Hacker News Reader

Comment by pietrovismara | Hacker News Reader

This reminds of the story of Google firing all its managers, only to then have problems like engineers craving for feedback, avoiding boring work or being unable to resolve friction by themselves.

It seems clear to me that most people (even the most brilliant engineers apparently) still need something as a reference, they can't just be let on their own.

But that reference doesn't need to be a single manager. We could start to think of the team as the manager. The team can perfectly give feedback, handle friction, distribute boring work and so on. We already have plenty of stupid daily standups, team meetings, weekly all-hnds meetings and so on, so it wouldn't really be hard to have a team daily standup where problems can be brought up to everyone and solved cooperatively.

View on HN

Leaders can foster the sort of team dynamics that you’re talking about here. Who can’t foster it particularly well is managers.

You can lead without managing (much) and you can manage without leading at all. The latter always seem to suck all of the joy out of my work, to the point where I dread coming in.

The problem is they should have fired all of the managers but kept all the leadership. It takes some soft skills to know the difference.

I don't think this gets the balance right. Management creates friction but some of it is necessary. Too much causes problems, but too little causes a different set of problems (at least beyond a pretty small scale in terms of goals and people).

I guess one way to look at is management as an activity - at some scale you have enough of it it makes sense to have someone(s) specialize in it, rather than distribute amongst the group. But once it is a specialized role, it's harder for the person in that role to do other things. So if there are too many of them, or their time is not directed the right way, it's a net negative.

Leadership creates friction too.

It’s advertising for one set of priorities, which introduces friction for others. Friction is amoral. Leadership can be immoral (in which case, removing leadership can be a good thing).

But I think I’m the specific case I illustrated (management without leadership) few of the qualities you allude to will be much in evidence. Managing for the sake of managing is, well, bureaucracy, isn’t it?

Ok, but leadership without management easily falls apart to. I guess I was reacting to the “fire all the managers” subtext, which is not actually what you want (almost always). Manage for the sake that things need managing, I guess.

People that are brilliant in their field not necessarily are brilliant in "soft skills", or at least have been prepared to manage those skills.

The Morning Star example (which I read of just now) seems to have the leaderless thing as a cultural backdrop, and new employees receive training in it (by doing). OTOH, you can't just do away with managers in a structured organization and expect it to work, the culture is not there.

> you can't just do away with managers in a structured organization and expect it to work, the culture is not there.

Totally agree. That's probably another big mistake of the google experience.You can't just change completely the organizazion and expect everything to work fine the next day. Change should be done gradually, ideally I would gradually assign responsibilities to the team, while leaving a manager there to supervise and slowly fade out.

How would you address the problem of all "good" managers (defined here as those who can easily get another job elsewhere) just leaving immediately instead of remaining in a job that now has zero growth potential? It seems that very rapidly you would have only the worst managers left and (because by definition they would have trouble getting another job elsewhere) they would have every incentive to halt or slow the phasing out of managers in the company.

Maybe it's not exactly necessary to have the old managers in the transition. Instead I would enhance HR by hiring counselors dedicated to assisting teams self-resolve internal issues.

So, a manager?

Without decisional power.

Facilitator?

Morning Star is a fascinating example, but (per the hbr article mentioned in the post) the amount of time employees spend on committees devoted to hiring, purchasing etc is considerable.

Exactly the kind of managerial activity devs often want to get away from.

While I absolutely believe what you said is true--that developers often want to get away from these lindane of managerial activity--they do so at their own long term peril. FWIW, I would imagine most professors at research universities aren't excited by the idea of being on all of these same managerial committees, but outsourcing that to a tier of administrators sounds worse.

It also means that the managerial work is distributed amongst the team rather than focused on a smaller number of individuals. That distributes the power and decision making at the expense of individual productivity. I suppose generalists would thrive in an environment like this while specialists would have difficultly.

> brilliant in their field not necessarily are brilliant in "soft skills"

You are confusing skill with power.

Hierarchies exist to wield power and exert control over employees in order to extract financial value from them.

There's plenty of people who own businesses, buildings or land and have terrible "soft skills".

> the story of Google firing all its managers, only to then have problems

Do you have a link to more information about this? I only heard about this recently.

But it's not that simple. There are many things like social dynamics at play whenever people interact with one another, and the one with most charisma is going to be a leader without a title–and that can be good too.

> But it's not that simple

Neither regular management is. There's plenty of stories of failed management. At least if it's a whole team doing the management, toxic behavior by one individual can be controlled. If the toxic individual gets to be manager instead, then there's nothing to stop him.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com