"Middle managers" are certainly needed as part of a corporate hierarchy. What is being exposed with WFH is -ineffective- managers.
Ineffective managers are at every level, including the C-suite. Middle managers just have a higher probability of being ineffective due to lack of experience/resources, so they get the headline.
>Middle managers just have a higher probability of being ineffective due to lack of experience/resources,
Actually, I think it's because they're more difficult to discover; Determining whether a middle manager's performance is good or not is a far less trivial task than determining whether a technical employee is producing value.
Middle managers are adequate by default. Individual contributors are not. If a middle manager does not obviously cause damage or liability, they are generally assumed to be "working". If they do not appear to be exceptional or effective, it's assumed that their role has not presented any chances to excel. They are protected partially by the empathy that other managers have for their position. Managers are rarely fired simply for not producing results, which is very much not the case for individual contributors.
The difficulty of weeding out ineffective middle managers means they will be present as a higher percentage of total manager head count than e.g. ineffective line managers.
I agree. Also, most companies need a lot fewer middle managers than they have. I picked a "management" path because promotions are easier. But I still do technical work - I write code, review code, create and review tech documents.
Successive teams I have managed liked it that their manager is "one of them". We dont have boring team meetings. All are technical except select 1-1s which are career conversations
Not really the entire hierarchical structures of corporations is actually highly inefficient it's something a lot of universities have been talking about for a while now. Which is ironic when you realize most universities are designed similar to churches with indentured servitude.
I've never been too impressed with what academics think the corporate world is like. Some of them, maybe, are pretty knowledgable, but a lot of them have been inside the academic bubble too long.
Honestly, they're right more than they are wrong under the correct circumstances that is. Too bad being locked in a room for your entire life leads to a lot of other issues instead of experiencing the world and grabbing a better understanding of how everything ties in together. But who would change that after all if we believe what the modern psychologist says altruism doesn't exist.
Are they, though? Specifically in predictability of models. Really good at explaining, but not good at hedging on how likely what happened was to have happened.
It depends. Science doesn't occur in a vacuum. Change occurs overtime with the experiences of others. No one can do anything independent from the world. In several instances in the world the most meaningful leaps and changes in scientific theory have been when individuals have gone and seen real experiences. Such as nightingale and her contribution to sanitation.
In my opinion, any model that predicts any sort of outcome when doing so accurately is overfitted and lacks the proper contextual knowledge necessary. Should the work of actuarial science be validated as just a series of lists to prove the risk and likely hood of death? Should we all have numbers above our heads dependent on the fate and caste we are born into? These are all things these models ignore and misrepresent. If I was born into a lower middle class black family if no one knew who I was would they care about me? My struggles, my pain? So far all that I've seen are people who would rather choose to mock me. Wearing my clothing, pretending to sing my songs, my struggles. Yet nothing changes, no one cares about me, it's not my problem they say. What my ancestors did is not my fault nor my problem. While some in the scientific community care about these issues, the majority just ignores it. Even today all they care about is what book they need to read in order to follow their identity politics over real system change. Having been forced to live a lie, I can't see how or why others would care without having people who have seen and experienced it themselves. When you exclude more than half the world it really does make you wonder if we are right more than we are wrong.
> In my opinion, any model that predicts any sort of outcome when doing so accurately is overfitted and lacks the proper contextual knowledge necessary
For me, models that do not make predictions are not very useful. Without predictions about the future, it's very hard to tell if the work is useful moving forward, or if it should be read as a historical analysis that doesn't matter in the current environment.
Predictions are critical, they are a primary mechanism to find out if something is useful.
This touches on the controversy that sparked Coase's Theory of the Firm. He proposed the idea that firms exist to reduce transaction costs as an explanation for why capitalist firms look like mini-soviets internally, with highly centralized control and planning. Which seems like a contradiction to classical economists. If free markets are so effective, why can't you run a company like a free market? eg have workers bid for tasks from managers. Turns out that is wildly inefficient because of the transaction costs involved in coordinating competitively instead of cooperatively (at least in successful companies). I suspect pandemic WFH has revealed there are much more efficient ways to coordinate cooperatively than simple centralized planning, and those methods generally do not require as much managerial facilitation because they rely much more heavily on asynchronous communication.
The offices solution to Coase's paradox is that central planning doesn't scale well.
This is similar to federalism -- central governments don't work very well for everything, but scaler local governments are still effective for local issues.
Except that the most successful companies work in the opposite manner from what you describe. Your line workers and manager may know how best to solve a problem, but they are almost never empowered to implement that solution, because upper management is not interested in delegating that power to them.
Pour one out to anyone who has ever done a sprint retrospective, or a company 360 review, where all the important problems get skipped over because 'there's nothing we can do about this, this, and that.'
