to work directly for the CEO. You can put in place rules so that employees can self-organize, appoint representatives to interact with other teams, vote for collective decision making and so on. But this typically requires a huge power loss for the C-suite and owners, which is why it's very unlikely to work well outside of a co-op.
Depends on if you are managing people or you are micromanaging people.
It should be possible to manage 22 employees if you are good at setting directions and explaining why those directions have been chosen. You can have 22 people in one room and do functional group discussions, this is like a good size for a school class.
1 CEO -> 22 level A managers
each level A manager -> 22 level B = 22 * 22 = 484 level B
each level B manager -> 22 level C workers = 484 * 22 = 10648 workers.
I have yet to see a company with 10_000 employees and only 2 levels of management between workers and the CEO.
If you add another management layer, it is only 10 people per manager. This is not much and quickly gets into micromanagement if the manager works fulltime at managing.
Hi, sometime middle-manager here. The goal isn't to have me make decisions, its to let people around me make decisions quickly and well enough that most of the time it works out, and when it doesn't, we can roll back easily.
If this isn't working out, I hire experts to improve the quality of decision-making, with me making decisions as a last resort.
So… the goal is for you to do nothing? Except not impede people making decisions and hiring consultants when you, not the person closer to the issue, thinks it’s not working?
The layers above do likely understand the actual business goals better, and want to be sure that this thing you are asking for is actually going to support achieving those goals. Ideally that is the case, anyway.
If you've got the CEO, and you've got front-line workers doing the actual value-producing business, you can have two layers in between, sure. Maybe three layers.
But once you get to four or five layers? I hope your culture and productivity and ways of working were exactly where they need to be, because they're now impossible for anyone to consciously change.
There's a big difference between for e.g. Twitter where ultimately you have thousands of people working on a single product, and a conglomerate like Siemens or GE where you have very different, almost totally independent, business units doing totally different things.
After working at a very large Telco with 50,000 employees and management style straight from the 1950's, your comment hit the nail precisely on the head. I put faces to the positions in your comment, and it sent shivers down my spine.
A way to sidestep this is by giving people financial authority. Say you're a team lead of half a dozen developers, so you get a blank approval for anything your team orders under 500$, 1 level of review for 500-2k$, and a third level (or HR) approval for hires and raises.
Of course, for that to work a company would have to place trust even into lowest levels of management, and that is what causes a lot of friction: people are feeling the disconnect between them being responsible on one side for the success of a contract that brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, but apparently cannot be trusted to not waste 20$ on someone who managed to drown his computer keyboard in coffee by accident, no, that has to go through three levels of approval.
I seem to recall that the central takeaway from the essay tyranny of structurelessness is that when one affects to dispose of an official, formal and acknowledged power hierarchy, it simply reappears as an unofficial, informal, actively disavowed, and even more paranoid version of its former self.
The difference is that in soviets (in the original sense) the workers held actual power. Bayer still wants full control over their workers, they just want to offload all the responsibility normally held by middle management to them as well.
They're trying to get rid of "hierarchies" without getting rid of the power structure. I don't see how this benefits the workers at all.
Using Meta as a source of good management is a fallacy that needs to be tackled.
Meta has only managed to release one new "domestic" product since facebook advertising (threads) and only one of the features released on the main apps has stuck (reels)
there is no strategic direction at meta, its a mass of noise, poor project management and bloated orgs craving for any metric of success other than what makes the user happy.
Meta is only successful because it has one team that brings in >90% of all income(Ads). Not only that but its incredibly good at it. Every other department is effectively a cost center.
Now Bayer might have ossified, given that it actually has a rule book (meta does not, it smears industrial quantities of docs at a wall to see what sticks)
It's like when people look at Google for inspiration. The employer brand is cool and flashy, but in reality they're just a nouveau riche search engine. Yes, they generate revenue on other services as well, but the insane profits that allow them to be what they are come from a product launched in 1998.
Stories and Live have become such integral parts of the platform, for some people that's all they use it for. No posts, no reels, just ephemeral content.
One sector of a company bringing in the lion's share of the revenue isn't necessarily a red flag, it's actually the case for a _lot_ of companies. G being the most obvious example.
"Meta can't innovate" is a take I've been reading online since 2014. If your analysis was correct, do you really think it'd be worth nearly 10x what it was 10 years ago?
Shops, doesn't work, really high friction way to buy stuff.
