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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

I'm not opposed to managers. I am one, after all. But I don't think "management" is a universal skill. I think somebody who manages developers should probably be a developer. I think somebody who manages doctors should be a doctor. And I think there's a lot of merit in non-hierarchical systems, like the way doctors and lawyers are mainly accountable to professional organizations.

I agree that metricising knowledge work is a mistake. But I think it's also true for other kinds of work. In colleges I worked in a factory and there was no end of trouble that came from managing via metrics.

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> I think somebody who manages doctors should be a doctor.

i could be wrong, but i believe in 'real' professions like medicine and law, there's some kind of board/bar rule that prohibits being managed by someone who never had the actual job they're managing. any one know if that's accurate?

For a professional engineer's license, you have to demonstrate competence and have 4 letters of recommendation from PEs who have either managed you directly, or have overseen your work. So there is not a requirement that you (as a budding prospective PE) may never work for someone who isn't a PE, however it does limit your ability to achieve your own license. Therefore, there is a desire from the younger engineers to seek out PEs to work under.

There isn't in law, but, in most (maybe all?) US jurisdictions, only a lawyer can own a law firm.

I find physicians like the idea of working for doctors, and hospitals have shrewdly supported the role of 'chief medical officer", while keeping financial controls with the other C level officers. The Children's Hospital in San Diego is famously "Rady's" because the physicians ran it into the ground and the Rafy family bailed it out on condition they accept professional management practices. Not coincidentally, the Rady family also funded the the UCSD Rady School of Management. Also not coincidentally, many health care workers loathe working there, generally attributing this to a belief that management is more interested in the bottom line than patient outcomes, and this leads to a general distrust of Management.

Agreed. The big problem in academia is that when you don't trust academics you need administration to provide oversight. Administration is now a huge portion of the cost of university education. Not research, admin.

To be fair, academics can also be childish, vindictive, sexist. There is also a real problem of hiring one's friends and students. BUT inter-organizational competition helps to some extent with these problems. Regardless, they justify administration and associated costs.

Managers, CEOs, police officers, border agents, and presidents can also be childish, vindictive, and sexist - but they're rarely subject to similar oversight.

There's something disturbingly paternal about the idea that unusually clever and/or creative people can't be trusted to act like adults and therefore need adult supervision from people with authority over them.

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