How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics
hbr.org
hbr.org
This is nice in theory. But when your "peers" with Manager in their title have access to more information and more decision-making power, it is not in fact a parallel track. Just saying people are equal doesn't make it so, and it doesn't change the underlying organizational structures.
there also is a ted talk by semco ceo ricardo semler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4vzhweOefs
I'm saying this as a candidate that didn't get selected. I got great actionable feedback on how to be a better leader, and I'll keep my fingers crossed when there is another opportunity available.
i.e. when it comes down to the icon, your group should agree to trust the designer, and then trust the designer. The benefits are numerous: 1) People get to make the decisions within their realm of expertise, 2) No aimless debate, products are built faster, 3) If there was a bad decision, there is one person who made the decision, but the whole team should share accountability since they all agreed to trust the person who made that decision.
The process by which that decision is made is the process by which you select a person to make that decision. Ideally, that happens at the hiring level, so once, for example, a designer is assigned to your team, you already know that s/he is good enough to pick the right color. You don't have to engage in office politics to discover whether or not you can trust him/her, and you don't have to engage in office politics to allocate praise/blame in the event of particularly good/bad decisions.
A lot of flip flopping and lack of follow through.
Who made that decision? We did. Can we give up on that and try something else? Of course.
I kinda like to have at least a shepherd for the day to day decisions, if not a commander.
In practice in my current environment it's been the occasional PM that takes some ownership that fills that role, but in many groups I see the floundering without leadership.
Internally I think they think they're making progress because everyone on the team is always happy with their decisions, I may just be the old curmudgeon that's frustrated with what I see as wasted effort.
Your peers form an agile group to deliberate. You have non-management product owners and stakeholders to guide you (shepherd you).
You have a supervisor who deals with HR business like time off, but is unrelated to your product decisions.
This essay was illuminating:
Tyranny of Structurelessness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...
"Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group."
The same essay was linked to me a previous time I made a similar public complaint :)
The feedback my own manager shared with me that had been collected from my reports was that they appreciated what I was trying to do, but that they also wanted me to have a more active technical leadership/decision-making roles.
What I'd failed to do was talk enough specifically with the rest of the team around what they wanted the roles to be, vs just assuming they'd want maximum autonomy. This will vary depending on composition of team, familiarity of the devs on the team with the problem area and stack, etc.
It will also depend on if managers are expected to be almost-purely people-managers or if they're also expected to be domain knowledge leaders as well.
There's no one-size-fits-all approach, but the thing I've seen that separates a good manager from a bad manager is being able to adjust their approach in things like that based on the situation vs sticking to a script.
I favor democratic decision making processes.
Use voting systems appropriate for the task. Roman eval for new hires, go/no go. Approval voting for triage, new features. JADs for "visions". Creative writing exercise for post-mortems. Etc.
"Democratic" does not mean winner-takes-all, which is suboptimal.
"Democratic" does not mean consensus.
I rather don't agree with this one.
'Voting' should almost never, ever be used.
For so many reasons.
Rarely should everyone have an 'equal say'. You are not 'equal citizens' in this. Second - is that it leads to politics - 'I helped you last time, you help me this time' etc. Unless you get into crazy things like 'hidden ballots'.
There is no substitute for leadership.
Often, a mediocre decision, executed upon well, will lead to better outcomes than 'great decisions' wherein their is fudging, lack of insight etc..
In situations that require broad input, a decent moderator should be able to assess the 'consensus' and go with that.
In many design situations, architects and designers should basically set the direction, absent issues brought up by team members.
Things like 'should we all use the same IDE' or 'what IDE's can we use' - obviously require a lot of input from team members and maximum flexibility.
But things like API design ... that needs to be really well curated and it's best left to the experts - with strong feedback from team members.
Second this, true in my experience as well.
Not a peer.
It's not about making everyone equal at all times. What's important is how do you choose a leader and when.
Personally, this has lead to me getting messed with my managers ~never, which is a very high-order bit in my work happiness.
For instance, a lot of non-software companies may pay more and provide a director or executive level title to a developer and give them a team just to get them in the door.
What these people don't immediately realize is they are giving up being a "tier-1" employee at the organization. First and foremost if you are at say, a tire company, software is most likely a cost center and not central to the strategy. This means they wont attract good developers, and have to do things like above to get them in the door.
If you want to work with really passionate and talented software developers, you'll want to be at a primarily software organization, or one that sees the logistics of software central to the business strategy.
