> 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.)
There are not many options. Headcount might help (secondment, overtime, contractors, move from another team, new hire) or pushing other work back (or cancelling it, reducing scope) or saying no (find a workaround, go without it). I might of missed it but there is only so much you can do. A win win might be showing how doing X now is not worth it because event Y makes X obsolete or less valuable.
You can just have a queue. I’ve seen departments that basically function as an internal vendor of services to other departments. First in first out. Fixed schedule to expect turn around on most requests. No one complains. Seems quite pragmatic and fair.
Until they become the sole group that does X (Officially), and other groups realize that having them do a simple task related to X is way more hassles and months of wait time so each team just build their own unofficial X or try to circumvent it from day 0.
I'm not say this or that method is better just pointing out what I've seen so far through different companies. Not all work is the same priority but if you try to reprioritize then you can enter the endless quagmire of inter-department/group politics than involve a lot of useless meetings.
And a simple FIFO queue can be equally as problematic.
I have seen it where they are literally the sole provider of x. Cheaper than third party x vendor even because of a lack of profit margin charging internally. Still their terms are straightforward and there’s no bullshitting.
Only works if you have a lot of funds or your funding model isn’t broken. Where I work it’s a big dance around funding IT to build or connect stuff for Ops/Engineering. Because it’s such a chore there are lots of alternatives (ticketing, middleware, event management/collection system etc.) or even shadow IT.
FIFO is not an efficient way to prioritise work, though. Unless all work has about the same value and urgency, in which case, I guess, that sounds nice.
If you are an specialized department, insulated from the organizational goals, and circled by people that only speak in riddles, FIFO is the best you can do.
The context was in R and D at a large organization. Are some projects better funded/further along/seemingly more important to spearhead? Sure. But that was not how this department handled the workload. Dozens of people are coming to them a day for work done on hundreds of separate projects potentially. They can’t afford to triage this workload nor even can you really. Like I said, no one complained because despite FIFO turnaround was still faster (that afternoon if you got your job in during the morning potentially) and cheaper than any third party vendor.
This seems impossible to fix in a divisional org structure, where each division owns their P&L. If I'm in division A, and division B wants something from us that won't make a difference on my P&L (or will just add costs [headcount]), why would I be incentivized to help? If they pay for it though, that's a fee for service. Seems fine. It's all internal accounting anyway, so it's mostly fake.
That likely depends on how exactly your org works. In my company, usually cross-org funded HC is permanent. It is expected though that you do whatever they ask for with that HC for ~3-5 years.
> 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".
From my perspective, I've had mostly good managers, in the sense that I've had multiple managers get fired over the years for being more interested in making sure the team had the tools and support that it needed than doing what the org at large wanted that wasn't possible.
To me, the best managers I've had have done a good job balancing what their team was able to do against what the org needed/wanted them to do. Sometimes that was pushing back against the org and doing the hard work of saying things weren't going to happen, and sometimes it was being clear and sympathetic about conveying difficult realities down to the team about what was needed. I've had managers convey things to me that ultimately led to me quitting and finding other work, but I hold them in high esteem because they clearly communicated what needed to be done to meet demands and I decided it wasn't for me and didn't hold it against me.
There are good managers. They're just also good peers who happen to be your manager and fulfill the role of a manager as best they can. Sometimes the system of the company rejects that, but that's also a sign you're maybe working somewhere that wants you to have no peers and no support, and maybe that should prompt some changes for you as an employee.
For years, all my managers were extremely bad to the point where I thought I was the problem. Until I had my first good manager.
My definition is: if my level of stress after a meeting with a manager is lower than before, then it is a good manager.
With bad managers, I carefully select what I share, often downright lie to them just to limit my stress level. I know a bad manager will throw me under the bus to save their ass, so I behave accordingly. I essentially manipulate them as much as I can: it's politics.
With a good manager, I share all I can, reach out when I need their help, and have their back when stuff goes south. It's team work.
As an IC, a good manager will shield you from the chaos, infighting, changing priorities and ever shifting timelines. They will ensure that you are aware of what’s going on, and have enough clarity to be able to proceed.
A bad manager will most likely try to help by exposing you to all of the above, and cause you get caught up in all of the confusion that comes with it.
I think it’s important to say that they also protect from rogue/drive by superstar IC’s. The ones who will come along and “fix” your problem, leaving a mess that nobody understands behind them that makes them look competent and your team incompetent, when in reality they’ve just half assed the job.
I’ve seen managers stand up for their teams and defend against those guys successfully.
It really reveals how clueless some managers are when they sing praises of the "rockstar" IC who from day 1 trash talked their coworkers and broke everything they touched before leaving after a few months to do the same somewhere else.
It shows how managers often just base their opinions on vibes given in meetings and don't care to understand anything they're managing.
Having worked in both very flat and very hierarchical organizations, I can tell you exactly what makes a good manager. Any manager, good or bad, is an information bottleneck. Managers have more organizational exposure and are thus a much bigger target for communication. The good ones filter out noise and help you prioritize your work.
The problem I have with less hierarchical organizations is that when you have only one layer of middle management, middle management gets squeezed between executives and individual contributors and tends to burn out. Even worse with zero layers, where individual contributors are expected to self-manage. Communication overhead ends up eating most of the productive hours of the day.
The empire-building problem with more hierarchical organizations is already well explored in this thread, but communications are also a problem. With too many layers, organizational alignment suffers, and silos develop even if the managers involved are uniformly well-intentioned.
There's an underappreciated upside to silos, however, which is that functional parts of the organization can end up insulated from dysfunctional ones. In flat organizations, dysfunction anywhere is dysfunction everywhere.
A disproportionately large group of the good managers I've had were ex-military, and their big traits were clarity about what we were doing and why, and that when the SHTF they would fight alongside the team, not against it. This wasn't exclusive to ex-military types, but if you are so cynical as to believe in no good managers you may want to look for places which employ this style.
I can imagine within gov contracting this same group of people are violently annoying instead, but I have never had the experience of that world.
I have had a good manager and here are some concrete examples. He thought it was important to deliver what we promised so he would work with us to get good estimates and would then bring those outside our team and argue for a reasonable time/scope. He would deflect stupid requests (add AI to our project that had no reason for it). In my four years working under him he got us two off cycle inflation adjustments by going to HR and telling them to retain good talent in software we need to pay more.
Is it possible for the manager to be given insufficient resources by their manager? Such as insufficient pay to hire sufficiently skilled people, or insufficient budget to hire sufficient people?
In a good organization, there will be several layers of people owning failures of different types. The low level manager can claim ownership of failure to sufficiently manage expectations, their manager can claim ownership of failure to prioritize properly, and a yet higher level leader can own failure to provide funding.
It's a responsibility of management to ensure that the work is understood and proper resources are negotiated for and allocated to perform it.
When a manager doesn't understand the scope of the work or has not made the case for adequate resources, to the project's jeopardy or their team's, it's typically referred to as mismanagement.
If this culture of under-serving itself for no apparent benefit except to appear too busy to be assigned more work extends elsewhere, it could be an organizational issue. If it's a SNAFU principle situation, management needs to be brought in alignment and trust with leadership, or leadership needs to be replaced. I've encountered both at the same place at the same time, and thankfully the board agreed.