Reels, great, but how long did it take to get it to work? especailly is it was(or should) have been a modified instagram TV
> "Meta can't innovate" is a take I've been reading online since 2014
Meta has one product, which is advertising. It has singularly fucked up the blue app to the point where its basically unusable for anyone younger than 30. Its trying to get there with instagram, but thats a separate story.
Instagram has been dented by Tiktok. the only saving grace is that the vast majority of impressions on tiktok are for people who are not yet old enough to have a credit card, or if they are, not enough spare cash to be worth targeting. However that is changing.
Meta hardware is great. It's software stack sucks hard.
Oculus: come and play games with us, just don't expect to be able to join your friends. Oh, and before you can play you need to do an update, oh and charge the device, because we wake it up every hour to check to see if we need an update.
You want to join your friends? just start a party! oh wait that game doesn't support it. Ok. have you tried just phoning them?
The amount of research that they are doing is phenomenal. Its just a shame there is no attention to customer experience so that all of that research can be applied to a product that is easy to use and does what it promises.
Rayban stories: Headphones in your glasses! oh wait you want to listen to more than 5 minutes of music? sorry I need to reboot. oh you want me to re-connect to your phone? naaa we can't do that. You'll need to turn me off and on again. but don't get comfortable, we're going to disconnect in 6 minutes! (it took a year for rayban stories to reliably connect to an iphone. a _year_ so much time that the rayban sales specialist said to my optometrist "yeah they look cool, but don't order them, they're way more hassle than they're worth. something like 70% get returned inside a month")
> Stories and Live have become such integral parts of the platform, for some people that's all they use it for. No posts, no reels, just ephemeral content.
And yet the entire feature is relegated to a tiny strip of horizontally-scrolled content at the top of the home tab. It's a complete failure of UI.
I’ve worked in an environment where there are no managers for 4 1/2 years and it’s been fantastic. Here’s to getting rid of them in most (but certainly not all!) places.
It's no secret that small teams of experts do not need managers. But if the team grows, you will either have to sacrifice producer productivity to coordination and management tasks or hire someone to offload those responsibilities. Many orgs struggle as they undergo a "phase change" from one type of team to another, as it requires a different set of skills, strategies and expectations along with dramatically higher staffing requirements. There is probably a way to compartmentalize some larger projects so you are an aggregation of smaller teams but I personally haven't seen it so I can't comment on it.
I've gone the other way! I used to be strongly against managers. I drooled over that Valve manual describing the flat hierarchy, etc., and I would have honestly said that managers in general were a parasite that had latched on to the software industry. That's honestly what I felt.
Now I work at a place with not enough managers to go around, and my team basically has 25% of a PM's time, and no dedicated department head (last guy quit, leadership has not decided whether to rehire). It's absolute chaos. No shit shield between us and leadership, nobody to soak up all the excess meetings required to understand what's going on throughout the company, nobody with political weight to throw around on our behalf, nobody to persist a long term vision for our department. We're working twice as hard to tread water, and creating a lot of technical debt while we only barely stay on top of our basic responsibilities.
It may be that, at an organization that is set up not to have managers, it's better than just being the one group in an organization that doesn't have one. I admit that's a possibility.
But, at another organization, I've actually had great experiences with managers, who cleared the road for me and made me feel like I was doing better work more easily than I was without them. So, on the whole I am pro manager, so long as they are very very very good at it.
> So, on the whole I am pro manager, so long as they are very very very good at it.
That is a big "if" because most of the managers I have seen are on the spectrum of "ok" to "very bad"; the really good ones are rare and usually move up leaving spoiled employees that have to endure being managed by the norm of "ok" to "very bad".
> I’ve worked in an environment where there are no managers
I've opened your profile and then your website just to find out where is this magic place is. How fitting that it turned out to be on other side of the globe from my place... But good for you :-)
Who checks on if you’ve completed your assigned work. This can only be possible in an academic/non profit environment where there are no deadlines or fixed client commitments.
By the time someone has entered the workforce it should not be necessary to be ‘checked on’ by some surrogate parental figure.
In a functioning workplace, everyone agrees to do their work because it is part of the social contract of working on a team. They don’t need to be told what to do. If someone is falling behind, they’ll talk to other team members and work together to get back on track. You are there to help your coworkers, and they are there to help you. Someone doesn’t have to be your manager to make sure projects run smoothly; everyone can take turns in this role if they feel like it’s something they’re interested in doing and are competent in that role.