Line workers and managers are given an incredibly narrow window in which they are permitted to operate. Anything beyond that needs beurocratic approval. Much like in the Soviet Union, sometimes that beurocracy is staffed by intelligent human beings, but usually it is staffed by donkeys. People who care enough about doing their work find ways to work around the latter, or just give up and punch in their 9-5.
This contrast is interesting; taking it a bit further is that in free countries the concern with individual participation is that not everyone is sufficiently educated or motivated to actually provide meaningful insight or course correction.
Hypothetically, A firm like Tesla or SpaceX maybe be so successful in engineer feedback because they are high demand places to work and they have not exhausted the pool of individuals who can provide great work. However as the company needs to scale, or as the company becomes less glamourous you have people who either (1) just aren't as capable or (2) don't care to expend any creativity on solving the needs of the company (either because there's no reward or they are interested in other areas).
Furthermore, a company that is not centrally planned will most likely move slower than a centrally planned one. Just like how China is able to forcibly take your land to build railways; an action like that in a free society has many gatekeepers that would slow down such a process. Any public company, that is measured on a quartely basis would find themselves grappling with showing change to wall street.
It seems logical to me that free markets are also not necessarily very efficient at price discovery, there are after all a ton of costs involved in price discovery, information gathering about market counterparts to see if they are trustworthy, drafting and policing contracts, etc etc etc. However, even with these added costs markets are the only thing we've discovered that still works well beyond a certain scale.
For R&D departments and startups, plan economies can still work because the complexity is still small enough that humans can comprehend it.
Why share the cake when you can have it all to yourself. After all they did spent their entire life getting to that point shouldn't everyone else suffer as well? Maybe just a little worse every iteration until we just stop paying them. /s
Yep, hierarchy comes from religion (hierarkhia, "rule of a high preist"). Traditional capitalist hierarchical organization is just one of many potential hierarchies, so definitely it could be improved. But hierarchy is ingrained in culture, and culture is probably the third hardest thing in the universe to change, after genetics and cancelling your gym membership.
It seems to me that hierarchy is ingrained in nature, and human nature is an extension of that. There will always be a hierarchy in any system of living (and therefore competing) organisms.
It seems more productive to focus on making sure the difference between the top and bottom doesn't get too extreme, rather than lamenting the fact of nature and wishing there was no such thing as competition.
The nature didn't for the most part had software nor networks, and thus couldn't fully explore and utilize the alternative approach of self organization from the bottom up with closed loop feedback to achieve desired emergent properties/product/etc. There are good chances that many known human hierarchies are going the way of dinosaurs.
If you are talking about hierarchy copying the Catholic Church, well the church also copied the Roman government, that appeared mostly naturally from the existence of an imperium.
By far the most inefficient part of the hierarchy is at the very bottom. Workers slacking off, not working optimally, and still getting paid for the full 40 hours. Wouldn’t need so much redundancy if you could truly get their full output.
Getting the relative most out of the bottom line workers and finding and taking care of the underperformers is the direct responsibility of their managers, and I'm saying this unironically. Managing is about being a performance multiplier, and the most hands-on part of management always involves concrete teams of people doing concrete dirty work.
It's the manager managers that are the problem mentioned here.
And the productivity of line workers doesn't matter if management is prioritizing the wrong projects. Bad managers have a bigger negative impact than bad line workers.
> Wouldn’t need so much redundancy if you could truly get their full output.
The incentive structure is that those workers capture much less than the value of their total output. If they worked harder so the firm required less employees, how do they benefit?
I can't think of a more useless profession than manager. Managers should not be paid because they don't do actual work and they don't know about the technology. They just squeeze all the joy out of work by commanding developers to do things they know will not work, and take away all intrinsic motivation. The accumulation of managers is a sign of a sick company. When engineers build things, out of an intrinsic interest in building stuff, they gain status as the company becomes more successful. This attracts people only interested in status that drag the company down. A top priority of tech companies as they scale should be to keep engineering in charge.
> I can't think of a more useless profession than manager.
I used to think that, but it just means you haven't worked with a good manager. Which isn't surprising since they are rare. But they exist.
A good manager will keep all roadblocks and distractions out of your way so you can be in the zone most of the time and they will play the corporate politics on your behalf so you get interesting projects and promotions.
A most dramatic demonstration of this happened at one company where I had my best manager ever succeeded by my worst manager ever. The worst wasn't a bad person or anything, just incompetent as a manager.
Under the great manager I was convinced this was the best-run company ever. Never any emergencies, never unreasonable requests, could focus all my time on interesting projects in different parts of the company. It was so great.
Then the great manager left for greener pastures and the incompetent one was hired. None of the upper management changed so the company was running the same as before. Suddenly I was inundated with nonsense escalations every day, constantly being pushed to stop working on the interesting projects, unreasonable time demands, etc. None of this was orignating from the incompetent manager directly, it came from the SVPs above.