Is it possible for the IC to be given insufficient resources by their PM? Such an insufficient pay or insufficient time or or? Whose fault is the failure then? My point is, we all work between lines and try to do our best, whether we are managers or ICs. A good manager will try to do their best just as you do, a bad one will throw all his troubles on your back, or blame you/the organization/moon phases for them.
It's about shielding the team from the consequences of failure. A good manager will say "If my team failed it's because I did not prepare them well enough/lead them well enough/manage expectations well enough". this is what ownership looks like. It is orthogonal to probability of failure.
I like this take a lot. This assumes that authority, competence and responsibility are aligned. However, this is often not the case in "modern" management as authority is spread very thin and responsibility is fluid (highly dependent on outcome).
Well I've had good managers but you're right in that they were peers more than emperors.
As for something concrete, I can think of managers fighting for my bonus allocations, fighting for comp days after a crunchy deadline, things like that. Estimation was earnest and not pushy. Problems were handled in a solution oriented way, not a blame game. You could argue that's just maintaining combat readiness but I'll take it.
I see here a lot of generalities about good managers helping you prioritize work, shielding you from chaos, bringing organization to the team, etc. These are necessary, but not sufficient. Any reasonably well-organized, good-intentioned, and less selfish person/manager can do that, but I wouldn't necessarily call them a good manager.
The measure of a good manager is their willingness to do something difficult for them for the benefit of their team or reports, such as saying no to various pressures from upper management, not jumping into latest trends pushed down to the teams, not saying yes to every new pivot, etc. Most people in a work situation would not do that, which is why there are no good managers.
I've had good managers. They always get outplayed and outmaneuvered and ultimately fired and replaced by sociopaths who spend all their time successfully playing politics and never doing anything significant.
I never said all managers all bad or that they should be removed and employees should self organize instead. Managers are needed so that ICs can focus on the work, the problem is that a lot of large companies, especially from traditional industries, tend to create some of the worst kinds of managers possible because their incentives are the worst.
I dream of a graduation speech where someone says all of this stuff, or even a proper uni course “avoiding corporate bullshit in a narcissistic world and how to sue your landlord” … except the donors wont like this!
> 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.
C. Northcote Parkinson is a great and very under-appreciated economist. His books are easy reads and well worth it. He made many astute observations about human behavior, not just Parkinson's Law.
I think it’s a different calculation in smaller companies or companies where employees have equity. “I make money if the business is successful” tends to remove a lot of bullshit you see in larger corporations and civil service.
> 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.
Yes, this is my mantra. Senior Only-Developers are attracted to complex problems and try to make things using as many language from the "advanced" book as possible.
That's why I like all-round developers better, they have a bit less to prove by making "smart and complicated" code.
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.
> 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.
Reminiscent of choosing teams in PE/sports lessons at school. The sporty kids who were good at the teacher's favourite sport get to pick, and kids like I was get left to the end. Nice way to get familiar with the pecking order at an early stage.
It's a good way of getting the best team(s), which is what you want in a company. Maybe not so great for the emotional development of children, of course, but it's hard to say.
You get the teams with people who 'get along' not the best for the company. Mediocrity with friends in high places gets far further. That's not any form of meritocracy.
> Mediocrity with friends in high places gets far further
That doesn't happen all the time, at all. It happens more in places where results are less measurable, or where you don't have to attract customers, but that doesn't mean it happens a lot. And merit isn't just competence. If a leader knows from experience they can communicate with someone and be understood, that is a big advantage.
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.
> Badly managed BigCorps are overstaffed 3x (or more).
I never knew what a corporate intranet was for until I worked at a huge company. It's for clicking around on, going back and forth, when you have nothing else to do but need to look busy.
Bingo. I find that limiting headcount is a great forcing function for only doing what's important. The classic example is Google making X different chat apps. That doesn't happen unless a company is severely overstaffed.
To me that really just screams lazy and incompetent management. Being overstaffed is just a coincidence. A good mgmt structure would have prioritized that roadmap and gotten the cats herded to work towards a singular goal/chat app. I say this as a "cat" myself who has to be reminded to not get distracted by the next shiny thing.
I'd say it's not. But causality is the reverse of the GP's.
Being overstaffed is a consequence of not prioritizing the work. Either the staff grows until the important things get done, or the organization shrinks because the important stuff doesn't get done.
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.
I may just being nitpicky here. With such a commonly understood, and old, concept it doesn't need ant attribution. Name dropping a random CEO just feels like a cheap addition to get eyes on an article.
I suppose it kind of is, or an 'appeal to authority', I just don't see that as necessarily bad, it's just like 'don't take my word for it, someone you might actually have heard of or in an important position said blah'.
Proper journalists and newspapers spend plenty of time quoting politicians and senior employees making obvious or previously said remarks too.
> 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.
> so you'd better be prepared to listen and support them
... is in my opinion basic management 101.
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Concerning your other points: I do believe that I at least somewhat know how to work with such people (though I never managed such people).
For example, at a former job, I worked under such people; they really liked me, because I was one of the few people who were actually capable of "understanding" their visions and make them understandable to less intelligent (but still smart) colleagues.
I really have a tendency to be liked by frustrated highly-smart people, both because I really love to learn from them and I think I am a decent person to talk to if you are really frustrated (on the other hand, much more "ordinary" people often reproach me for being "unapproachable", "having my head in the clouds", "always being so negative", "complicated to work with", ... :-) ).
Part of building an effective team is picking the right tool for the job, and your assertion that ‘genius’-wrangling is always justified / ‘the best thing to do’ is just plain wrong, no matter how much you try to justify it with…what basically sounds like Dunning Kruger self-flattery.
GP is right. So-called geniuses have their own problems. Problems that can’t just be ‘managed away’, just like you can’t completely ‘manage away’ some other types of poor fit. To say otherwise sounds like the sort of elite technical ability fetishism that, ironically, I’d expect from an IC.
If this has worked for you so far, it’s by coincidence.
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. :/
This is the classic one guy digging the hole and ten observing him doing it.
I've had this discussion a few days ago and it's simply the problem of pay. As soon as you want to make more money you have 'to be in management and act like one' which is utter cow manure since adding managers is not going to make you any product and only delay it or make it worse but the end result is endless managers and not enough actual horses to carry the load.
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.
Depends on the company a bit. The older a company is, the more it accumulates the sorts of people who equate management with cracking a whip. This is the laziest form of management and also the least effective. It's incredibly common, though.
There are some really talented managers out there. The sort of folks you want to work for. You'll find more of these at younger companies.
But the harsh/unfortunate reality is corporate culture generously rewards managers in spite of their effectiveness (lack thereof).
Empire building is probably the single biggest drain on the global economy. The good news is it seems to be getting more attention and companies (Bayer, Meta for example) are taking action to combat it.
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.
I always wanted OKRs to be flipped to a bottom up approach. Let every employee or manager define what's most important to them, or their team, and how they'll measure success. As it goes up the chain, managers and ultimately the CEO are responsible for taking all those goals rolling up to them and craft it into a plan or business direction.
Effectively crowd sourcing your business from all of your employees. Of course you have to actually trust and respect a majority of your employees which really makes it a non-starter for most high level leadership.
