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Comment by mtrycz2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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".

> 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.

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