It’s only through the distorted lens of corporate ladder climbing and backstabbing departmental politics that the idea arises that you’ll just hire untrustworthy people and then beat them into submission by making a workplace into a prison.
There are multiple dimensions in the latent space that is contemporary white collar management.
One is interfacing the work of a group of people with the needs and wants of others.
Another is doing administrative things like who has done this compliance course or who needs a security authorization.
A third is allocating credit and blame to group members (aka compensation).
A fourth is ensuring that the work product itself is on track (aka technical leadership).
A fifth is ensuring that schedule commitments to other stakeholders are honored.
If you take out the third dimension (credit and blame), then even if a single person happens to do the other 4, they probably won’t feel much like what you’d call a “manager” today.
This is a long-winded way of saying that the various things a manager does can be disaggregated and either spread around the team, eliminated or given to a different person.
I do sometimes think a self organized hierarchy is better than one organized by fiat. Everyone always will say, "Ah - but then you just get an implicit hierarchy rather than an explicit one" with these types of systems but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. For example, There shouldn't necessarily be one escalation channel for all types of conflict - technical decisions may get resolved differently than intra-personal conflicts.
Or, if you force a team to be under an incompetent leader in a traditional structure, you get a really unhappy unproductive team but in an implicit structure that 'leader' is quickly sidelined when people figure out the quality of their decisions are poor, and if they want to get things done - which most do in a properly incentivized org- they should find another path.
> but in an implicit structure that 'leader' is quickly sidelined when people figure out the quality of their decisions are poor
More likely to end up in turf war unless exist legible means to transition leadership. Some members will stick with old leader for various reason, some will push for new, some will be unawares and courted to choose their side. Person in leadership does not most likely give it up quietly and immediately.
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I’ve seen this first hand. One place where I worked HR even had a table of team size vs manager compensation. When I pointed out that it may not be the best idea to directly incentivize managers to hire more people they were less than understanding. Of course it went totally out of control.
But sadly there just is no counteracting force (except perhaps mr Musk). When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?”, and they won’t be impressed when you say “I managed to keep it down to four people”. It’s just something that resonates very strongly with the primitive side of our brains (“You say you were the chief, how big was your tribe?”).
I was once in a meeting where an IT manager was told his group would have to handle the install for a piece of software that like 2 engineers used. The guy asked for 3 additional head count and my jaw dropped. If someone has ever seen the Avatar Airbender show, I was like Prince Zuko speaking up at his father's meeting. You see I was there as a courtesy and tried to point out that even one headcount seemed like a lot for something that should take less than a week of work for a single employee. At the time I didn't understand that the manager understood this, but was playing for more staff to build their own importance. I didn't understand the games they play. As part of the game...you always say your people are swamped no matter what...or refer to a massive backlog of work even though that backlog is all super low priority and existing employees can be reprioritized.
(I know this isn't really a miscommunication. It's misaligned incentives leading to an exasperating kind of logrolling.)
Every manager I had at every major multinational company only had the interest of their own career progression in mind, not the company's, not their team's. You as an employee under them were just a means to their goal, nothing more. I naively assumed that making them look good and doing the overtime when needed to achieve their idiotic deadlines would also guarantee my ascension later, but boy was I gullible and wrong.
Going the extra mile for your boss might work out for you when everything goes smooth in the org in times of economic prosperity when there's room for everyone to move up, but when the org or economy went tits up, and things were being put on chopping block, those managers didn't hesitate to grab the only parachute for themselves and let their team sink or throw them under the bus to save themselves at the tune of "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish", so I learned the valuable lesson to not go the extra mile for any boss unless I have written guarantees of a reward.
It's the way the reward system is set up in these companies. Climb the ladder and kick it under you after you dangle the carrot in front of naive idiots to push you up that ladder for rewards they might never see. I think someone called it "the GE way".
Ah yes .. current prios remain in place, more context switching, operational ownership, unplanned fallout, holidays, meetings ... cutting the pie in more pieces does not give you more pie ... people still seem to think that ...
No co-incidence New York is called the "Empire State"
Hiring too much is one of the things the "falling upwards" specialists do
"To comprehend Factor I, we must picture a civil servant called A who finds himself overworked. Whether this overwork is real or imaginary is immaterial; but we should observe, in passing, that A’s sensation (or illusion) might easily result from his own decreasing energy—a normal symptom of middle-age. For this real or imagined overwork there are, broadly speaking, three possible remedies
(1) He may resign.
