Hacker News Reader

Comment by mo1ok | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, and I'm being really frank here, a lot of the management "expertise" at fortune 50+ firms that come from traditional (re: MBA) tracks has just two tools in their toolbelt:

1. Meetings to "align"

2. Cracking the whip.

That's it. That's all they have. They have poor insight into creating team chemistry, culture, focused work environments, mentorship, long-term planning, QA processes, sourcing efficiency feedback, etc. - all those things that are crucial to boosting productivity and creating supersonic teams. The people that really know their stuff and can work miracles are people that have been in the trenches for 20 years, regardless of profession. And they hands-down make the best managers.

That's my honest 2 cents, it's a bit of disgruntlement from working in large enterprise environments with engineering and technology.

View on HN

That’s a hilariously narrow minded generalization. If that’s your honest opinion then I have to assume you’ve never actually sat down and had a real conversation with any of these “MBA types” and talked about what they do. My guess is that the reason you think all they do is crack the whip and hold pointless meetings because that’s the only interaction you have with them, but I can guarantee you that every organization you have ever worked in has had plenty of “MBA types” working in ways that are invisible to you building exactly the team chemistries, culture, planning, processes etc that you mentioned.

I would agree that this is narrow minded - and would say that this opinion is a result of exactly what you mentioned - my interaction with them being fairly limited and clinical, despite them having a direct leadership role in my org.

I would argue that this is the problem unto itself. The idea that a manager can work invisibly "behind the scenes" to create these conditions is the squarest negative stereotype of the MBA - that they are clerical, remote, number-crunchers who don't have an intuitive human grasp of the unique challenges their teams face, because they lack experience where the rubber meets of the road of their organization. I think this Boeing case conforms to this stereotype, as does my personal experience.

But I don't believe they're a scourge, or anything. I quantified it with "a lot" but not "most" ;)

When I said they work in ways invisible to you, I did not mean it as they are intentionally working “behind the scenes”. It is more likely that your narrowmindedness just blinds you to all of the things they do. The work is probably all done out in the open, and in almost all cases I’ve ever seen, the “MBA types” specifically seek out interaction with and input from “rubber meets the road” folks (side note: this is another hilarious notion that MBAs apparently aren’t involved in “rubber meets the road” tasks), but it’s generally the engineers that shy away from this interaction and then blame management for being out of touch.

In our organization we created a special "department" which is disconnected from the traditional corporate structure.

We're a compound of self-organized teams of Product Owners and Engineers.

Our traditional organization takes 10 weeks for feature X, we need at most 2 weeks, averaging at 1 week (10%).

We have the luxury of delivering the exact same product (as a green-field variant of our classical product as a SaaS solution), so it´s quite comparable in terms of scope.

The main difference is there is no hidden agenda of would-be managers, nothing between the customer than a PO who knows what he is doing (i.e. is doing regular A/B tests, customer interviews, involving the dev team as deep as possible to understand customer requirements).

We were awarded a nation-wide award for digital transformation.

No middle-managers, no HR.

You can reach me @ hackernews@disposable-email.ml for additional details if you like.

Summarizing: we got rid of all non-relevant management ballast and are able to deliver features at a pace of around 10x of a traditionally managed line.

Overtime: around 0% with a tendency to dip below 0%.

Addendum: the POs are 70% MBAs, but they are good (i.e. they learnt to deliver as opposed to manage)

Keeping in mind this whole thread is about the process of manufacturing aircraft, do you think this approach works equally well with traditional manufacturing?

My experience is that these lean approaches work well for something low on the severity scale, like an SaaS solution, but can more easily falter with complex safety-critical systems that blend multiple domains (e.g., mechanical, software, etc.) I think sometimes people interpret the process rigor that gets added to critical design to management bloat.

Not disagreeing with you, but worth mentioning proto-lean/agile methodology began with the manufacturing of cars at Toyota.

Also worth mentioning that Boeing has their own variant of the 'Toyota Production System (TPS)' named the 'Boeing Production System (BPS)'.

Do you have any insight into how BPS addresses software development? I've looked but so far most of the information is related to hardware manufacturing or using software as a tool (e.g., for training).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com