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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

This strikes me as an understandable but pathological response to managerialism. Managerialism being our current dominant business philosophy.

To see it in contrast, think for a moment about a well-run hospital. At a hospital, the people who make the key decisions about cases are medical professionals, not managers. If a surgery was supposed to take 4 hours but takes 12, well, that's how long the surgery took. Everybody recognizes that the 4-hour number was an estimate, and estimates are not commitments. The most important thing is patient health, not manager feelings. Managers help organize the work, but they do not control the work.

I would love to see software development become a true profession, where stroking manager egos by making them always feel correct and in control is not the most important thing.

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Yeah, this. At my current company, which I would consider large (20k+ employees) and bureaucratic, we've actually gotten this part right. Managers in no way control what the team is working on or deadlines for that work. They behave more like career coaches and therapists. They DO ultimately have control over your career, and I feel like that's a part here where having a good manager matters. But it's very rare for them to step in and shape the teams sprints etc. This is all in my own experience, so it probably depends to some extent on the department you're in and your manager in particular, but I can say this is all true for every team in my department.

The managers are held accountable by their bosses, but usually what this boils down to is teams not doing what they said they would. Which of course happens from time to time because as the article mentions we're all pretty terrible at estimating and shit happens sometimes. It makes me nervous to think about changing jobs because it sounds like this is NOT the way it is in most other places...

> Managers in no way control what the team is working on or deadlines for that work. They behave more like career coaches and therapists. They DO ultimately have control over your career,

I work in a place like this. It's a horrible idea. It's politics 100% of the time for managers, because there's no other way to climb for them. Welcome to half-brained initiatives and goalpost technologies being championed rather than ROI exploration and derivation, because the managers that do get stuck on projects that cost money don't want to talk about that.

Same in the arts, until you get a Heaven's Gate or other big artist-driven films that flopped at the box office and ate up UA's budget and then company. The studio model is savagely more effective at survival.

Catering to delusions is very dangerous in a hospital !

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