So, exaggerating, the CEO would be responsible to craft a business direction from this set:
- publish more as open source,
- migrate to novel:
- libraries
- frameworks
- architectures
- paradigms
- small refactoring that hugely improves elegance and readability,
- big refactoring that barely improves anything,
- add an impressively-sounding feature, sponsored by letters C, R, D and T
- ...in Rust
I'm not saying it'd be easy, or that it'd scale to a massive company, but then I don't think we should have such massive companies which is another discussion.
The examples you give are more like every employee getting to decide what they feel like working on. The idea would be for employees, as the ones almost always closest to customers, to define what they see as mattering most.
You have to remember that OKRs aren't just tasks. Ideas from the bottom up would include what they see as most important along with why its important and how success will be measured.
All of the examples you gave could be great examples if they are complete. Publish more open source to break into a new market or improve code maintainability. Migrate to a new library to fix long standing performance issues or unlock a new feature set. Redactor for readability to reduce code review time or speed up new feature development.
Other, more customer focused, examples could be to improve docs to reduce customer churn or improve discoverability for new users. Maybe you help in a support channel on Slack or Discord and find a ton of users asking for some specific integration, its very easy for you to see that pattern but hard for someone at the top to see it or assign it value.
Pushing down orders from the top is easier, and better at stoking ego. Hiring and developing your team well so you can honestly take their recommendations and craft the next 6 months of marketing or define a new product direction that ties together what your team has seen is much, much harder but an amazing strategy if done right IMO.
My examples were more like every employee getting to decide (cynically, individually) what's best for them.
Your examples are where every employee figures out (altruistically, collectively) what is best for the CEO.
Breaking the symmetry, CEO in both cases decides what's best for the CEO (officially "best for everyone", but in fact you are only counted as "everyone" if you are an employee who is contributing to what's best for the CEO).
I admit that your proposition could very well work fine. Many people do love to get into the shoes of higher-ups.
They probably aren't good employees then, honestly. My scenario here is entirely dependent on leaders trusting their reports, if that isn't possible then at best they can try to force objectives down from the top.
I'd argue that still won't work, and in my experience it hasn't. Id your employees don't understand the business or aren't good at defining goals, you've failed them as a leader. Maybe they shouldn't have been hired, though I'd argue they have been poorly managed and put into roles that don't fit their skills and interests.
The model I was talking about here would be flipping the script entirely though. There wouldn't he a chance for someone to misunderstand the business. Leaders' entire task is taking what their reports' priorities are and unifying a vision and business plan from that (recursively until you reach independent contributors). Employees can never misunderstand, leadership can only misunderstand their employees.
> They probably aren't good employees then, honestly.
This is incredibly naive. Even in single product companies you can have excellent employees (e.g. a CNC machinist) who don’t know anything about the pricing, regulatory, and legal aspects of the company.
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.
That's how I've often seen it implemented as well. There's absolutely no point to OKRs when used that way, I assume its a sign that someone pushed through a big change in the name of efficiency and got a nice promotion out of it without anyone checking to see if it actually helped.
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.
In an interview process they tried to sell this to me. So I asked the question of what would happen in case of disagrement. It would be solved magically by consensus...
I told them no. No structure or too much structure leads to the same result: chaos. A different one, but well, not good in either case.
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.
22 is so many direct reports. If my supervisor had 22 direct reports. I'd just check out mentally because I know I wouldn't get any real face time with them to discuss issues. Skip manager attention? Forget it. With 22 direct reports, you're not there to add your expertise and make the process better, but to be a cog in the machine.
I see repeated 1:1 sessions as micromanagement, like being treated as a kid that needs their hand held.
I don't want to discuss work items on 1:1 with the manager, I want to discuss them in a group setting because it is the group as a whole that solves the tasks. I also want the input from other members in the group instead of only the managers view.
In my country we do personal "how is everything going" 1:1 meetings at most once a year.
1. If you want to discuss work items in a group setting with 22 people, it's an inefficient use of time.
2. If a manager has 22 direct reports, it becomes nearly impossible for them to do anything but manage, which make the whole team less efficient.
3. A manager ought to be expected to, and have time to, mentor their employees. This is impractical with such large teams, and the manager will always end up preferring just a couple at the expense of the rest.
4. Micromanagement is inefficient and unappreciated, but in such a large & flat team, it's very hard to ensure streamlined horizontal communication such that optimal decisions can always be made by ICs (or above them, managers).
5. There are two reasons organizational layers exist. The first is to allow domain specific experts to focus on their specialties in areas of the business that required dedicated staffing. The second is so the organization is setup to continuously mature over time. If you have a completely flat org almost entirely composed of IC SMEs, attrition will end up killing you because of the disjointedness and lack of corporate tribal knowledge creation you miss when you don't have functional teams. Note that the second piece almost always introduces some functional inefficiency in the org, but it is a reasonable risk mitigation practice for most companies.
Personally, I think "how is everything going" should be discussed at least every month, and with more casual check-ins that are more frequent than that, and task-based. I have high expectations for managers, and do expect that a significant portion of their time should be spent helping the people beneath them learn & grow.
Actually 20 people is around a reasonable number if you have some tech/expertise leads in the mix. 2 to 4 tech leads would be more than enough. Tech leads would be responsible for the technical decisions under their respective area and course setting for the future work but they don't do people management.
Managers do not need to mentor. Actually an independent mentor is better as there would be no conflict of interest. A person can get a mentor from another team as long as both are willing. If there are more mentees seeking mentorship than mentors, you can rotate the mentors or double/triple assign them especially to those who seek to switch to management track. In reality though, there are more mentors than mentees it seems. At least that's my anecdotal observation.
20 people management is very well possible. You don't need to have 1:1 with directs every single week. If you do it bi-weekly (every two weeks), the meeting cost to the manager would be 2 sessions a day. Managers tend to join every single meeting under the sun. That's how they fill up their time and appear(!) to be busy. In reality, they can cut down the meetings down to %25 and nothing would change.
Let's look at lowest level managers. They can meet 20 directs bi-weekly for 0.5hr. Let's add 0.5hr follow up work after each 1:1, which is way generous. So that totals up to 20 x (0.5 + 0.5) / 2 = 10hr. Let's assume their own 1:1 with their own manager to take 1hr bi-weekly or 0.5hr weekly as they need to discuss both team and personal issues. They can meet with peers and their manager weekly for 2hr. They can meet with sub-teams (let's assume max 4 teams) weekly (4 x 1hr) for status and problems. And at the end of the scrum (bi-weekly), they can meet all the directs for demos and postmortem for 2hr. If there are some other technical meetings they do not need to attend unless they are absolutely needed but this shouldn't be often. Leads are perfectly capable of handling those and report back if they're hesitant, which, again, shouldn't happen often. Meeting tally up should be around 18hr. For a 40hr week that's less than half. Let's assume they're dragged into some technical meetings for 5 more hours that's still 23hr. Remaining time should be more than enough to sifting through emails, quarterly duties (e.g promos, end of quarter status, next quarter strategy/goal setting) and occasional emergencies.