I am not knocking the system, as I agree that a meritocratic structure can work in small social systems, but there are some risk. The primary ones would be new member exclusion which can be hidden behind the meritocratic mantle of "it's the best choice", and fiefdom building that can result from the finite number of members that can function in a social group or that can reliably be recalled/indexed by members with in a group.
It may be possible to have numerous self contained and self structured groups operating within a larger organization, assuming the time tables allow for them to establish, and that new member barriers are not so obvious that they decrease retention. Facebook may be knowingly or unknowingly leveraging their Employer Brand to mitigate the risk of attrition within hierarchy-lite system.
The problem isn't traditional office politics, as far as I've seen. The problem is that sometimes the influential engineers can be shortsighted about other teams' needs and it can actually be hard for management to step in and say hey look.
In case this wasn't a phonetic typo and you're really not aware, the word you are looking for is "cliques". Cheers!
Isn't this the definition of politics? Trust is a personal feeling based on other opinion and your own experience while level should be based on documented achievements in the company.
Same with influence over authority. Influence is just another word for politics.
Still toxic.
Political status becomes the primary product at work. Actual work performance of individuals and teams becomes secondary.
Decisions become increasingly irrational because the interests of low-status individuals - including customers, suppliers, and other employees - start being seen as an annoying distractions from personal profit/status.
If that's reversed and performance becomes more important than status, you're already in a healthier place.
Empires can be very profitable. But they're also miserable places to work, and they rarely have much customer good will.
If, say, a Software Architect and a Senior Director have the same pay and the same perks and the same bonus structure, and it really does take a talented person the same amount of time to climb that high from (say) Software Engineer and Manager, then they're parallel.
If any of that favors one side over the other then they're not.
I doubt any company is going to give access to enough data to prove or disprove the claim; but the default believability isn't very high.
I have a doubt: "the same pay and the same perks" things seem okay but "the same bonus structure" seems difficult to understand.
A manager has more visibility, more access to business info then he/she will have more chance to be eligible to "bonus" than an engineer has.
So, it'd great if you elaborate on how a Software Engineer and a supposedly equal Manager can have "the same bonus structure".
the best thing about it? engineers who aren't good at the strategic, human high-touch, or political issues, but excel at execution and implementation aren't managing teams of people -- they're busy executing and getting paid (and further promotions) based on their ability to execute, not on their ability to manage herds of programmers.
as a software engineer, i love that my boss is my boss because he's good at managing teams of software engineers. not because he's the best software engineer in the house.
In silicon valley contacts are as valuable as money and a person with manager in his title will build contacts faster and achieve more than a developer who actually might have made more impact for his employer.
People with manager in title can work from home more often, travel on company paid trips more often and in general have a better social life than developers. At the end of the day managers can make a developers life bad if he/she wants too. That is what matters.
Many large software companies have very similar structure.
Since I had personal experience working in these companies here what I found as problem:
- Management has decision making power.
- Management has ability to control $$ (bonus allocation, etc.)
- Management has access to more information than employees on "individual contributor" track
It is important to note that system work up to mid-level managers. I.e., it is works well when there is "team lead" and "manager". Manager ensures that the team is not bothered by politics and get all necessary resources while team lead ensures that things are done.
But when you come to mid-level and up even if the pay is comparable, the life is much better for managers. For example, if you are in 40s it is important to have job security. Senior managers and VPs will know when are layoffs are coming or certain groups will be sacked (since they have access to more informations). They can prepare for it. If you are "software architect", you are in the blind until the day of layoffs.
Companies that are set up well also give minimal control over bonus allocation or salaries. These things should be controlled by HR and recruiting, along with salary and compensation policies based on role and level. Managers supposedly have the best view on IC performance, so within some band they should be able to influence rate increases and promotions. Anything outside of that would need to be a conversation between the manager/IC and HR. My advise here is if you feel there is a deviation in your pay, get your manager to bat for you, do not go to HR yourself.
And by design, management will have access to more information than individual contributors, but that's the purpose of the role. This person brings in information, priorities, and resources to the team to execute. This is where the "power" idea comes in, but anyone in this position long enough would tell you its more of a "responsibility." It's not always clear what is right and what isn't, nor even a way to really prove it ex post facto. Could it give someone enough perspective to make self-interested decisions that ICs could not? Probably.
I suppose the question is, is that bad and how is it bad, and how would you eliminate it?