So turns out the awesome manager was just absorbing all this noise and keeping those in his team shielded away from it so we could happily focus on tech work. The incompetent manager just forwarded everything that came to him.
Less than 6 months after the manager switch, I also left the company.
Sounds like you're describing ineffective or incompetent managers. A good engineering manager will teach/grow their reports, helping them focus on the things that they love while harnessing their energy towards building good systems and products. Few groups of engineers are able to work together effectively towards a goal without some sort of leader or manager in place.
Middle managers are a totally different beast altogether and are supposed to be coordinating resources for strategic rather than tactical goals. It's a lot easier to coast in this position, however, as many competent frontline managers often have the same skill set.
I hope you don't believe that "things will just happen on their own". Because they don't and won't. It's the same with selling products that generate company revenue - in general products DO NOT SELL THEMSELVES. Ever. And "worse" - even the best designed product that "flies off the shelf" will usually only do that for the first 3-9 months - after that, the lack of awareness for product or problem, the mismatch of buyer/seller knowledge, product features to market need, etc. is large enough that nothing will be an obvious match. All these things are why there are sales people with commissions et al.
>When engineers build things, out of an intrinsic interest in building stuff, they gain status as the company becomes more successful.
If engineers build things with no business value, then that company will fail. When every engineer is building their own passion project, then the company fail.
The position is a leadership role, one that should ideally ensure the team is united on one goal and is able to exert pressure outside the team in defense of that goal. However with any leadership role, the best people for that role aren't always the people who seek the role.
Sounds like you've only worked for bad managers. I'm not surprised, many companies protect them, and in fact promote them! I've worked for too many bad managers, so I feel your pain.
But also sounds like you've never worked for good managers. They may not do actual work (but many do!), but they definitely know about the technology. They ensure blockers are removed, questions are answered, obstacles are overcome, and that motivation remains high.
They may or may not be rarer that bad managers, but they do exist!
> Technology has made it possible to be a more effective manager and leader.
How so?
I've built a few different organizations now and each time I've found that I need to introduce a middle management layer somewhere around 18 and 24 engineers.
The limit is always things that are really hard to automate or replace with technology like 1 on 1s, keeping a pulse on how the team is feeling, coaching people on career growth, etc.
And in my experience, if more than 5 people are working together to do the same thing, one of them is going to be the manager, whether you call them that or not. We do it intentionally and explicitly because that's more likely to lead to a good manager then just letting someone take charge.
I don't think that contradicts what GP is saying, or perhaps I misunderstand them. 5 directs per manager. So 10 engineers = 2 managers. But at 25 engineers you have 5 managers, and now you've maxed out their manager.
Either way, my experience has been 5-10 directs as the sweet spot. 12-15 is fine but really pushing things. Beyond that, you need more structure.
Cars and planes made multi site management more effective.
Phones, cellphones, email, etc have all made management communication more effective. Address book in your iPhone is faster than your secretary, a Rolodex and the switchboard.
Automate the easy stuff, and have the management do the human leadership tasks.
I’d ask the engineers what else can be done differently but maybe you have implemented lean leadership already.
Beware a thing: the classic production of the '900 manufacturing industry do just require organization because anything is done on the assembly line, but creative works (witch means anything not already designed and now in mass production stage) is another thing. You can't subdivide a problem in tasks effectively until you figure out how to solve it in the first place, you can't easy share ideas quickly without "work's social life" etc.
To be more precise, it's doable but demand years of experience, our society except for very few jobs lack such experience and as always anyone want young people with decade of experience behind...
You no longer have to spend 5 minutes walking between meeting rooms and can now go straight from one meeting to another with no time to collect your thoughts at all!
My primary responsibilities as a manager are coaching, mentoring, hiring, firing, and solving impedance mismatches with other teams. None of that is aided by technology.
You telling us the advent of video and animated media, along with the increasing ease of making them and sharing them, has not helped? When many thus far have applauded the existence and presentation of information in such media?
Does your manager communicate to you with youtube videos? No. I have not found that video and animation content creation tools have made my job as a manager more efficient.
Maybe you need coaching not your direct reports. Training can be completely automated via technology with close feedback loops , AI and other techniques. Hiring can also be automated to a large extent specially for technical loops. Objective evaluation of someone’s performance can be done by tracking and task allocation systems. All these can be automated to a large extent.
Actually lot of middle management jobs can be automated specially tasks allocation and tracking. It is not that difficult to imagine a system like that where these functions can be automated and this middle managers can be free to do more “valuable” tasks.