For mid-level managers (generally directors), they don't have to meet with teams but we assumed their 1:1 would cost 0.5hr/week. Their follow-up should be much less though as they should be able to make decision on most of the issues on the spot. But let's add a quite generous %50 on top which would sum up to 0.5hr x 20 x 1.5 = 15hr. I think they should meet with tech leads (skip-level) too if they're one removed from the lowest level. They can meet them for 0.5hr every 8 weeks which should take at the very maximum, 20 x 4 (leads) / 8 * 0.5hr = 5hr/wk but it'll probably take less. Tally up is 24hr (if you add peer & direct meetings). Mid-level managers may get more randomized but they need to be efficient at what to get involved and what not to. Majority of the middle-managers make the mistake here. They get involved more than they can chew as they're micromanagers and/or they respond to every single demand from their own manager, practically doing the manager's job for them. This is because their promo is generally tied to their manager's attitude toward them but this should be changed. How you can change this is a separate topic I can get into, if needed but let's skip it for now.
For high level managers (generally VPs), their time would be spent less on skip-1:1s & technical meetings but more on strategy and status meetings. I believe they would have even more time at their hand than directors if they're vigilant on the time sunk on the emails.
Then you have CEO at the top or you can have SVPs if number of your ICs is above 16K. But, yes 20 people management is possible if managers are cognizant of their time and boundaries of their responsibilities and if they actually work instead of appear to be working.
But let's face it, it ain't happening because managers are
A) either people who doesn't want to work anymore but need the money so they'll just carry on until they f-up big time and then switch companies and rinse & repeat,
B) or, they overstep their boundaries,
C) or, they don't know how to do prioritization and time management,
D) or a combination of some/all above.
> I see repeated 1:1 sessions as micromanagement, like being treated as a kid that needs their hand held.
There's space between viewing employees as children needing to be coddled on the one side and viewing them as completely rational automatons on the other.
I worked for three years for a "flat" company where we were all expected to independently define our own goals, schedules, and get support when needed. When everything was going smoothly, it worked well—I had a degree of freedom that was an incredible relief after my previous employer. But when I lost sight of how I could best benefit the company, I went into a spiral that led to months of me questioning my ability to work in this field at all (or whether I was a capable adult at all). Without a reporting chain—or official support structure of any kind—I didn't know where to turn; and knowing that it was my responsibility to correct this mess made the spiral go even deeper when I failed to do so.
At the time I was fired from that job, I was having issues with my blood pressure for the first time in my life. Within months afterward, my blood pressure returned to a normal level, and my wellbeing improved in so many other ways that can't be so readily measured.
I'm fortunate to now be in an environment that both has formal support structures as well as informal communication and feedback loops. I'm still the ultimate person responsible for my success, but my manager (and others in the company) are also invested in it. Perhaps I have less autonomy than I did (I still have quite a bit, especially compared to other places I've worked), but I find myself much more relaxed. Guardrails can be freeing.
> Without a reporting chain—or official support structure of any kind—I didn't know where to turn
I really don't know where you are coming from. The OP stated a clear hierarchy where you'd have a single and well known manager that you can just go and talk to.
Imagine every time a decision had to made where you were clearly the only person who needed to be met with and 20-50 people had to be plowed into a room to make that decision.
Instead of 2 person hours going into that effort, now we've just vaporized half a week to a week of person hours. A $300 decision just turned into at least a $3000 decision and the opportunity to handle 16x more point decisions just disappeared.
Even the idea of routinely scheduled 1:1s i dreadful.
People that do that one certainly will also do routine scheduled meetings by project, and routine scheduled meetings by department. You'll quickly get more than 10 hours/week of just those useless meetings, and your manager will be completely unavailable for any real work at any time.
22 is a reasonable class size for childhood schooling, and every single teacher ever has a clear and everpresent understanding of which kids "get it" or are gifted, and which kids are the problem. They are usually able to get face time with the kids that need it, and they do that to nearly entirely new kids every single year. Good teachers have a strong rapport with their students, and a tangible relationship with each and every one.
Why can't managers do what teachers do at a tenth the cost?
Like.... this isn't even the teaching part of teaching.
22 is a dreadfully huge class size and only "works" to the extent that we ignore all of the children that fall through the cracks. Teachers have nowhere near enough time to have personal time with the problem children that need it.
Children either excel, tread water, or fall behind. Children who fell behind once will most likely drop out of the school system entirely, unless it was for some very specific temporary reason, or their parents can afford private tutoring.
A school system that really wanted to make every child excel would probably need class sizes of 4-8, but that is well outside the realm of possibility.
1. Large class sizes are only effective if the instructional method is rote memorization. Otherwise, the teacher ends of having all the same kinds of issues corporate managers have.
2. Teachers literally go through years of formal education on pedagogy and effective leadership. Most corporate managers adhere to the Dilbert Principle, where they had been a competent IC whose role grew too big for one person, so they were allowed to hire a helper... before they know it, they're managing a team, until they become too incompetent at the managing part.
Have you managed people? Just dealing with interpersonal issues alone of 22 people would take all your time. You would have little time after to convey direction or even learn about direction from those above you. This is why someone would make 2-3 of those 22 people managers/leads...
You're only talking about functional management though.
You also have to discuss 22 sets of career plans, interpersonal conflicts, hiring etc and all the other aggravation that comes with dealing with people.
Your model assumes the CEO and all others on the path are full time people managers. In reality, the upper layers of management have many other roles, from customer engagements to political lobbying to CSR to strategy etc. They can manage nowhere near 22 direct reports.
Additionally, geographic distribution is important. You can't have one manager in the USA managing 7 direct reports from Germany, 7 from India, and 8 from China. So, you need 1 site leader for each of these, that the 6-7 middle managers report to. These all add up very quickly to take the theoretical 2-3 minimum required layers to 6-8 layers in practice, without requiring any of those along the way to be micromanagers.
- 40-60% trying to figure out how to turn large strategic goals into projects digestible by your staff
- 20-30% coordinating up to get permission and sync with senior management, and then coordinate workshare with your peers
- 20-30% coordinating with your staff
- 75% of your time then gets sunk into squishy people problem stuff most people would call "HR problems"
"But this adds up to over 100%!" - yup
When an HR problem arises, at least 8 hours will immediately vaporize out of your schedule. It's not uncommon for bad situations to turn into multiple days to resolve.
On average, in my experience as a manager for the last 20 years, you will lose about 8 hours per month per staff member to "HR problems". It doesn't mean every staff member has these problems, but there will absolutely be those that have multiple repeated issues that take a long time to resolve. If your average work week has about 21 or 22 work days, you've just designed a full-time staff manager who does nothing else. Imagine performance review time in this structure where each review requires this staff manager to solicit performance input from each staff members task manager. I can tell you from personal experience it turns into a solid month of long nights and zero staff satisfied with their review.
This kind of construct does exist in many companies, but most companies have decided that it's more efficient to have the staff manager and the task manager be the same person, even if they have to swallow the fact that it makes organizations less flat as that manager simply doesn't have the time to deal with so many people as direct reports.
And voila, corporate hierarchy.
There are certainly managers who deal with having so many direct reports by simply not allocating time to staff management issues (i.e. HR problems) or not dealing with them in a timely fashion. The result is usually chaos, high-turnover, blah blah, but the actual end result is that staff become fungible units as the organization has to plan around this effective unreliability.
Staff also have fewer career growth options as the divide between worker bees and management transition becomes an insurmountable gulf. New management staff then tend to be brought in from the outside, and don't know the business or products. Enshittification occurs because the only comprehensible strategy anybody can cling to is revenue growth.