Edit: My wishful novelist inside me says its the software program that automates resource allocation, charter, and IC development. You could essentially build an autonomously managed organization with IC roles being the only true human employees.
Relaying on HR for anything related to company development and future (i.e., bonuses) is very very dangerous. I was there and you have to see shenanigans and company politics in that case.
So the problem is:
1. you can give power to HRs to allocate bonuses
2. you can give power to EVPs and VPs to allocate bonuses
It is much better to give this power to EVPs and VPs.
> And by design, management will have access to more information than
> individual contributors, but that's the purpose of the role.
And that cause of the problem :( ICs will have less information and thus when things come to making decisions, people on management track will make better decisions (since they are have more information) and thus subsequent promotion. I was also there...
Either way - I think you may have misinterpreted my remarks about HR.
politics in the end is a part of life; it should not dominate or overshadow goal oriented work, but it is a natural, unavoidable consequence of people holding different viewpoints.
on the other hand, all the openness strategies they suggest are great, and these do work well in practice to mitigate conflict [but politics does not equal conflict].
I say that I learned the hard way because I focused on being that high-impact developer. At my first job, I rewrote the company's core software to make it (really) an order of magnitude faster, providing the basis for the company's sustainability for the next decade. My salary skyrocketed. My title did not. I was forever stuck in a limbo of being just a "developer" while being paid as much as an executive but being excluded from every executive meeting and not even being involved in hiring for the team that would maintain the software I wrote on which the entire company depended. I was still stuck in a cubicle while the managers were sure to get very nice, spacious offices with ludicrous window views.
At that company, it was, frankly, impossible for a developer to get the same perks as a manager. I'm sure there are companies out there that handle this a lot better and don't make management the only path to promotion. These have just been the minority in my personal experience.
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I also agree with you for what it's worth that management is a skill in and of itself that most developers wouldn't be good at. The point I was making in my previous post was a little more nuanced. Think of it like this. At a large company, there might be 100 VPs who are pure managers, and there might be 5 very distinguished engineers who are at the same VP level. This creates the impression that developers can rise up just as high in the company, when in reality it's more of an illusion. The technical skill level necessary to reach VP level as a developer is astronomically high. The management skill level necessary to reach VP level as a pure manager is certainly not low by any means, but it's comparatively much lower than it is for VP engineers.
I learned this the easy way at a company when our manager left and it took a long time to find a replacement so all the directors and VPs would come directly to us for questions, advice, etc.
and the engineers have skills most managers don't. One set just happens to lead to easier power and money, for some reason.
In my experience if the answers to these questions are no then the company is still being run by PHBs with PHB priorities and PHB viewpoints in which technical people are largely interchangeable cogs.
I do ask you to take the flip side. Do you want your non tech savvy PHBS at your meeting setting your technical direction? Should they tell you what Web framework to use? What IDE? Tabs vs spaces? OOP vs FOP?
Most engineers who I know are really mad about not helping more with business decisions, but they won't listen to a pointy hair boss making technical decisions. Why is that?
If that's you, then make sure to add that to your list of jobsearch criteria and don't join a company that doesn't have it. Lack of it is almost a guarantee management is unenlightened about tech talent.
In other words, my dream job.
Take Philip Su, who was the site lead for Facebook London. In most organizations, that would translate to "manager of everything happening at Facebook". After 3 years he decided to take another lateral move - to move back to software development (no lead, just a software engineer) https://www.facebook.com/the.philip.su/timeline/story?ut=32&...
When you work at a company where managers demonstrate that it is a lateral move - moving from management to individual contribution - well, then this stuff starts to work.
Another thing that this article does not touch on, is the transparency that people at Facebook share what's going on with them professionally. My buddy said a senior person shared on Facebook @work how he had gotten a bad performance review, and how this made him feel... for all other employees to see, and comment on. My buddy was saying that "when I joined, I thought that people were just drinking kool aid about how our culture is different. But now that I'm in - I seriously have not expected it to be this different to anywhere I've worked before"
I do think that Facebook is doing something incredible with keeping a very startup like and transparent culture going at this large scale. No other company of this size even comes close.
"Take the incentive out of “climbing the ladder.”
Also, the rank on engineer track may also be converted to a lower rank in management track. On top of that, long tenured Distinguished Engineers might also get a much higher compensation than a mid-level manager.
Once the incentives are leveled up, personal interests and motivation really becomes the driver for employees to do their most appropriate job.
