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Comment by tamaatar | Hacker News Reader

You are right about the salary. but what is your opinion on job security and employability. the way I see it, in a tech role, as long as your are flexible and open to learning whatever technology is thrown at you, you will always be employable. But in management,especially in junior management and especially in very large organisation, managers are in most cases dead weight. they don't do much.Don't they feel the insecurity?

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Perceiving a manager—no matter how junior—as simply "dead weight" signals a failure in the organization, the individual manager, and/or your own perception. In addition to ensuring accountability, a good manager also helps to shield subordinates from the bureaucracy that is inevitable in large organizations. This work may not always be visible.

Bureaucracy inevitably leads to inefficiency.

If a primary purpose of managers is to "shield subordinates", then you have a much bigger problem within your organization.

But chaos is also inefficient. The best possible management minimizes both the chaos and the bureaucratic inefficiency, to get optimum output from their organization. This does not happen without management - the "natural state" of an organization is not as efficient as the optimal state.

Good process adds some latency, but reduces risk.

Definitely not as many available jobs. Every company in the Valley seems to be looking for engineers by the truckload, but there are not so many openings for [people|project|product] managers. Apparently, engineers now self-organize and products simply leap from their fingertips onto store shelves.

As for job security, I guess I'll find out eventually. My gut feeling is that in software companies, it's easier to get laid off/fired as a manager, and it's the opposite in companies where software/IT plays a peripheral or supporting role.

Yeah, this is my gut feeling too. Unspoken is the fact that productivity tools like Asana, Trello, Slack are innovations to replace management.

If you think you can replace managers with Trello, you clearly have had some very awful bosses in your career.

I don't need anyone to tell me to keep working on my TODO list. On the other hand, someone who grasp the big picture is useful to have around to tell me in what order to tackle the task in the TODO list. Its even better when said someone has the clout to go poke a 3rd party that is blocking me so I can keep working on the TODO list.

But the very best managers I have had are the ones that are willing to bite the bullet and say "No, X cannot go into the TODO list as it is now. Let's work together to define what realistic actionable items need to happen for X to be accomplished and then we can put those in the TODO list."

There are a few good managers. Everyone else is a boss. Boss's are detriment to an organization.

Managers manage. They don't wait until there's a fire and then start running around tossing the blame ball. Boss's do that.

I would say the type of manager you describe could be more aptly called a leader: visionary (motivating the team behind ideals), willing to do the hardest work (as opposed to handing it down apathetically), respectful (building trust and such) and more.

"Leader" is usually reserved for a different kind of work. A leader determines where the organization should go; a manager ensures that everyone under him is marching in that direction. They require very different skillsets - leading is an outward-facing, synthesizing, strategic role, while managing is an inwards-facing, empathizing, tactical role. To use Ben Horowitz's terminology [1], leaders are Ones and managers are Twos. The CEO's usually the most visible leader in the company, but you'll often find them at lower levels as well, like the tech lead trying out a new experimental Skunkworks project.

Both of them are distinct from "boss" as the grandparent describes it, which is usually what happens when you get a manager who lacks empathy, awareness, and flexibility. Both leader and manager are highly cognitively-complex, pro-active roles that require constant information-gathering. Boss is what happens when you get someone in that position who lacks the confidence or skillset to stay on top of all that information and then reacts through command & control techniques when things go wrong.

[1] http://www.bhorowitz.com/ones_and_twos

"a manager ensures that everyone under him is marching in that direction"

That sounds like a boss to me (and not just because you used an unnecessarily gender-specific word ;). One of the anecdotes in the article is about this person, as a manager, acting as a listening board and ultimately conduit for an engineer when discussing the importance of a specific project at Twitter, and raising questions that came from that engineer that ultimately resulted in the project being cancelled. I think that advocacy role is important management – where the manager advocates both up and down (and ultimately you can't "tell" people what to do, you can only fire them or convince them, so it's "advocacy" both directions).

Difference between a "manager" and "boss" is entirely in how they go about getting everyone on the same page. For any given strategic direction, there are a lot of different ways that could be achieved. A good manager takes in information from all her reports (including their preferences, fears, concerns, and goals) and then figures out a plan that keeps all of them happy while also achieving the strategic goals coming down from above. A bad manager takes the goal as the only input and then outputs commands to achieve it.

Totally agree. A good tech resource is hard to find. The guy who makes you go to a meeting once a week to tell you the floor plan is changing a little? Not so much!

So a good tech resource is harder to find than a bad manager? Hard to argue with that.

Ah, but the managers are usually the ones that decide who gets fired. If they fire you, you can be back on the job somewhere else in a few weeks. If they fire themselves, what other manager would hire a former manager who even implied that a manager was the least productive employee in the unit? That's crossing the thin green line, man!

Half of a manager's job is justifying the importance of management to the employees, and the other half is justifying their own importance to their superiors.

Let's put it this way. I have never been kept around long enough to see my own manager get fired. And I have been through 3 mergers.

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