Anecdotally, the places I've worked that were flat all featured these characteristics while well balanced hierarchies were able to grow, build long-term strategies, and had high-retention rates.
For the record, I've had as high as 20 direct reports where I was both staff and task manager and it was hell on everybody. I've also had as high as 75 reports in a well structured organization (no more than 5-7 people per manager) and it was totally fine. Companies were software, R&D, or some mix.
Note: the average Googler stays at Google for 1.3 years. In my current company the average employee stays for just under 5.
I'm glad you called out Google in your post. I joined Google in 2015 having been a managing director of a global software engineering team at a non-tech F500, where I had teams in Brazil, India, China and Mexico, and folks scattered around the US & Scotland. I was accustomed for the prior ten years of my career, to run my org basically how you described, and I like to think I was a good manager that my team respected, and that we generally operated well. I spent a lot of my time 1) in leadership meetings trying to understand strategy and business requirements, and 2) structuring projects for my org and mentoring key individuals.
At Google, I found there to be 0 respect for management as a function. Every manager is expected to have their own personal projects and come performance review season you had better be able to point to something you did yourself, not just the outcomes you managed through your team. Perhaps this worked when it was a startup, but as an enterprise with roughly 350,000 workers, it's disrespectful to leaders to run things like this. I expect Bayer to experience similar disillusionment among their experienced management team. Overall they will probably see tactical acceleration in some areas but breakdowns in many others that will be more systemic and harder to recover from.
Golden post. I'm a manager at a company that was mostly flat for most of its existence, but is starting to add management as we grow. Middle managers are evil and bad until you find out why you need them. Much better to bite the bullet and design a system with clear roles and good incentives past a certain head count.
It's a long way from being mostly flat, decisions are made at a crawling pace, and is convoluted enough to hide substantial theft, and shield large numbers of pedophiles .. even those rising to the Vatican C-suite level.
I think it's also possible that says a lot more about the shoddy metaphors of most business schools than the actual level of hierarchy in the Catholic church (beyond the other discussion we were having about how atypical the CC is as an organization).
Well, a thousand years of refinement and a set of company values that most employees have instilled into them since birth will do that to an organization.
That, and also most of the work of a church (interaction with laypeople) is self-evident, local, and easily managed. Once trained, a priest can be set loose on a community without much oversight.
Likewise, I can imagine a chain of Montessori schools being similarly organized, or a trade guild.
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?
As someone squarely in this position for the last few years (from a prior senior engineering position), I would say my job is to try to emulate the decisions and guidance my manager would give, but to more people than he has time to do it for.
This is fairly obvious because for a while he was doing that for too many people because we couldn't find a person for the position. If I can speed up answers and feedback and provide direction quickly in a way that's similar to what he would have do for people that often ended up waiting for him because his schedule was too busy, then I'm doing at least one part of my job well.
The more layers of this there are the more likely the message might be garbled by that game of telephone, but ultimately people can only handle so many relationships successfully, especially when they require specific regular action, and delegation (which is all middle management is essentially) is one approach that's been found to work around this.
When I'm doing my job well, the people I manage have clear directions and expectations, and if the company is managed well those expectations are seen as achievable by all involved, and if they aren't it's my job to communicate that either up or down the structure. I don't think it's sane to assume that will just naturally occur once a workforce gets big enough, so something is needed to help that along, and managers are one way to do so.
Basically you're describing a lieutenant/sergeant relationship. The sargeant will try to give each private the same commands that the lieutenant would give, with necessary adjustments for the immediate realities of the field.
Yep. It's frowned upon in some companies to use the military as an example, but military management has been forged often times in blood. The concept that you're hitting on is called 'commanders intent'. Basically we need to climb that hill over there, but the commander is not going to tell someone exactly how because they won't be in the situation. They trust the people on the ground will make good decisions.
I give my team all the information I have, convey my/the company's intent, and let them work. That way, I don't have to make every little decision. I trust they will make good decisions and come to me if there's a problem.
Commander's intent (CSI) plays a central role in military decision making and planning. CSI acts as a basis for staffs and subordinates to develop their own plans and orders to transform thought into action, while maintaining the overall intention of their commander.
I'll also add that it builds ownership since the people doing the work are making the execution plans. IMO, it's the really the only way to manage if the goal is to get things done.
I think this is not a good explanation. “Get on the hill” is a bad order. “We want to get on that hill to gain fire control on that road” is much better. Because that means the on the ground troops can achieve the objective through an entirely different means if the hill is not viable.
Critically, and this is why military analogies don’t work with most large orgs, the on the ground folks don’t need to confirm with top leadership that an alternative tactic is sufficient. In messy business orgs, middle managers play it way too conservatively and try to get their bosses to green light every decision by presenting them a synthesized and watered down view (“the hill is well defended, the other hill is better”). But this is slower, error prone, and at risk of compromise to minor communication failures because the condensed time and attention for the synthesized logic won’t capture the full reasoning (“I don’t get why the second hill is better. Just do the first one”).
You're right on expanding get on the hill. I didn't want to get too much in the weeds, but thank you for explaining it better.
I would push back a bit on your second point and say that there are many decisions around tactics made in business that are not confirmed with higher ups. This is why your expanded first point is so important. People at all levels of the org are making decisions all the time and you want them to have the most complete picture possible when doing so.
Unironically, a lot of modern war material like "Band of Brothers" is relevant to management and leadership in vertical organizations - which is what most companies are, at the end of the day.
If person A manages 6 things and thinks it is too much, he should instead manage 3 things and have a new person B manage the other 3. Not elevate himself to manage person B and C who each have 3 things.
You say your job is to emulate what they would do, but also that there’s a game of telephone going on. That implies your boss is still very much in the loop of those actively communicating, and what’s probably happening is you’re bubbling up lower and lower fidelity information up the chain for them to make decisions.
You should never have the role of trying to emulate what your boss would do. If you’re going to manage managers, then those managers below you should have some sort of functional/technical expertise that warrants them being independent managers or they should have enough autonomy that your relationship is only about allocating higher level resources to them.
If you have 100 people at the company you should have 19 managers with about 5 people each? And then the CEO has to manage those 19 managers, and has 19 people under them (because what is a CEO other than the person managing what's done at the top level?)? What about when the company has 1000 people?
It's all fine to you should just split it up more, but that only makes sense if you look at the part of the system (company) in isolation, which you can't do. It's intricately linked to the parts around it.
What you're recommending isn't even the waterbed theory of complexity, where you push down complexity in one area and it pops up in another, this is the ostrich theory of complexity, where if you stick your head in the sand and ignore everything then it doesn't matter.
Org structure should not be a function of number of heads. If you follow some logic that each manager should have n reports you’ll make an idiotically tall structure. It’s basically the stupidest thing you can do. Which many organizations do. Most large orgs have a terrible design. It’s difficult.
Effective org design is about properly delegating authority. If you need to get your boss’ permission to do things, you’re friction, not lube. If your job is synthesizing others’ synthesis, so that a real decision maker can do things; you’re friction. If you’re a manager whose sole job is to try and emulate someone who is a better manager in a higher position, you’re friction.
It’s more useful to directly oversee a smaller number of important useful things that you can handle well than to hire two new people and manage them managing others.