Obviously these were all anecdotal stories I heard. Microsoft now may also be different from the Microsoft then. I welcome someone who has first hand experience with similar organizational structure setup to clarify and elaborate on this.
However, the gist of the matter is that despite being on-par with compensation (assuming metrics like years of experience / company tenure), a manager role is simply more powerful, allowing easier leverage for more compensation more quickly.
So making more than a mid-level manager may not be all that great. :-)
(I imagine Distinguised Engineers at MSFT do very well, and when you factor in quality of life may be happier with their jobs than VPs. But that doesn't make it parallel.)
Thus, if 1% of engineers are in the highest, distinguished level then 1% of managers should be in the highest managerial level. If those 500 VPs amount to 10% of all managerial positions then they should be comparable in impact and salary to all those engineers whose engineer contributor level amounts to 10% of all engineering positions.
https://galois.com/blog/2016/06/undirector-of-engineering/
Galois is a private research lab/consulting firm that specializes in high-assurance computing relying heavily in programming language techniques and Haskell. I mostly know about them because they publish a whole ton of cool tools for security, low-level programming and verification. They also seem like a wonderful place to work partly because they're tackling fascinating, research-level problems and partly because the internal culture seems like something fundamentally special.
In other words, pay everyone the same? Of course the author didn't mean that; and pay and power are the primary drivers of upward mobility. If I get paid as much as Zuck's SVPs, sure, I won't feel the urge to climb the ladder; but until that happens, I will.
It's possible to create an incentive structure that discourages cannibalizing your coworkers.
To be clear, I'm fine with rivalry and competition. I just think there's a sane and reasonable way to do it.
What do you do next with your glut of senior managers?
Or on the compensation side, there may not be resources to pay everyone as much as they'd like.
Confusing management with leadership is one of the main reasons for politics and empire building. Once managers think they're in charge of figuring out the vision, instead of that being the whole team's responsibility, you're lost in top-down management land.
Unfortunately, what often happens is managers think they are more knowledgeable than the ICs on the team. This in turn leads to ICs not being invested in the outcomes as much as if it were their ideas, and can lead to resentment because they do not feel their input is valued.
A good leader is not "The Decider." A good leader is the one who asks their team "given X, Y and Z goals, how would you solve for this knowing these are the constraints?"
"Given X, Y and Z goals, how would you solve for this knowing A) these are the constraints and B) that me and the other cofounder have already decided what we want to do, and really just want your buy in."
Office politics are more rampant in places without externally defined hierarchies because people have to figure out the hierarchy on their own.
That almost brings a tear to my eye. This is such a huge contrast to what my current experience is at BigCorp. And that's just a few miles away from Facebook.
The question then becomes, how much power does a manager have at Facebook? Can they block you from transferring to another team? Can they block your vacation/time off requests? Are they the only ones responsible for doing the performance reviews? Is said performance review audited so as to contain verifiable facts?
> We make escalation “legal” by making sure people know they won’t be blamed or punished for speaking up or asking hard questions.
I really wish that was expanded on. Theoretically, I could escalate. In practice, that would backfire horribly. After all, if there's no accountability, what's preventing your manager from simply retaliating by giving you a hard time, possibly a while after the escalation happened? There are lots of subjective ways your work can be criticized/sabotaged which are not obviously connected to the escalation.
> Obviously, these strategies are at their most effective when the whole company adopts them.
Actually, it is way, way worse when the whole company doesn't support that. You can move from a great project to your own personal purgatory.
Reviews are written by your peers (that usually includes your manager).
Reviews need to quote actual success metrics to prove the impact you had...just writting "bob is dope" won't take you far :)
FB is actually more mindful of the quality of their management talent. They put a bonfire under their feet in the form of charging managers with direct responsibility to hire for their teams, and _encouraging_ team members to leave for other teams every now and then to overcome human inertia. If you suck or if your project sucks, you will have trouble hiring and retaining talent, so pretty quickly you won't be a manager anymore.
My new project is actually quite interesting. There's very little politics involved too, which is a plus, and I'm glad I'm not writing yet another chat app that we will deprecate in 2 years time.
The worst part about Google for me is the level of incivility. This is what, the 4th time a senior exec has to call people out and tell them to behave on memegen? And it's only getting worse.
Also, considering how mediocre many Google engineers are, I never understood where all that arrogance comes from.
Edit: fix typos.