(2) He may ask to halve the work with a colleague called B.
(3) He may demand the assistance of two subordinates, to be called C and D.
There is probably no instance in civil service history of A choosing any but the third alternative. By resignation he would lose his pension rights. By having B appointed, on his own level in the hierarchy, he would merely bring in a rival for promotion to W’s vacancy when W (at long last) retires. So A would rather have C and D, junior men, below him. They will add to his consequence; and, by dividing the work into two categories, as between C and D, he will have the merit of being the only man who comprehends them both."
Thanks for the proper write up.
I’m not sure that private firms are much better. Especially if the work they are doing has been contracted out to them.
I had this same interaction when applying for Staff+ software engineer (not manager) at two FAANGs.
One of the recruiters sniffed, or maybe negged, and said they expected X number people under you for that role.
Highly effective small teams was considered small-time, not a selling point. Also not-OK was leading engineering for an early startup. Nor was a cross-company Principal role interfacing with everyone.
(However, both companies were still open to me doing their new-grad Leetcode hazing battery or Python grunting automated screening test. Which isn't a sign that their culture is otherwise good, other than the team size fixation.)
If that doesn’t work for a given company, well, interviews go two ways :)
Ridiculous. Essentially saying the staff role is management in all but name.
> Highly effective small teams was considered small-time, not a selling point. Also not-OK was leading engineering for an early startup. Nor was a cross-company Principal role interfacing with everyone.
Hilarious they insist on holding ICs feet to the fire for hiring while letting their own culture wither away to petty little fiefdoms.
“I built a massively complex system to manage our cloud deployment” looks superficially more impressive than “I eliminated the need for a complex deployment by rearchitecting a bit and consolidating systems, so then I only had to manage a few things.”
The first person will have more code they can cite and more expertise wrangling more systems. They’ll be able to talk about all the big sexy “hyperscale” stuff they have managed with lots of terabytes and Kubernetes and terraform and helm charts. Most people would probably hire this person.
I’d hire the second person.
It’s basically the midwit meme, which is so popular because it illustrates something real.
There seems to be a core conflict in society between systems as things we build to do things vs systems as ends in themselves. Morons just do things. Geniuses just do things. Midwits get mixed up into the process of doing things and forget the point.
That is more of a marketing issue, write something like, "Improved efficiency of deployment by x% by re-architecting systems x, y, and z which saved $xxM/year."
The question is always ‘what ad budget did you manage?’.
Not ‘what return on ad spend ratio did you achieve?’.
The 'cutter's compensation is tied to how much they cut.
Of course, they will also need a team, to more efficiently cut other teams.
And they in turn will also be incentivized to grow their team, the manager of the cutting team isn't immune to wanting to grow their team.
But then it gets up to CEO, who has someone reporting to them who's only goal is cutting. The cutter has a team, with some managers of teams of cutters. It's turtles all the way up, but it does end at CEO.
Generally every big company I've worked for, yes, had empire building. But then also had people to cut empires.
So every few years there were layoffs to trim it up.
There's a type of cell called the osteoblasts which grow and reinforce tissue, and there's another type called the osteoclasts, which dissolve it.
If there is insufficient manpower, it is often because they are building things they shouldn't. At least this was my experience.
When shopping for vendors to achieve something, my instinct is to try to find a way to do more with less. But I'm told that's dumb, I need to spend all the budget and ask for more, lest I be seen as a loser.
In enterprise companies like the one I recently left, management is incentivized to kiss up try and do more with less, but wants more people to buttress their role as well as help determine the role above them. My prior boss in this same organization had multiple teams but rather than have the teams talk about their work insisted on being the one to present upward and rarely invited his teams to join.
> Dysfunctional behaviour is ubiquitous and systemic, not because people are wicked but because the requirement to serve the hierarchy competes with the requirements to serve customers. People's ingenuity is engaged in survival, not improvement.
- Freedom from Command & Control, John Seddon
I don't see it claiming it's some deep novel insight, it's just someone prominent who said something recently that's salient to the point.
I honestly would strongly prefer 4 people who are highly smart (think prodigy- or genius-level) below me than 20 "somewhat intelligent" employees (i.e. what at least 95 % of employees are).