Managers of managers are useful at the junctions where one manager doesn’t have the skill set to manage a necessary sub function at a tactical level. A CTO, CFO, CHRO, etc. at the top. Maybe a tech team lead or a design team lead or a financial team lead (varying by if you’re organized by product or function).
When a “manager” is not responsible for any tactical decision making, and instead just broad strategic direction, it’s much easier to govern a wide team of independently effective members. But if it grows too much? SPLIT the manager of manager duties with someone else. Don’t create another layer of manager of manager of managers who then by necessity also need to get split anyway.
> What you're recommending isn't even the waterbed theory of complexity, where you push down complexity in one area and it pops up in another, this is the ostrich theory of complexity, where if you stick your head in the sand and ignore everything then it doesn't matter.
Congratulations, you've avoided providing any useful details about your suggestion again. I'll ask a different way. If your plan is to just add more managers in a single level above the bottom, how do you expect the CEO to deal with the hundreds of managers that would report directly to them, that they would need to relay the company direction to and get feedback from?
Very specifically, without a tree structure, how does this scale for those above this layer of hundreds of managers at the same level in your preferred solution presented here? Are you just assuming that it's not a problem and therefore doesn't need to be addressed?
I’m not saying don’t use a tree structure. I’m saying only create vertical tree cuts at functional junctions were the type of work is different between boss and subordinate. Do not ever make vertical boss where your subordinates are just supposed to be shittier extensions of yourself. Only one person should be in charge of tactics. Only one person should be in charge of strategy.
Not every decision should roll up to the CEO. Not in terms of decision making (obviously) but honestly not even on the org chart.
If your job is assembling little PowerPoints to pitch decisions to your boss then you’re an impediment to getting things done. You should have the authority to do what you want without your boss’ approval.
This is the natural, shitty outcome when you made X and then made Y, and don’t have time to do both, so you think you should be promoted to manage a manager for X and Y each. No. Bad. That’s selfish prioritization and the cost of the org. You should pick one and do it well and accept that you do not have capacity to reap the rewards of both. When everybody plays the game, everyone loses. Prisoners dilemma of org design incentives.
> Are you just assuming that it's not a problem and therefore doesn't need to be addressed?
Fucking hell dude. Fuck off with this unnecessary passive aggressive bullshit
> Fucking hell dude. Fuck off with this unnecessary passive aggressive bullshit
That wasn't meant to be passive aggressive, it was meant to solicit an answer to the specific question I was asking. I interpreted you point differently than what you apparently meant, either from a misunderstanding on my part, a poor explanation or your part, or some combination thereof.
I thought I was sufficiently clear a few replies back when asking how your solution scales to larger groups of people while I pointed out problems of scali g that I was looking for your thoughts on that, and then you proceeded to talk about entirely different things.
Honeatly, I'm aware my ostrich comment was a bit rude, and was trying to tone it down and honestly ask here. It's not that I think it's impossible or stupid that s along might hmbe ha fled a different way. "Flat" management strucutes claim to do so, and while I'm very sceptical of them in reality, I would love to hear from someone in the trenches about how they thought it worked or failed in practice, and so thought (along with interpreting your earlier comments as "extra levels are unneeded" instead of "they should provide different things") that you might actually go down that route and have a take on it.
For what it's worth, I don't think I actually disagree much with what you're advocating for, but I'm not sure it makes sense in the pure form you're describing in reality. It's great to want every level of.management to bring their own special bit to the picture, but sometimes when you have tens of thousands of employees, I think some levels will necessarily be present just to deal with the scale. Playing around with Dunbar's law and modern management studies means that for a large company you start getting quite a few management levels deep unless you expect people to be managing a hundred people under them each.
That in essence, is the main critique I have of what you've said and was trying to get you to address. Given a company of 20,000 people, explain how many levels of management you expect them to have and what special sauce each level could even theoretically bring and how many people on average each level would be directly responsible for managing. I suspect it will be hard to justify some levels other than the need to provide stable relationships between the people involved.
You can have many vertical levels. It’s the role design that you want to solve for. The flattening is a side effect. Managers hiring more managers because they don’t have capacity to manage all of their subordinates is a cancer that grows. Do it two times and you now have three managers that all view themselves as managing the same individual contractor at different levels of specificity. And inevitably one guy in the middle becomes nothing but a gatekeeper for talking to the bigger boss. It’s countercultural but productive for people’s scope of work to go down every now and then.
The number of direct reports should scale with the level of tactical involvement. Call center employees -> huge team. Dev work -> small team.
Team of tech leads each running their own project and teams independently? Probably pretty darn big team. You can manage a lot of tech team leads so long as you do not go into the weeds.
As discussed elsewhere, the operational sides of the US military are a pretty good example of effective organization and delegation. This is in part because the critical real time, limited communication nature of military operations forcing the organization to adopt a structure that cuts out the wasteful managerial cruft you often see in the business world.
Russia operates its military more like a U.S. corporation and you can see how it fails them daily.
It's kind of like how the north star for a programmer is to automate themselves out of the job. A good manager will bring the best out of their reports, which leads to making good decisions and executing on them.
In the same sense that a machine maintenance person’s job is to not be involved in the machinery. Their job is not to operate the machine, but to make sure the machine operates correctly all on its own without intervention. Doing this correctly does take a lot of work.
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.
I work in an org with 5 layers of management.
I do think CEO and top management have good strategies and big picture thinking etc.
It is the bottom two layers where is see the biggest issues and challenges.
We are not a software company but as an engineering/technology company most of our work happens in systems and software. Lowest level management needs to know, really know the software and concept to support workers. Else it is just smooth talking and buzz words.
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.
No, I was talking about when governments lose even basic ability to control the peace, when they can no longer keep the monopoly on violence expected of sovereign states. Haiti, for instance.
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.
The truly difficult bit is making an organization with 100 or 1000 different 4-8 people teams to build something more complex. There is a vast array of problems that need solving that just can't be tackled by one 4-8 person team.
It turns out that nothing in life can be tackled by one 4-8 person team. We are all heavily dependent on each other to build the complex things we have. Our solution to make that work at the macroeconomic scale is to employ a service model.
The solution to which you speak is microservices. No, not some misguided multi-process IPC technology model that seems to have tried to usurp the name, I mean real microservices. The people model. Where each 4-8 person team continues to act if they are an independent businesses, even if they legally work for a single organization.
It's not particularly difficult. The macro economy, which operates at an unfathomably larger scale, shows how easy it is. But, indeed, it can be uncomfortable for some people to not feel like they have full control over an organization.
The macro economy is dominated by gigantic conglomerates that try to own and integrate a significant amount of their entire supply chains - think General Electric, Mitsubishi, Samsung. Small to Medium Enterprises have a few niches where they work (restaurants and other service industries being the largest by far), but they play a relatively small role and are not normally part of any supply chain, they only really work at the very end of the chain.
Similarly, building a whole product out of pure microservices with teams that barely coordinate with each other beyond maintaining their APIs doesn't really work. There is very much a place for such microservices for certain well understood problems (authentication being probably the clearest), but for most domain specific work you need far more coordination than that to truly evolve a complex product.