There is a "hollowing out" of middle management - not from Covid or work from home, but software. It's still eating the world. Accountancy, or rather bookkeeping went first in the 1960s with rooms of people pulling levers on adding machines to the first IBMs. And now the data that those pounds and pence proxied for is actually being sent up the chain aggregated and compounded into a single straight through connection from the coal face to the board room. As Larry Ellison said "if you don't design it, build it or sell it Inwill do everything I can to automate you"
This is pretty accurate as an observation I believe. "My" middle manager does a lot more and acts more like a PO/PM combination fixing things in a horizontally integrated manner, whereas most typical PO/PM roles do their PM/POeing in a vertically integrated manner, on a product/product team basis. He's very good at that and therefore far from feeling irrelevant. Instead, he's drowning in useful work.
I am not surprised. I don't know how this plays out across different cultures, regional or corporate. I only witnessed how it went in the circles I work in here in Europe. My impression is that the group of people that clearly reacted mostly negatively to the work-from-home-during-the-pandemic period were indeed middle-managers, lowly heads of units, project managers, and those that populate the middle ranks of organisations with funny and unclear job titles. Perhaps these people are by nature of the extroverted people-person type that need extra social interaction to feel good. Or perhaps they found that their need to control others was more difficult to satisfy at distance. In my country it was also discussed at a point that many people were confronted during the pandemic with the meaninglessness of their jobs. I really believe it can be the case for many people, and not not only those middle-managers with funny job titles.
That's interesting that you mention Project Managers, mainly because my experience has been just the opposite. We've been leaning much harder on those folks to manage the increased communication and coordination overhead that comes from WFH.
From what I've seen those people are leaned on to continue to give management a sense of purpose. They need to organize lots and lots of video meetings with lots of unwanted participants showing up.
My take here (as a T.PgM) is that I really see my role as doing the opposite of what you describe. We really do try to think quite a bit about if a meeting is necessary, can it be moved to async communications (whitepaper, email, ticket, slack conversation, etc.), and most certainly who are the minimum possible amount of people needed to resolve a given issue.
And this is certainly not to be directly contrary to your post -- which does raise a great point. In fact, it is many peoples' (warranted) criticism of and aversion to pointless meetings that helps me and my colleagues keep minimizing communication and coordination overhead at top of mind.
And everyone's interests tend to dovetail in this regard when these things are done well anyway: folks spend their time in meetings sparingly and efficiently, which in turn speeds up and makes more efficient the project/launch/program/whatever.
OK but the meaningless of a job is supposed to be compensated by a paycheck -- I don't mean that as some patronizing middle manager -- but rather I've done loads of jobs I thought were meaningless, but did them anyways, because I needed to pay my rent.
We can get a sense of how an IC’s productivity changed during lock down. But it’s harder to tell how the effectiveness of management or leadership might have changed over a one or two year period.
Side note, I don’t know if some of you have actually been key players in a large org without management, but I have, and it SUCKS. If you think random slack pings are bad, try random slack pings plus 5+ hours of meetings a day you need to decline, justify declining, communicate about async, just to have time to get your work done. It’s my experience that without management, top performers are easily looking at 80+ hour work weeks
When a middle manager is removed, all the communication goes to the most senior member of the team instead keeping that person from being able to actually get things done.
The middle manager's time is a lot less expensive in most cases.
Staff+ engineers generally report to middle managers, and are expected to work across that middle manager’s subordinate teams.
In upper management it might be one very senior “right hand.” In the lower tranches of middle management there will be more and more hands-on technical-track leaders.
Also, being a middle manager isn't much fun either. Basically all meetings and bullshit, and you get shit from people below you and above you. Upper management blames you for anything going wrong and workers blame you for, well, everything. You need to motivate, teach and provide resources while dealing with all the bullshit from above and a lack of resources.
But as you pointed out, it's necessary otherwise everyone has to deal with the bullshit.
I once was in a discussion between two former <FAANG> VPs. They were mentioning someone who had been at their prior <FAANG> co for 20 years.
VP 1: “Jason? He is still there? How?”
VP 2: “He never managed anyone.”
I thought about that a lot. What is it about being middle management that is so lethal? Its exactly as you said: Liabilities from from above, below and sideways.
How to navigate organizational power structures to secure what is needed to get something done (both the formal and informal structures). How to establish organizational boundaries so that a teams capacity isn’t redirected. How to navigate upper management culture to communicate in a way they expect. How and why teams are organized the way they are and the pros and cons of different structures. How to position a team for growth and how to position a team during a period of consolidation. How to be therapist, mentor, mediator or executioner depending on the day.
I mean, in small enough orgs they're typically workers who have been promoted so they can teach the required skills. I guess in bigger orgs there's another layer...
I’m a middle manager at a company that is fully and completely embracing remote work, and I feel as needed as ever. It’s the bad middle managers who only know how to provide “value” by instilling fear and managing presence who should be afraid.
my middle manager at Apple Inc in California purposefully instilled distrust between members of his group. It gave him control and he would do it repeatedly over different situations. At the same time, there was this vague message that if you wrote patent applications, you could possibly maybe be promoted, with a bonus, but there was no time allocated to do that. 1990s
My manager has been great during covid. He immediately scheduled a daily group meeting for 30 minutes and it made me feel more involved with my staff group than ever. Because we're all so spread out so whenever I visited the HQ I only ever met a few of them.