IMO your best bet is to pick and choose who you need based on the situation. Your already-in-production CRUD app may benefit from a few extra 50th percentile coders to help with the workload, but if you're building a ground breaking product from scratch, then a deliberately small team of top echelon nerds may make the difference between success and hard fail.
sweet summer child.
My father used to tell me he preferred to ask 'what did you build' or 'what did your team accomplish' instead.
> when there’s no real constraint on hiring
Of course there’s empire building because of prestige. And even more, the enthusiasm of people who joined your growth company to make an impact, who then see all the possibilities if they just hired a little.
Keeping all those bad and good instincts balanced with the actual company needs is the task of management.
So if you handle $$$ worth of book, you get $$$ worth of headcount to keep that going
Coming at this problem from the manager / owner point of view: If your company is bootstrapped or hasn't raised a lot of money headcount can be a first guess at valuation. Or how seriously another partner in business takes you. Companies that balloon in size tend to be taken very seriously while small profitable ones get less attention. So the pressure can go both ways.
Ie 5% of gross revenue / employees. So every time you add someone you reduce the bonus unless that person adds more to gross revenue?
I suspect if you incentivized managers to keep their teams small, through a bonus pool, it would definitely result in smaller teams, but also with the danger of overworked ones. That seems self-fulfilling though, if you're overworked but you know there's a reward with it.
That all being said, most places don't have bonus pools so it's a mute point.
And everyone got the same grade?
That happens in corp land all the time too, and it’s extremely demotivating.
Paired with a nice xmas bonus and year end review/raises, it basically meant no-one quit because you were never more then 6 months from a fat check.
Thats the same dynamic in civil service environments. Some people are motivated by dick measuring contests, and life will find a way to give those folks a metric. When I was a director at a large agency, one of my peers came into my office, proud as a peacock, to let me know that a re-org meant that he now had 113 employees. It smashed his soul when he realized I had more.
It’s all huff and puff.
"Big enough to hunt woolly mammoth"
Does nobody get tired of managing a huge army? Or do they just all assume they can delegate it, like an HR pyramid scheme?
Lot of companies have terrible exec teams that are out of touch with the company
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But yeah following Goodhart's law it's bad if it makes managers hire new people instead of vanquishing other managers and taking other employees under their direct command.
Without me, my team would drown in less than a week. Say what you want about that implying a lack of resilience, or that I’m not teaching a man to fish, but it’s the current reality. I work insanely hard to ensure that they can do their best work, that their best work always gets better, and that they get the most out of their time in my team, distraction-free. I work insanely hard to smooth over organisational politics, communications failures, and so many other things that every day without fail so many people in this community bitch and moan about.
This is an anonymous account, there’s no benefit to me self-promoting. I’d never be this confidently candid were my name attached, no matter who I was talking to.
Maybe you should go find a better team to work for.
Just lie. Then you will see it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not sure how to recruit for managers in a huge corporation, I don’t think even huge corporations necessarily know.
One thing’s for sure: a big difference between some ICs and Managers, at least the managers you actually want to work for, is that those most non-manager ICs seem to be really fucking bought into some very reductive points of view.
Yes, the liars should consolidate with the idiots at the dysfunctional companies, and leave the rest of us alone. :)
“My core team is always small but is capable of networking and scaling with other expert teams, in order to manage large projects”
There is no no-hierarchies. Working in a 3 month cadence on an organizational level puts a lot of pressure on all people. Usually QBRs work top down and there is more monitoring along the process.
What sounds great is more or less success theatre as well as inflexibility. No one wants to lack behind in a QBR report. Risking 4 times a year being red flagged in a report sparks fear.
Also approval processes and idea sharing are the first victims of such reorganizations. No one risks a 2 week sprint for some improvement sprint or working on technical debt in tech for example.
I’ve seen this within a company with 100k employees worldwide.
People will regret QBRs.
Usually companies want to get rid of the costs of middle managers, which are usually elder than normal staffers. Also companies want to include younger folks, because they are on average cheaper per resource from a controlling perspective.
Young guns without leadership with delivery pressure by an even older senior management layer means having a large gap and divide between them.
Senior management adds so called assistants to their staff, the hidden layer.
I watched a lot of mobbing at the lower level as a result. Fear of tumbling over mistakes aka receiving a bad performance review is rampant when you need to report all the time results.
Mixing teams every QBR sounds fun, but isn’t. It means even more being in constant competition. Who is the most flexible employee and most successful under different circumstances?