For example, you can't build a computer game in this model. A modern 3D engine requires far more than 4-8 people, and there is no clean separation between pieces to afford this. And even if there were, there is no One True Way to build one: the teams designing the 3D engine need to communicate with the teams building the game engine and the game designers themselves and the artists to achieve a cohesive whole. A 100-person project just can't (always) be modeled as 15 4-8-person projects.
> the teams designing the 3D engine need to communicate with the teams building the game engine and the game designers themselves and the artists to achieve a cohesive whole.
Sure, just as they need to communicate to the farmer what food needs to be grown in order to ensure that the right food shows up on their dinner table. These are solved problems, though. We already know how to do incredibly complex things at scale.
No, it is nowhere near like that. Food is a particularly bad example, as the food industry is extremely wasteful overall, with a huge percentage of all food produced being thrown away at all levels of the production chain all the way to the final consumer.
In addition, most companies that package food in various ways, including major restaurants, either own or contract farming business for specific quantities of specific crops ahead of time, spending large amounts of time to negotiate contracts to this effect, and sometimes working even closer when a particular result is required.
If you find yourself craving Mongolian food one night, you may often simply find that none is available, at any price you are willing to pay, unless you worked with someone to make some months in advance. And conversely if you open a Mongolian restaurant, you may just not find any customers for it and waste significant money on it. (substitute Mongolian with any other food that is not commonly eaten or even thought about in your area)
The point is that you do need explicit integration and cooperation. And you often have way more than 4-8 people working on one of these contracts to even define the terms.
And again, most real companies own most of their supply chain, they don't depend on a hundred different suppliers at every level like you seem to be suggesting. And they do this because it's FAR more efficient to have a large monolithic team build something together than to rely on dozens of small teams competing in a market to build the same thing.
> The point is that you do need explicit integration and cooperation.
Obviously. Like we said, no 4-8 person team is building anything by themselves. For one, most obviously, they'd starve to death if they even tried. Integration and cooperation are literally what defines an economy.
> most real companies own most of their supply chain
As opposed to fake companies, that have no supply chain, with them being fake and all?
> because it's FAR more efficient to have a large monolithic team build something together
How can you know? The problems needed to be solved to see that through were stated to be unsolved. Was there some breakthrough in the past 10 hours that you haven't mentioned and the rest of us missed?
> As opposed to fake companies, that have no supply chain, with them being fake and all?
I should have said "companies that can afford to".
> How can you know? The problems needed to be solved to see that through were stated to be unsolved. Was there some breakthrough in the past 10 hours that you haven't mentioned and the rest of us missed?
Because I can look at the price of goods versus their cost. A company that owns the production chain for a sub-component is paying the cost of that component, while a company that doesn't pays the market price.
Also, markets only work if you have competing suppliers for the same product. This in itself is extremely wasteful for software, so trying to maintain an internal market of software where multiple teams build the same service and compete with each other on who has a better version is crazy when there is any alternative.
Again we can see this from the software market: most companies not only don't build an internal market in house to have, say, the best OS, but they actually found that even supporting an external market is wasteful. Instead of buying Solaris or Windows or OS/2, they started collaborating on Linux (and clang, and MySQL, and Kubernetes and others).
But these are not built as a marketplace of microservices. They are built as monoliths with large teams working to add features and collaborating relying on a hierarchy of maintainers to merge them together in a cohesive whole, or on a more elaborate committee system.
So again, I don't see any proof whatsoever that building a company or a product in general out of a marketplace of dozens or hundreds of very small teams has ever worked beyond maybe some niche cases.
> Because I can look at the price of goods versus their cost. A company that owns the production chain for a sub-component is paying the cost of that component, while a company that doesn't pays the market price.
I'm not sure I follow. Let's say Acme Inc. produces a widget that is a subcomponent of their larger product. When that subcomponent is within the control of a team of four who works for Acme Inc., the company has to pay the market price (meaning a markup margin?), but when that team is joined with another team who also works for Acme Inc., then they only have to pay the cost?
1. What difference does that make? Even if a markup really was paid on paper, it's just to Acme Inc. itself. You haven't changed anything, practically speaking.
2. If an external entity is willing to pay more for the component, which is what I think you are trying to suggest with market price, Acme Inc. is paying the opportunity cost when keeping it internally and thus is still paying the market price. Are you under the impression that there is a free lunch here? There is not.
> trying to maintain an internal market of software where multiple teams build the same service and compete with each other on who has a better version is crazy
Just as it would be crazy in the macroeconomy. The idea that competition is necessary for markets to work is misguided. You don't need a second road running parallel to the first. One road is just fine. Competition only comes into being when someone thinks they can serve the customer better by doing things differently. Which is a useful property of human dynamics, to be sure, but sometimes things are already as good as anyone is able to imagine.
> they started collaborating on Linux
As individual teams, with another team headed by Linus who accepts the services of those other teams as seen fit. Another great example of the service economy in action. No need for a monolith – if such a thing were even possible, but as pointed out at the beginning of this, of which I agree, we don't actually know how to build monoliths, no matter how great they sound in theory. There are outstanding problems not yet solved.
> They are built as monoliths with large teams working to add features and collaborating relying on a hierarchy of maintainers
A monolith, but also hierarchal? Uhh...
> I don't see any proof whatsoever that building a company or a product in general out of a marketplace of dozens or hundreds of very small teams has ever worked beyond maybe some niche cases.
I suppose you can take the perspective that nothing works, but given the outstanding problems not solved to allow anything else, something that doesn't work beats nothing at all. Worse is better, perhaps.
I think this whole thread may be at least partly a misunderstanding.
The way I see it, the discussion began by saying that any team (but in context, referring to a whole company) that grows past a certain size needs a traditional hierarchical system of layers of management to function. Then, someone said that a team/company should just not grow past 4-8 people, and thus you avoid the need of hierarchical management.
My point is that this idea makes no sense. A company can't function as a composite of hundreds or thousands of sled organizing small teams without any management to coordinate them.
My understanding is that you claimed that such a thing is possible, and that in fact it is how the free market and thus the economy of most nations actually functions, without any hierarchy.
I was then rebutting this by showing that the economy does form hierarchies (with large buyers essentially viewing small sellers as subordinates, not independent market actors, when they're not outright buying them).
So, I would argue, the economy is not generally organized as a bunch of independent small orgs, but as a series of huge conglomerates that either own their suppliers, or at least dictate market terms for some period with contracts. The idea of a free market where buyers and sellers meet and negotiate prices based on supply and demand is largely a myth, with some limited exceptions.
As such, the hierarchy in how Linux is built is in line with my original idea: not supply and demand based, but instead organized in a relatively rigid hierarchy.
In support of why I'm claiming that this system of hierarchies arises due to efficiency, I gave the example of how much it costs a company to buy a piece they need versus how much it costs them to produce it internally. This is meant to show that a supply&demand based self-organizing market (the flat, many small teams without managers model) is less efficient than an integrated supply chain (the top-down hierarchical model, with layers of management).
> and that in fact it is how the free market and thus the economy of most nations actually functions, without any hierarchy.
There is a hierarchy of sorts (realistically, something more like a cyclic graph, but close enough for all intents and purposes). The customer gets food from the grocery store -> who gets food from a wholesaler -> who gets food from a processor -> who gets food from the farmer. But at no point, despite being an exceptionally complex system, do you need to exceed a small number of people per team.
> thus you avoid the need of hierarchical management.