But our org is so confusing that he has very little to do with my daily tasks, I have other types of managers for that.
Daily 30-minute meetings sounds to me like the antithesis of good management. If you feel like you need 30 minutes of synchronous time per day from your team of engineers, you are not a good manager.
That depends. A "daily group meeting" doesn't sound like a stand up or project management meeting. It sounds like 30 minutes a day to goof off with your work mates. A way to replicate the downtime you naturally have during an on site work day, a way to increase group cohesion by talking shit and playing games.
If that is the case, then they sound like a great manager.
We do 30 minute daily “standup ups” where the “what I’m currently focused on” component lasts for 10 minutes. Our group discussions, that are IC led, that come out of challenges or successes folks are facing, make up the last 20 some days (otherwise we wrap).
Of the 8 hours a day of my work, it’s the least likely to be a waste of time. It’s a great way for our distributed team to stay connected, express interest in work streams, and have a laugh.
Work can be so much more than just optimizing productivity to the nth degree.
"Daily standups" that become status reports where people drone on for 5 or 10 minutes each are not good experiences. My best managers have been fellow engineers that understand this (and also understand what their reports are actually doing.)
I think they mean micromanagers. I thrived as a middle manager of a remote team that was always distributed across three time zones. I’m not a micromanager and I built my team with that in mind, so my focus was hiring, onboarding, long term planning, and mentorship.
Maybe there’s a two dimensional chart here, but my best managers have been leaders, in which case they became mentors, or they’ve been service oriented, in which case I and my peers were up-managing them. The ones who are trying to herd cats come off as shrill, and nobody respects them. Fears them maybe, but no respect.
Problem is that if you’re up-managing your boss, they aren’t up-managing their boss. I’m sure there’s a Law in there somewhere. The leader types tend to know what’s what and shield the team from bullshit so they can get busy making the boss look competent in every other area. You can talk your way out of a lot of stuff when people are happy with the rest of your results. Delay tactics if nothing else. Sorry we can’t work on bullshit #372 right now because we’re busy being awesome on feature #784. Come back in a month or two (then cross your fingers to see if they still remember or are focused on bullshit #381).
Service-oriented would be when they make themselves available as a service to "customers" (direct reports, other teams). Think of helpdesk/customer service, where there's docs on how to communicate/collaborate/find needed info, times to schedule meetings/office hours, etc. Focusing more on the experience and needs of the people who might need the manager for something.
Up-managing is basically supporting your boss. Help them with their goals, find ways to unblock them, ask them how they're doing/let them vent, make them look good to others.
Personally I disagree with the whole "making someone else look good" management philosophy (including "only complain up"). I think it's dishonest and counter-productive. Sure it reduces friction, but it doesn't help crappy things be less crappy. It does prevent people from having hard conversations which might change things for the better. We need to take the ego and resistance to change out of work/management.
It doesn’t just have to be helping your boss. From your reports’ point of view, it’s a matter of spending less time telling us how to do our jobs and spending more helping the boss figure out how to do theirs.
Because often the people doing the thing have a pretty good idea what’s possible and what’s not, and when the management wants unicorns they will be unhappy with everyone because all they are getting from them is ponies. Someone has to tell them that’s because unicorns don’t exist and they’re being not just unreasonable but unhinged.
I hire relatively entry level folks for advanced product technical support so my funnel is naturally large since they aren’t specialists and I can teach/train the stuff to anyone who is a technical hobbyist or enthusiast. This has been my best way to keep top of the funnel high, over the years I also got more and more comfortable hiring folks with less and less technical/startup background but mostly my advice isn’t helpful for roles that require a lot of specialization. At that point it’s good to have a solid network, a good reputation, and a successful company. That’s another thing that’s kept me from having to expand my funnel much - my company has been doing really well for eight years and is only becoming more well known and mostly we get a lot of inbound. Besides that, hire good recruiters, sourcers, and recruiting coordinators. They know their shit.
From demanding all computer screens face them to micromanaging time that required logging every minute in 15 minute intervals. I've seen it. From email snooping to timestamp logging to phone call recording tracking micromanagers are alive and well .
We were using it internally pretending we were billing each other. Total employees under 5 people. Monthly an accountant would email and say you are not billing enough hours. This was full time.. weird, horrible experience I can bring with me.
It seems silly to suggest n=1, unless you somehow assumed I've only encountered one manager in 20 years.
N is the number of managers I've personally reported to (directly and indirectly), other managers I've had direct experience with at my various workplaces, the managers of my peers at these workplaces, and the managers my friends at other companies have told me about.
I've seen many bad managers, but their flaws have been: political shenanigans, technological ignorance, lack of involvement, or just general cluelessness. The one thing I've never actually seen yet is a manager who is trying to do too much in the details.
