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Comment by darrenwestall | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but let me elaborate.

I quickly learned the way to get promoted is to be replaceable.

If you’re relied upon too much or if you’re the guy who always fixes things - it’s actually too risky for a business to promote you.

Throughout my career I always made sure I was giving people below me the opportunity to step up, which allowed me to step up too.

I quickly appointed team leaders as soon as a team I managed had more than 4 people for example.

I had to manage the team leaders but they had a lot of freedom.

Some days I had so little to do you wouldn’t believe it, but the department was running the best it had in years and everyone was happy.

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Nice answer.

The bosses I have been most happy to work for had such systems in place.

Scrum/Agile (while sometimes derided) if well executed can help with this. If the team is 'self-organizing'.

Although you had little to do, I imagine you probably have to nudge things in the right direction every now and then.

Another aspect I think is important is hiring good people. Hire bad people and you will be a busy manager!

Absolutely, if you truly want to automate your day job, you need the best people propping you up.

Luckily I did, and if I didn’t I removed the rot fast - that can spread and really make your life difficult.

> it’s actually too risky for a business to promote you.

What if the person leaves the org?

In the longer term that is usually a good thing. If they’re the only person who fixes things, that also implies the correct knowledge sharing isn’t happening.

We strive to remove any single point of failure from a hardware point of view, and for me, people are no different

The only exception to this is sales, it’s usually your top biller who you can’t promote - because you want them out there selling. Luckily sales people usually respond to money rather than titles so it’s important to reward those efforts. It’s why some sales people earn more than their managers and 6 figures+ is the norm for good sales people.

>> We strive to remove any single point of failure from a hardware point of view, and for me, people are no different

Thanks for stating this explicitly.

In my next System Design interview, I am going to list single points of failures as: HW, SW, People :-).

This seems to me like a real failure of late stage capitalism. Similar to how factories in the soviet union were overstaffed with middle managers who barely lifted a finger.

I might be wrong but this just seems almost like a ponzi scheme of some sort - keep moving up the middle management chain and getting somebody else to replace you. No offense to darrenwestall, I'm hating the game not the player.

No offence taken! I don't disagree - but it helped feed my family well for a long time.

I'm on a start up journey now and much happier.

This quote might be relevant: “I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.” — General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

https://medium.com/@jcmrgo/i-divide-my-officers-into-four-gr...

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