As to the quality of engineers, I've worked with some AMAZING people at Google, far and away the best I've ever seen in my long career. After a while Google skews your perception as to what it means to be "good", because even the very worst SWEs at Google are well above average in the industry. Google would not be able to function without this, given that it takes a full 3-4 months to just become productive with its internal infra and kinda-sorta figure _some_ things out.
What does this mean?
Ah. I understand. So there are people that will set a company/team above their own interest and are reasonably intelligent at the same time?
They're just looking for good liars, nothing else.
Don't get me wrong. Some people will embrace this. Namely those who aren't interested in managing others. But it seems a bit disingenuous to say you can "level the playing field" by having a value structure that doesn't map well to how most other companies' value structure is set up.
* at some point companies need to become more democratic. Yes "influencers" should be involved in these discussions, and management should almost be the press - letting people know these decisions are underway.
* I personally think if we spend more time writing good discussion documents around our projects we will be able to write good discussion documents about our organisations
Being a 40-something engineer, you hear the same things over and again. I used to work at MSFT and my first manager there used to espouse company, team, self every day as the HBR article does. He'd regular re-evaluate his priorities based on what is the most beneficial task I can work on for the company today. Makes me wonder if it appears in management books or people just get wired that way.
It definitely a reasonable way to proceed most of the time. Firsthand, I have no doubt that most of the unpleasantness I've witnessed in tech companies is due to team or self over everything.
I only commented because it's frustrating to see any company painted as if it's the one magical place in the universe that has solved office politics. Facebook is not that company.
What like this?
I consider myself very not into office politics and I'm confident a would fail massively to answer most of the proposed interview questions
(Although it's "employees, customers, management, shareholders").
EDIT: Disclaimer: have friends who work at costco, have a membership, own some stock, etc.
I've looked into cooperative business organisations in the past. From my recollections, these typically fall into a few classifications:
1. Political parties. Often themselves strongly aligned with cooperative or anarchist principles.
2. Labour unions. In some cases.
3. A few creatives collaborations, but with pretty loose integration. Artists, performers, or writers organisations.
4. Food-based businesses, typically smaller tea or coffee houses, or co-op food stores.
5. Mondragon Corporation. Pretty much an only-one-in-class, of an industrial cooperative. Also almost everyone's default example. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
6. Producer co-ops. Often in agriculture, though others exist. Blue Diamond Almonds, and, previously, both Visa and MasterCard (the latter have both since reorganised as for-profit joint-stock companies).
I don't know of any business organisations that perform software or consulting services on a cooperative basis, though of course, the entire Free Software movement is a non-business organisation of such work.
Of course, I DDG on posting and immediately find: http://www.software.coop/info/
Though I'd argue that the fact I'd never heard of this group and their size somewhat emphasises my point.
I'm looking for tech examples.
Except, for example, the ACM Software Engineer's code of ethics where this is the explicitly stated order.
Which is another way to say that people who comes up with these things aren't in their right minds.
CLIENT AND EMPLOYER is #2 in the list, and SELF is #8. COLLEAGUES is #7.
In fact the code says it's all in service of the public, if there is any sense of priorities to derive, the employer is not on top. And besides, "The Code is not a simple ethical algorithm that generates ethical decisions."
You think Facebook engineers can seriously go to work every day and abide by that?
Software engineers shall eat learning comrades.
Kinda are, tho'. Stress, burnout, depression, carpel tunnel, strain on relationships, poor diet and lack of exercise, sleep deprivation - these are all things that many companies demand of their employees.
I already have to make decisions and produce value. If a company is paying me, I will choose to be more tolerant of making such decisions as part of that company's processes and with consideration to that company's needs. However, payment does not obligate me to serve those things. At least, not morally.
Now, it may be a rare trait. I have no idea really whether it is or not. I've certainly known many who operate in the reverse order, but it is what I was taught by my parents growing up, and has served me well during various careers.
None of this means I want to work for Facebook, but they may actually be doing this there. I have read complaints by former employees that it is a little cult-like to work there, but again, those are a few out of thousands.
I don't think that the author was suggesting that the employees are expected to value the company's interest over their own personal lives. At least I hope not.
Project/work priorities? Should be company first, then team, then self. I think that goes without saying, and I think thats what they're trying to get across. Going for self glory in projects isn't good for a company. Going to team glory isn't good for a company, but its better than self glory.
Financial priorities? Everyone has to take care of themselves in that sense. Every individual has to take care of the bottom of their hierarchy of needs. This might be what you're comparing here. At the same time, past a certain point self needs are fulfilled financially - holding a project hostage for a raise for example wouldn't be great.