I had a CTO who would often send erratas with corrections in documentation written by and for ICs.
He would also _frequently_ request that PMs would send him draft emails before they send those to third party suppliers.
Note that all of these edits were not about content or data sensitivity or anything technical. It was purely grammar or just zero value adding re-wording.
It was definitely the shortest position in my career, i got out as quick as I gracefully could.
Ha, I send corrections (including minor grammar/spelling) to ICs under me. But I use it explicitly as a "teaching moment", and explain to them:
* They should be mindful of all aspects of their work, including docs.
* If I come across code that woefully misformatted, and comments are all over the place, with random whitespace, and zero effort on spelling (in comments or function/variable names), it causes me to think they don't pay attention to details -- that they don't care about their code. I find badly formatted code to be especially jarring with UI engineers, who should have some knack for visual quality.
* I warn them that when /others/ in the company see our code and docs, if we look sloppy, they will implicitly form a judgement of us as a sloppy team.
On the other hand, if the single contribution I ever provided for my team was spell-check... then yeah, I should leave.
> If I come across code that woefully misformatted, and comments are all over the place, with random whitespace, and zero effort on spelling (in comments or function/variable names), it causes me to think they don't pay attention to details -- that they don't care about their code. I find badly formatted code to be especially jarring with UI engineers, who should have some knack for visual quality.
This is a tooling problem, not a people problem. There's not a language I know that doesn't have at least a tolerably decent formatter and linter out there, and a delightful side benefit of having those in your build chain is the end of style bikeshedding. I find "well, if it means that much to you, you can always open a PR on the style rules," and the knowledge that they'll need to justify their preference - and own all the whitespace PRs, and at least half the merge conflicts, if they wish not to be thought a jerk - quells most folks' desire to fight about their preferred number of spaces or what-have-you.
Without any sort of reliable tooling support for a standard house style, I believe I might well come to regard the kind of insistence you describe as a demand to waste time on pointless busywork. Doubly so, if the person doing the insisting had made no evident effort to find and put into practice such tooling support.
They do; I went to a lot of effort a few years back, teaching one how not to be. We both learned a lot: I learned how to avoid a significant failure mode in my own career, and he learned he was happier in an IC role.
This is a bad title to an other unsurprising article.
Managers don't fear they will become irrelevant. It's bad managers who are having trouble figuring out how to manage without seeing people at their desk.
What's mind blowing to me is that despite two years of being forced to evaluate people by their impact rather than by their physical presence, so many managers still don't have a clue how to do this right.
Meanwhile, healthy remote teams are thriving, and competent middle managers there provide incredible value, from managing execution to keeping the social tissue of their teams together.
Middle management got obliterated in the recession in the 80’s. It’ll happen again in the next recession.
I often wonder at the parallels between military chain of command and civilian chain of command. Line managers and NCOs are down in the trenches, and most of them stay there. Everyone else is in an “up or out” situation. They are not stable titles and you’ll get burned if you aren’t incredibly lucky.
If you took a title for more pay, my advice is always to recall that it’s for more money but that money might go away. Save it. Spend it on incidentals. But don’t take out loans on it. In the next downturn you’ll be fucked. Spend like you are one job title behind where you currently are - so either don’t spend it, or keep climbing.
Not doing your job well if this is the case. Quality managers do everything `codezero` mentioned above (hiring, onboarding, long term planning, and mentorship) along with being a corporate therapist and much more.
A lazy manager looks like the ER where they only handle shit when people come to them with blood and guts, a quality manager is regularly assessing the daily/weekly situation and anticipating obstacles or implementing fixes so engineering can run an unimpeded race. They're essentially the emotional chaos buffer for engineering, the goal being engineers come to work and feel the autonomy, freedom, and energy to execute well.
Hard disagree. A well-managed team can manage itself. If you can go on a month-long vacation and don't need to set up any special delegation of tasks first, it's a well-managed team.
If you're constantly dealing with crises, that's a huge management failure.
Nope not true. I worked 8+ years managing small to large teams. Doing very little work. And my teams were routinely outcompeting much larger teams. For example, a customer told me that my team of 15 routinely outcompeted a 75 person team at his company. I did it by clearly defining objectives, assigning responsibilities, and getting out of their way. The only key thing I had to do beyond that was to gently remind developers to focus on priority #1 when they got distracted and drifted off track.
It all depends on the role. My immediate manager is good ( and likely the best manager I had so far ).
But he actively cuts through red tape for us and deals with the usual corporate idiocy on our behalf. I actually declined a job offer partially because of him ( no friends at other place to vouch for the place ).
I don't know how much other managers do, but he does a lot. Not just for us, but for the company.
What's worse, is if you happen to hire a great engineer, you have to keep the pay raises and bonuses coming to that star engineer. Otherwise, he'll move on and take the %30 pay raise with a new job.
