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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

Why do we need managers? Seems to me like anachronism from authoritative past. I can't recall a single manager that wasn't getting in the way of doing things in my past working experience (top engineering companies everybody wanted to get into); more often they were just enforcers of shady things that companies kept in the dark. Ramping up education, practicing virtues, supporting transparent exchange of information, and people can self-organize without any managers. Having managers just keeps everybody weak, uninformed, ignorant and lazy. Anyone remotely competent doesn't want to be managed.

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Who makes the decision to hire and fire? Or decides what to prioritize after speaking with upper leadership and assigns resources? Managers deal with a ton of day to day stuff that most engineers should not have to worry about. I am a software team lead (not manager level in my company, our structure is strange, I report to a VP) but I have to manage several employees while also dealing with the customer to properly capture requirements and code.

I spend a couple hours a day in meetings and can then based on that tell, the developers what to focus on. Having the entire team in each of those meetings is a waste.

Managers for the most part act as meeting shields to the development team to optimally allow them to focus on writing good code with good motivated team mates.

But yes, some of them can micro manage and make things far worse than they should be. Few things are worse than working for a bad manager, especially glory hounds.

The number one thing I do as a manager that actually got to me enjoy the job was being responsible for setting expectations. In particular, getting a big say in contract writing. I negotiate the scope and staffing plan. I set the SLAs. I tell stakeholders what iterative delivery looks like, what we need from them to have a successful delivery and what my team can do for them.

The first project I scoped delivered almost to the day on schedule and on budget without burning the team. My next project we had a locked scope where I took one look and predicted disaster and it happened. Now I have enough credibility to make these decisions and set a team up for success.

A good manager makes a bad team good, and a good team outstanding. A good manager is an enabler. A good manager makes individual programmers better, makes the team work better together, makes the work itself better. A good manager can have an incredibly positive effect on a group. Seen it myself.

Sure, sometimes a group has relatively simple tasks and doesn't have enough incompetents, prima donnas, social disaster zones or or straight up sociopaths to need a good manager, but given that a good manager can massively improve the output of a team, make everyone happier and make a company more profitable, it seems silly not to have a good manager.

In the interests of no passive-aggressive nonsense, I simply don't believe that you've never encountered a situation where a good manager can make things better, or never encountered a situation where somebody was managing things and in doing so making a positive difference. The odds against it seem astronomical; especially in a 750 personnel sized company.

I've heard a lot about good managers, but never experienced one. It was always some form of manipulation, cutting the corners, forcing agenda even on solutions that were both wildly profitable as well as technically excellent "to make their mark", finding scapegoats to blame, in order to propel manager's ego and standing within company; the game was purely about power, hacking perception of their seniors about their qualities in order to progress. People that didn't play tended to find themselves packaged for layoffs, regardless of how much company benefited from them in the past.

So from my experience: Good manager is like UFO - I've heard of it, but never seen one. Unless you consider top management that just makes itself invisible and leaves kids on the playground doing whatever they are inspired to. That would be probably closest to what I could take as good management.

The valley is a pretty capitalistic place and one that's willing to eschew orthodoxy.

But managers are still the norm. If it were economically preferable to not have managers, I think you'd see that model gaining lots of traction.

Maybe this is a common model though, I'm not familiar with very many truly flat organizations.

This is my main problem with engineers that become managers. Programming does tend to create ego problems. You want that as your manager? Not really a good move. My best manager had no idea how to code, but he knew how to communicate, lend an ear and really listen, and make sure everyone was happy. But somehow he did it with a firm hand. Every one knew the line to not cross was mostly about lying. You have to be truthful that's what he can see through.

Apropos of this, some of my junior engineers now repeat back to me "code without ego" every time they have a code review or make a mistake. They take pride in not allowing their ego to get in the way. All it took was me demonstrating egoless working and loudly advocating that we all leave our ego at home.

I soothe my ego on the anonymous internet. In the workplace, it goes in the fucking box and every other thing I say is a variation on "I don't understand". Working life is so much easier without ego games. So much more pleasant.

I hypothesise that programmers with excessive ego have been sadly let down by managers and team leads in their formative years :(

They exist. I've had a few. Protecting devs from meetings, being flexible, not getting their own ego into things, generally trust their developers to figure out how to code things (or at least the architects), try to keep you from working long hours (or if there are long hours, they're probably working them with you), pretty transparent about the crap that's going on above their heads (although that can be because that's all they can offer and aren't allowed to give you what you really want by the higher ups).

Invariably though, these guys were in the trenches at one point. Good developers or designers that eventually rose up into management. They understand how it's better if everyone works together instead of get too deep in politics (they aren't perfect about that, though, I've seen them have favorites) and try to enable their team as much as possible.