Large organizations are hard to manage. People will very soon miss their middle managers to cover things up in a human way.
QBRs don’t help if there is a clear product strategy missing.
There is no perfect system, but QBRs are some of the most toxic form of working and collaboration that I have witnessed so far.
It sounds great to be metric and goal driven, allowing employees to decide for themselves how to best reach those business goals. I've never seem it implemented this way though. Instead, I've seen leaders define goals and solutions together, paired with a list of metrics used to define success so specifically that annual reviews and layoffs become an almost mathematical, robotic process.
It's a critique from a feminist in the 70s account how the feminist movement's attempt to have no hierarchy created implicit hierarchies that were less accountable too the group than explicit hierarchies
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i thought maybe quarterly business review, but not sure after reading several descriptions around...
The lowest management layer cannot make any decisions alone, otherwise the next layer would have no reason to exist. The next layer might even have to hand over the decision to one layer above. Up there no one really understands the decision that needs to be made because they are too far away from the actual impact. The result is that the decision is not made at all. Instead they procrastinate by asking for more details about the decision and the options.
If you have only one layer you get a decision very fast.
If you even attempt something like this, what will actually happen will be a chaotic hierarchy arising within the larger group, with people playing politics to rise above their peers.
Edit: I should add that I absolutely believe a bottom-up organization can work, but it needs to be built with the right organizational model in place. You can't just say "no managers" and expect people to work directly for the CEO. You can put in place rules so that employees can self-organize, appoint representatives to interact with other teams, vote for collective decision making and so on. But this typically requires a huge power loss for the C-suite and owners, which is why it's very unlikely to work well outside of a co-op.
It should be possible to manage 22 employees if you are good at setting directions and explaining why those directions have been chosen. You can have 22 people in one room and do functional group discussions, this is like a good size for a school class.
I have yet to see a company with 10_000 employees and only 2 levels of management between workers and the CEO.If you add another management layer, it is only 10 people per manager. This is not much and quickly gets into micromanagement if the manager works fulltime at managing.
Your point is generally good, but not universally true. Mostly-flat organizations do work in certain contexts.
If this isn't working out, I hire experts to improve the quality of decision-making, with me making decisions as a last resort.
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If you've got the CEO, and you've got front-line workers doing the actual value-producing business, you can have two layers in between, sure. Maybe three layers.
But once you get to four or five layers? I hope your culture and productivity and ways of working were exactly where they need to be, because they're now impossible for anyone to consciously change.
There's a big difference between for e.g. Twitter where ultimately you have thousands of people working on a single product, and a conglomerate like Siemens or GE where you have very different, almost totally independent, business units doing totally different things.
Never again.
Of course, for that to work a company would have to place trust even into lowest levels of management, and that is what causes a lot of friction: people are feeling the disconnect between them being responsible on one side for the success of a contract that brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, but apparently cannot be trusted to not waste 20$ on someone who managed to drown his computer keyboard in coffee by accident, no, that has to go through three levels of approval.
Similar to how if governments get too weak, you end up with warlords/gangs just taking their place, power abhors a vacuum and all that.
They're trying to get rid of "hierarchies" without getting rid of the power structure. I don't see how this benefits the workers at all.
Meta has only managed to release one new "domestic" product since facebook advertising (threads) and only one of the features released on the main apps has stuck (reels)
there is no strategic direction at meta, its a mass of noise, poor project management and bloated orgs craving for any metric of success other than what makes the user happy.
Meta is only successful because it has one team that brings in >90% of all income(Ads). Not only that but its incredibly good at it. Every other department is effectively a cost center.
Now Bayer might have ossified, given that it actually has a rule book (meta does not, it smears industrial quantities of docs at a wall to see what sticks)
Stories and Live have become such integral parts of the platform, for some people that's all they use it for. No posts, no reels, just ephemeral content.
One sector of a company bringing in the lion's share of the revenue isn't necessarily a red flag, it's actually the case for a _lot_ of companies. G being the most obvious example.
"Meta can't innovate" is a take I've been reading online since 2014. If your analysis was correct, do you really think it'd be worth nearly 10x what it was 10 years ago?
Yes.
Shops, doesn't work, really high friction way to buy stuff.