The punishment/reward metric is skewed toward punishment in most companies.
Go even further and conclude that most engineers are shit , which is why managers have jobs in the first place. The best teams are highly self driven and self organizing
Not my experience at all. I worked as a manager of small to large development teams for 8+ years and my conclusion is that great developers can be cheap, and bad developers are always expensive (because of their negative productivity/impact).
There are clear benefits to remote. Our company posted record profits, ICs report increased individual productivity, but we have to roll it back, because it is 'hard' on managers? Whatever happened to, 'git gud'?
Schmidt:
"I don’t know how you build great management [with remote work]. I honestly don’t," he said. And about half of managers, 51%, genuinely believe that their workers want to return to the office.
Wesman:
“Clearly, managers are struggling,” said Max Wesman, GoodHire’s chief operating officer. “Organizations that find a work arrangement that satisfies the majority of their workforce will benefit in the areas of recruitment, productivity, employee satisfaction, and retention.”
I can think of a route towards Wesman's stated goal: if you fire most of the worthless middle managers, and let the real workers work from home, then a majority of the workforce will be satisfied.
I am not against it. To be honest, one could argue that the nation-wise remote experiment already yielded results.. we could easily extrapolate, who is an actual contributor and who is just there, because... reasons.
Sorry but global remote work didn’t need to prove the Dilbert principle and Gervais rule. I’m willing to bet more people will leave jobs purely because they feel stuck behind an incompetent manager. Who wants to waste years of their life not growing?
ICs have virtually the most power in most companies at higher levels of seniority. The demand demonstrates that, but more importantly, more people should stand up for themselves when they have a shitty manager. Life isn’t long enough to be a doormat.
There are good managers out there. They are very rare. If you have one, keep them. If you don’t, look for one. Your mental health will thank you later.
> Eric Schmidt even recently weighed in about the return-to-work debate, [...] "I don’t know how you build great management [with remote work]. I honestly don’t," he said. And about half of managers, 51%, genuinely believe that their workers want to return to the office.
Instead of believing, perhaps ask them?
In general, I find this article to say almost nothing. The headline is the clickbait bringing in a Fortune of clicks, I'm sure.
Actual work like coding and drawing has become much easier with WfH. People work, like managing and coordinating, has become much harder now that you can’t just walk up to people and have conversations with them anymore.
If anything, middle managers are more important than that were before. I’m sure upper management will just see them as a cost-cutting measure though and write specious articles like this to justify their idiocy.
"If anything, middle managers are more important than that were before. I’m sure upper management will just see them as a cost-cutting measure though and write specious articles like this to justify their idiocy. "
I only disagree about one thing in that sentence. It is missing one qualifier. 'Good middle managers are more important than there were'.
"Fed-up managers declare WFH is over, as 77% say they’d fire you or cut your pay for not coming back to the office"
And the reasons the article describes are more along the lines of managers feeling that they cannot manage remotely, not worrying about their relevance.
The underlying reason might of course be worries about relevance, but that is not the content of the article.
I think it is worries about job-security. If everyone is remote every worker can be replaced by someone cheaper from some region with lower wages. As mangers are at the same location as their underlings, their relevance vanishes with local workers.
Companies that doesn’t offer flexible WFH will be less competitive in the jobs market. In other words, companies that force everybody to be in the office 5 days a week will end up with developers that can’t get jobs anywhere else.
The title in the <title> and <h1> tags on the actual article are also very different. I think they are playing some optimization game to get more people to click. It's possible that the HN title was once the title of the actual article.
As an IC, having an immediate manager that coordinates what my team works on and shields us from getting whipsawed by ad-hoc requests is really valuable, remote work or not. I may be a little biased, because all of my managers so far have been very technically competent. But having somebody above me who is both politically and technically savvy is a godsend. During times when my team has had no manager, everything was more chaotic and nothing went as smoothly.
That's awesome! As an IC, I have a supportive manager but a lot of ad-hoc requests are just taken on, some of them don't make sense, and then I have to push back. When I push back, my manager supports me but a lot of time is wasted in meetings and slack messages to keep protecting my time to do actual work.
On the positive side, I'm not a confrontational/assertive person. So, I had to learn how to say no and to articulate well why I push back.
My company (an F500) has made the inverse process: before COVID-19 there was just 2 levels of management between me and the C-level executive. Now I have 4 level of management.
I don't think it's bad to have middle management, if they cover you from the shit coming from the top. If they don't, they are just unuseful.
Most of middle management work is being pushed onto employees, who can now absorb that work because remote work has led to everyone working 2-3 hrs extra.
In the past if upper management wanted a demo of what was coming up, the “middle manager” would put it together, especially if it involves several team members’ work.