Social priorities? Self probably comes first there as well - but its not that great a scale since self improvement from working around good people is a benefit to the company as well. But if done in such a way that you stand on the bodies of your vanquished foes you've created a win/lose situation where it could be a win/win. Don't be like oracle, basically.
you and FB missed the most important - going for the glory of your boss. It is good for the both - for the company (as the company did make sure that the glory of the boss is aligned with the glory of the company) as well as for the team (as the company did make sure that glory of the boss is aligned with the glory of the team). And it is obviously also good for yourself as bosses value the ones who bring them glory.
Well, that wasn't what GP said (specifically your "only"). What was stated was that company > team > self is not a natural ordering. And I agree.
In particular, people will generally rank team > company. This is well-known to anyone who's studied small unit leadership, and has been well-known since von Clausewitz, perhaps even since antiquity.
However, having some degree of overall faith in the leadership of the company, or at least in the purpose of the company (what's typically referred to in the military literature as Esprit de Corps) is a necessary precondition for small unit cohesion.
TL;DR: the relationship between self, unit and company is much too complex for a linear ranking of their priorities to be useful in anything but vacuous statements.
Nicely put.
Some of you claim the question is about putting your personal glory above the success of the team. If so the author states it horribly
One extreme: If I make more money than I need, I will not ask to be paid less.
Other end: I will work on whatever is most important for the team/product/company. Not what I find most fun.
Just walk out when you get questions like this.
I mean, if you are are part of a team and identify something that goes against you and the team but in favor of the conpany, your team's goal should be revised and realigned, and you should get credit for that. In the end pointing out the problem and eventually offering a solution shouldn't go against your own professional interests (your "self" shouldn't get the short end of the stick for a correct behavior)
I would politely ask Facebook to go fuck themselves if they asked me to put the company before myself. I don't exist to serve a company.
You should always remember that a company will fire you the moment they think they can make a penny more that way, plan and act accordingly.
Poor web design.
anyway...
> Successful candidates should clearly demonstrate that their priorities are company, team, and self — in that order.
This just sounds so obnoxious to me.
> At Facebook, moving into management is not a promotion. It’s a lateral move, a parallel track. Managers are there to support people and to remove barriers to getting things done. Managers focus on building a great team, creating a vision for how that team will execute its goals, and helping the people on that team develop in their careers
All of those things sound like they add up to much more influence and responsibility than you get as an IC.
> “Then who is in charge?” Lest anyone think it’s a Lord of the Flies scenario, our managers still moderate, facilitate, and tie-break.
So the manager is in charge. But you know, feel free to suggest stuff plebs.
> We provide different opportunities for growth by empowering employees to work on new projects or in new groups when interested. This keeps ICs engaged by allowing them to broaden their areas of expertise and expand or focus their scope by moving to projects at different levels of development
So does this mean you don't make me jump through hoops to switch to another team? Large part of why I quit my last job was because I find the idea that I have to do an interview, to get the same job I'm already doing, ridiculous.
The idea of the hackamonth sounds like it could help with this acutally. You are already employed by the company, just go talk to the manager and ask to switch for a month. At the end talk again and decide if it is a good fit.
Way better than getting stuck on a lousy team, with a poor manager, who is able to trap you with bad reviews and threats.
Safari reader or Readability is your friend.
But at least it's clear that anyone can get far in management as long as they don't screw up too much.
The problem with those interview questions however is they are more a test of "gift of the gab" or preparation and memorization than anything else.
The system would supersede and replace managers. Your rating would be hidden as well.
The reason my current manager is there is to communicate the business's priorities to me, and effectively deal with any grievances I have. This is astonishingly effective, in that I no longer have to spend time researching the reasons why I am performing certain tasks – I have a manager who can prioritise, but who is willing to take my views on board if I have them. Everybody wins, and I don't really want her replaced with an automated system.
I find it hilarious that the vast majority of people on here will agree to automating away everything, except management (we really need them!). What I also find hilarious is the amount of downvotes I'm getting. If anything, that proves my point.
Monkeys in business suits are a cancer and plague upon Silicon Valley, and the sooner we get rid of them, the sooner we can focus on solving real problems.
What I see in most SV companies is massive bloatware - managers upon managers upon managers that don't really do anything. They create no value. Yet the incentive structure is skewed in their favor. This inefficiency will be addressed eventually, either exogenously (tech bubble bursting) or endogenously (engineers finally get sick of this corrupt and infected system).