Reels, great, but how long did it take to get it to work? especailly is it was(or should) have been a modified instagram TV
> "Meta can't innovate" is a take I've been reading online since 2014
Meta has one product, which is advertising. It has singularly fucked up the blue app to the point where its basically unusable for anyone younger than 30. Its trying to get there with instagram, but thats a separate story.
Instagram has been dented by Tiktok. the only saving grace is that the vast majority of impressions on tiktok are for people who are not yet old enough to have a credit card, or if they are, not enough spare cash to be worth targeting. However that is changing.
Meta hardware is great. It's software stack sucks hard.
Oculus: come and play games with us, just don't expect to be able to join your friends. Oh, and before you can play you need to do an update, oh and charge the device, because we wake it up every hour to check to see if we need an update.
You want to join your friends? just start a party! oh wait that game doesn't support it. Ok. have you tried just phoning them?
The amount of research that they are doing is phenomenal. Its just a shame there is no attention to customer experience so that all of that research can be applied to a product that is easy to use and does what it promises.
Rayban stories: Headphones in your glasses! oh wait you want to listen to more than 5 minutes of music? sorry I need to reboot. oh you want me to re-connect to your phone? naaa we can't do that. You'll need to turn me off and on again. but don't get comfortable, we're going to disconnect in 6 minutes! (it took a year for rayban stories to reliably connect to an iphone. a _year_ so much time that the rayban sales specialist said to my optometrist "yeah they look cool, but don't order them, they're way more hassle than they're worth. something like 70% get returned inside a month")
And yet the entire feature is relegated to a tiny strip of horizontally-scrolled content at the top of the home tab. It's a complete failure of UI.
It’s 100% consistent with the ad platform being really good. Facebook was the best way to advertise well into 2020.
Now I work at a place with not enough managers to go around, and my team basically has 25% of a PM's time, and no dedicated department head (last guy quit, leadership has not decided whether to rehire). It's absolute chaos. No shit shield between us and leadership, nobody to soak up all the excess meetings required to understand what's going on throughout the company, nobody with political weight to throw around on our behalf, nobody to persist a long term vision for our department. We're working twice as hard to tread water, and creating a lot of technical debt while we only barely stay on top of our basic responsibilities.
It may be that, at an organization that is set up not to have managers, it's better than just being the one group in an organization that doesn't have one. I admit that's a possibility.
But, at another organization, I've actually had great experiences with managers, who cleared the road for me and made me feel like I was doing better work more easily than I was without them. So, on the whole I am pro manager, so long as they are very very very good at it.
That is a big "if" because most of the managers I have seen are on the spectrum of "ok" to "very bad"; the really good ones are rare and usually move up leaving spoiled employees that have to endure being managed by the norm of "ok" to "very bad".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114530
I've opened your profile and then your website just to find out where is this magic place is. How fitting that it turned out to be on other side of the globe from my place... But good for you :-)
In a functioning workplace, everyone agrees to do their work because it is part of the social contract of working on a team. They don’t need to be told what to do. If someone is falling behind, they’ll talk to other team members and work together to get back on track. You are there to help your coworkers, and they are there to help you. Someone doesn’t have to be your manager to make sure projects run smoothly; everyone can take turns in this role if they feel like it’s something they’re interested in doing and are competent in that role.
It’s only through the distorted lens of corporate ladder climbing and backstabbing departmental politics that the idea arises that you’ll just hire untrustworthy people and then beat them into submission by making a workplace into a prison.
One is interfacing the work of a group of people with the needs and wants of others.
Another is doing administrative things like who has done this compliance course or who needs a security authorization.
A third is allocating credit and blame to group members (aka compensation).
A fourth is ensuring that the work product itself is on track (aka technical leadership).
A fifth is ensuring that schedule commitments to other stakeholders are honored.
If you take out the third dimension (credit and blame), then even if a single person happens to do the other 4, they probably won’t feel much like what you’d call a “manager” today.
This is a long-winded way of saying that the various things a manager does can be disaggregated and either spread around the team, eliminated or given to a different person.
Or, if you force a team to be under an incompetent leader in a traditional structure, you get a really unhappy unproductive team but in an implicit structure that 'leader' is quickly sidelined when people figure out the quality of their decisions are poor, and if they want to get things done - which most do in a properly incentivized org- they should find another path.
More likely to end up in turf war unless exist legible means to transition leadership. Some members will stick with old leader for various reason, some will push for new, some will be unawares and courted to choose their side. Person in leadership does not most likely give it up quietly and immediately.
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