Now, with the fact that everyone is putting in more time, and that we are now all accustomed to spending hours and hours in meetings, they just throw an hour long meeting in the calendar, and ask the 10 people on the team to each do a 10 min demo.
Far more inefficient, but that’s ok because upper management is getting it for free.
I truly believe that I can predict how effective/productive an organisation is based purely on the non-manager to manager ratio. The higher the ratio, the more effective/productive the organisation is. This has been the case for every organisation I have ever worked for and read about. Don’t get me wrong. You do need a minimum of management to glue the organisation together. But anything beyond the absolute minimum will rapidly decrease the effectiveness/productivity of the organisation. The most efficient/productive/successful company I have worked for had a ratio of 20 to 1. The worst/most inefficient company I have ever worked for had a ratio of 2 to 1 (I kid you not).
Really there are just too many managers doing too little work. They seem busy because they're in meetings 40 hours a week. 40 emails would be about as productive, and free up half their week (so they could do twice as much, hence we would need half as many).
I have wondered if there is a chance inflation will wane due to cost efficiencies related to WFH. One cost saving is from lower real estate expenses. If a chunk of employees are made/revealed to be redundant, that could be another cost saving.
That doesn’t guarantee that companies will lower prices — they may choose to try for higher profits. But it reduces the pressure for them to increase prices YOY in order to account for inflation.
They were before too. But in any case their role isn't about relevance or production of whatever the company produces.
It's just a way the company expands after a certain size as an organism and starts feeding itself, growing bigger while allowing for redududancy and waste - like a state does.
The article doesn’t even mention “middle manager”?
It also does not make any sense. Increased WFH requires more effort to connect people, communicate context, mentor people, bridge silos, … all part of the job description of a middle manager
well I declared middle managers over last year and switched to full remote because I didn't want to comply with mandatory day per week in the office anymore.
Told HR on the exit interview my middle manager is not providing me any value and I don't want to make profit for his pay and rather found a company that realized enabling fully remote gives them competitive advantage and I can keep this part of the money for myself. They starred at me like I said a blasphemy
Looking back at it with the experience of almost a year I should have done it much earlier.
Current corporation structure is not meant to increase individual productivity, but rather it increases on group productivity (at the cost of individual productivity) which is why middle managers are always be important.
People leave, go on vacations, get sick, priorities changes, all of which need to be dealt with. And in an environment where the amount of work available to do is always higher than the resources available, you need middle managers to deal with other teams, PMs, customers etc.
IMVHO there are various issues, as anything "new for most people" (even if is not something really new) and that's not just on the administrative, middle-man, side:
- working by targets is not easy, because fixing targets is not easy. Formally we design everything up front so we know what to do at any point in the future, in practice we do design something up front but not all, especially not much "ordinary things". That means that control work progress is not easy and many feat to discover too late that someone is behind the schedule. Not all WFH jobs produce code that can be seen in a common repo every day;
- people who do not know each other sometimes have issue to act as a team and effectively communicate and interact as needed, most tend to communicate just the bare minimum and others too much;
- being really remote means no real geographical constraints so potential economical issues for workers (a new job market with workers from very different countries with very different cost of living), administrative issue (different laws, contacts etc) and practical issues for all (different time zones etc);
Meanwhile there are many advantages like for the employer no office space expenses, just furniture and hw for workers, for them the possibility to live in lovely and cheap places, no commuting, less fatigue and more free time having erased the itinere part etc. BUT to elicit those advantages we need a tested setup that's new and unknown for most, witch means a challenge with potentially long pain while experimenting. Most people still live nearby their offices in cities and there they do not have much space at home for a proper setup etc.
In the end the worst part: hybrid works that force in-office workers to work as they are at home and makes people at home less visible, disadvantage them, makes them feeling guilty to be more in comfort etc + all the issue of double/movable office setup from home to office and vice versa.
Long story short IMVHO:
- part of management, not just middle-man fear for their role
- part fear the challenge of completely change work paradigm
- part are simply not ready nor they can't be quickly to really WFH
That's why some like WFH and some do not. Of course techies tend to like it the most, because they are those already more organized and perhaps WFH since years, others are less organized and others are just old to feel well in digitally-centered environments.
I honestly think that around 30% of jobs can be done from remote effectively but just 10% of these 30% can be done now. Because only a small percentage is ready in humans and paradigms terms. To spread this percentage we need time and incentives...
What we should do right, hear me out, is build a really big spaceship, put all the middle managers on it and fire them into space.
We’ll tell them it’s to escape the giant mutant star goat or something and the rest of us will be along later, but they don’t need to know we’re not going to.
Once a decade, there is a story about middle managers becoming irrelevant. Somehow they manage to cling on. I'm sure in another decade, we'll get another article about something else making middle managers irrelevant.
Ineffective managers are at every level, including the C-suite. Middle managers just have a higher probability of being ineffective due to lack of experience/resources, so they get the headline.