The types of things you're talking about like manipulation et al., I've only seen from career managers, who never really had a proper job making things. And those definitely exist, and are more plentiful than the good managers, but the good ones aren't mythical creatures. You're just getting unlucky in finding them, I guess.

> I can't recall a single manager that wasn't getting in the way of doing things in my past working experience (top engineering companies everybody wanted to get into)

To counter your anecdote with one, I work at a reasonably famous tech company in SF, and my manager has definitely elevated my productivity as well the amount of things I had visibility into.

I'm switching teams in a week and one of my big regrets is leaving my manager.

I have a good manager right now. If that person hasn't had a good manager ever, then it might be one of those cases "if it smells like shit everywhere you go, check your own shoe".

> Are managers really necessary? Google wanted to know for sure, so in 2002, it experimented by removing bosses from its hierarchy. The answer was a resounding yes. Managers were critical not only for structure and clarity, but also for team performance.

What I love about this is that google had the research experience and the size that they were able to just conduct a massive study on themselves.

https://www.inc.com/michael-schneider/google-didnt-always-ap...

Let's say your company has 500 engineers.

Who does what? What's the highest yielding activity/investment/product? Someone needs to make those decisions and others need to execute them.

I worked for a company with around 750 people, considered better than any FANG, that had no managers. Moreover, everybody thought they wanted to do cool stuff and not do a manager (synonymous with uselessness). Internally ran like a bunch of startups. Extremely profitable. Multiple FANGs wanted to acquire it/destroy it.

Haven't worked in a better environment. Getting calls from recruiters from FB/Google about "exciting leadership opportunities" sounds like moving backwards and is as appealing as accepting a crappy job to survive. Half of the people who left to FB/Goog were back within a year. You have no idea how much better companies can be.

Recently during my university admission interview (3rd master degree) I mentioned to an interviewer that I turned down FB twice in the past 6 months and seeing their brain spinning, unable to understand why, was pretty funny... Not sure why people desire to work in such soulless environments with opaque army-like hierarchy.

What company is unilaterally considered better than FANG? I honestly can't think of one. I hope you're not referring to some banking or crypto startup because, well...

Well they are talking about getting a 3rd master's degree, so their estimation of good and bad might not be in line with widely accepted answers

No, definitely not one of those "get rich via pyramid scheme" companies. Reliable engineering-driven company with nerds at the helm. You might use their products daily. Do your research ;-)

I was going to guess "maybe GitHub or Valve" before seeing this, now it's definitely GitHub.

Which is owned by MS. So while not FANG, it's only not because the acronym wouldn't be as good.

So that superior cooperative of developers decided to be bought by corporate behemoth with long management ladder (MS)? I don't get it.

Within one of those "internal startups" how did engineers make decisions when there were different opinions on the team? Especially when polarizing decisions had to be made?

Was there an implicit power structure if not an explicit one?

Generally, it's difficult to get into, so a strong pre-selection is applied. Second, initiative on what to do, developing own bleeding-edge tech (literally creating frameworks/languages/devices/whatever and making them popular) is strongly encouraged. People joining a team will get a few % of ownership of the resulting business after a long enough cliff (3-6 years) so it's in their best interest to work together; polarizing decisions could take a while to resolve, usually by majority, but losing sides could prototype their ideas to a smaller extent time-wise; conditions that FANGs simply can't match as they don't have such internal flexibility post IPO. The only "safe" approach was to use already winning technology as a base for future products if one didn't want to do whole research themselves (e.g. use whatever best performing ML approach from Kaggle instead of figuring out your own). Wearing multiple hats is encouraged; people collaborate on unrelated activities like making music/videos/performance art together if they like and they are encouraged to showcase themselves. Nobody cares what people do in their own free time, remote work from anywhere in the world is encouraged and financially supported.

Does this company make profit per employee anywhere near FANGs?

What needs most managing is money - not talent.

Not sure about now, though I remember they hit $1B with around 500 people. How is the PPE/RPE comparing to FANGs I have no idea; I might do some study during my 3rd master degree on that topic ;-)

could you kindly share the name of the company?

I'm quite curious kind of this kind of company, this looks like band of .......... happy pirate?

Instead of saying "Go rob some bloody money back", and you can just make money by creating something new?

No, I am sorry, I won't (for doxxing reasons). They don't advertise themselves as aggressively as FANGs, yet can pick up some of the best developers easily due to word of mouth. I am sure the people that tried to acquire them and got denied as well as their employees can identify them easily. You might try to sort all companies on Glassdoor by overall rating and maybe you can spot something interesting there...

A good manager will 'stop the shit from rolling downhill' onto others and will give their people the tools they need to succeed and get out of the way.

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