Right, so I expect this is where the miscommunication is happening. You're not wrong that the consumer of food manages the grocery store. Absolutely that is true. Of course it is. And in that sense, some kind of hierarchical (or whatever we want to see the graph as) management will emerge. That is a necessary precondition for an economy to exist.
Contextually, though, management was seen in a more vileness way, which does tend to happen when communication overhead starts to overburden the people, leaving actors to be faceless "cogs". This is what small teams avoid.
> but as a series of huge conglomerates
Which don't operate as monoliths. Internally they function as a series of smaller businesses, and inside that even smaller business, until you whittle the teams down into a small number of people. Maybe not exactly 4-8, but certainly within that order of magnitude. A person can only communicate with so many other people before all hours of the day are exhausted.
> The idea of a free market where buyers and sellers meet and negotiate prices based on supply and demand is largely a myth
Okay... Sure? Is there some reason for us to randomly start talking about a "free market" here? It was never mentioned before.
> not supply and demand based
I don't follow. Supply and demand is not some kind of foundation on which something is based. It is observance of social behaviour, typically that of humans, but applies even to animals. Supply and demand is every bit as much present in the development of Linux as everything else humans do with other humans. It is fundamental.
> but instead organized in a relatively rigid hierarchy.
Instead? They are not at odds with each other.
> I gave the example of how much it costs a company to buy a piece they need versus how much it costs them to produce it internally.
Which didn't seem to serve a purpose. If all else is equal, it costs the same. Presumably you are referring to a case where you can buy a subcomponent externally for $10 or produce it internally for $5? But given that buyers are willing to pay $10, you lose $5 every time you keep it for internal use. So, in both cases, it costs you $10. There is no free lunch.
> This is meant to show that a supply&demand based self-organizing market (the flat, many small teams without managers model) is less efficient than an integrated supply chain
The data doesn't support this, though. Statistically, smaller businesses in coordination with each other are more efficient. You'll notice large businesses only become large when they can build some kind of moat. In the case of software, that mostly means hiding behind copyright and patent protections.
> You're not wrong that the consumer of food manages the grocery store.
I think this is the key to our miscommunication. I don't call that management. That is what I am referring to as the free market model of self-organization: one customer doesn't dictate what the convenience store does, they only give very indirect signals that the convenience store can choose to respond to or not (say, this customer didn't buy any cheese; they can drop the price of cheese, or drop cheese from their inventory, or keep offering cheese and hope that others will buy it).
In contrast, a rigid hierarchy is what happens inside most corporations: your manager tells you to make cheese, you either make cheese or you get fired. Your manager is telling you to make cheese because a different team is planning to make cheese toast, and the manager wants to ensure they have cheese available. I would refer to this as a planned economy model, and call this business a monolith in the sense that, while it has internal parts, they are "fixed in place", they don't get to decide what to work on.
Similarly, Apple's relationship to its suppliers is closer to the planned economy model than to the free market: Apple doesn't go shopping around various suppliers and getting some milk here and some cheese there. They investigate some market and pick some suppliers, and form contracts with them that demand specific amounts at specific times at specific prices. After signing the contract, the supplier is not free to take Apple's feedback or balance it with their own desires or other customers: they have to execute on the contract or risk penalties and fines. They are now effectively under Apple's management, for at at least some portion of their business, and not operating as an independent market agent that uses pricing signals to elaborate their strategy.
Of course I do agree that at no step of the way is there a 1000 person team working on something. But neither is anyone else: the discussion we are having, as I see it, is whether you can organize 1000 people into many small teams that only coordinate voluntarily, where team A decides what to work on themselves and team B decides whether to use team A's work or not; or you need to impose a more rigid management hierarchy that tells team A to work on this and team B to work use team A's output.
The second model is FAR more pervasive in how companies organize internally. And even in the economy at large, contrary to what you're saying, large organized groups like Samsung easily outcompete a network of small businesses. There are almost 0 industrial consumer products supplied by a myriad of small manufacturers, in fact. From phones to cars to appliances, everything is produced by huge conglomerates. And they don't have any special moats, only money and the inherent efficiencies of being able to run a planned economy internally.
Every business needs millions, if not billions, of people working for them. The complexity cannot be handled otherwise.
But back to the topic at hand, there is an impossible level of communication overhead to burden if you try to keep millions (or even tens) of people on a single team. Like the original comment pointed out, we've never actually figured out how to do that. It might be a good idea in theory, but the problems remain unsolved.
The workaround is easy, though: Just don't do it. Do what everyone else does instead.
Yes, I've tried to point out a different problem with your scheme. Outside of hypothesis, we do have a global market - I think it's disrupting your idea because you cannot prevent an independent team to enter it.
For a single team, sure, but the entire company isn't just one team of 4-8 people. When you start getting multiple teams, and some of them take on common tasks for the rest (finance, recruiting, PR, etc), you need something to tie them all together. It doesn't have to be a manager per se, but a free for all doesn't work either.
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 wonder why that is. My experience has generally been the opposite. Every manager I have ever had has been, at worst, pretty OK — and most have been really fantastic.
In nearly all of my workplaces, it's the upper echelon that has typically been painfully incompetent (poor financial strategy, too much micromanaging in areas they don't understand, etc.), and I've been mystified how they managed to hire and retain such talented middle managers. I'm sure it is survival bias, though, because a company can only scrape by with bad upper management if middle management is unusually good.
Thankfully, my current and previous job were both at companies where the C-suite actually know how to do their jobs well. Even though I've some had fantastic managers at otherwise poorly-run companies, that's not enough to keep morale high. No matter how much your manager supports you and encourages you, it feels like you're wasting your life when you feed your most productive working years into a company you don't believe in.
One reason could be the type of industry one may be in; banks: loads of chair-warmers, mainstream tech: probably better because the scope of hiding in hierarchy may be less (not sure, just speculating).
> 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.
>”By the time someone has entered the workforce it should not be necessary to be ‘checked on’ by some surrogate parental figure.”
Hire some recent grads and then make that statement. Not all require checking in on, but often entry-level, junior folks do. Don’t ignore them and don’t hold it against them. You, I’m sure, had someone checking in on you when you first started. Not in a “Are you at your desk” way but a “Are you able to complete the tasks? If not, how can I help you?”
Sadly the last few years with remote work and layoffs have made it so companies get rid of those who are “just doing the job” and keeping those that are “always the job”. Brutal.
On the one hand, yes, of course, and on the other hand on articles about "double employment" you'll see comments basically arguing that the company deserves it if your manager isn't micromanaging you and tracking metrics enough to spot that you're phoning it in.
And what about all the bs artists, slackers, divas, or assholes on the team? What if no one on the team wants to play “manager”, especially without the title? What if no one on the team has the skills to be an effective manager? What if my colleague Bob decides to play the role of a manager but I don’t like him? What if two people want to manage and disagree on things? Who exactly is supposed to have the authority to tell people what to do, and then hold them accountable?
What you described smells like communism - might work on small scale in some isolated cases, but usually doesn’t.
The above definitely exists all over. The group usually hires based on personality. Generally these organizations are very centered and know what qualities they are looking for in a a team mate.
small teams generally self-organise under a single leader, eg sports teams and it is often the other members of the team who self-check as they have to take up the load for anyone who does not perform.
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.
