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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

Are you a manager? When has american style management made companies more agile? American style management is all about kingdom and silo building.

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This is a really bizarre generalization. There are good managers and bad managers, it just depends on the organization and the individual. Bad managers aren't always easy to spot, but it's very obvious who the good ones are because everyone in the organization implicitly looks to them for guidance and support.

Don't get me wrong; I think American-style management is on average terrible. I just don't think it's easily automated, because the point is to take the nonsense from on high and make it somehow work, for some sufficiently lax definition of "work".

Source?

I'm a relatively new engineering manager in an older company in Canada (turning itself into fin/insurance tech), and a big part of my role has been about breaking down silos.

The silos where created at a time when being really efficient at 'your piece' was what the system rewarded, whereas now we want to be efficient at shipping code, which means efficient value streams (from inception to production)...which has basically meant many rounds of silo deconstruction.

But I'd be VERY curious about why silos get built in the first place & what incentives are in place to make this happen...and why this is bad. To be honest, maybe I'm just idealistic, but I see silo building as not desirable.

Not OP, but imo the classic thought is that your managerial influence is directly correlated with the count and quality of employees under you. In this sense, silos get built not quite for specialization, but because your individual managerial incentive is to try to grow you and yours at the expense of (internal) competitors for a fixed budget; interoperation can be a direct threat to your influence and growth.

A famous study of behavior like this might be Kodak, and how internally the film "silo" crushed the digital "silo".

Ah interesting.

I think I might just be idealistic and having thought about it this way. Thanks for the context.

For the background and how things go wrong, you might enjoy the book "Confronting Managerialism" by Spender and Locke. The Lean folks also have a lot of good critiques. A book that sticks in my mind is "Simple Excellence: Organizing and Aligning the Management Team in a Lean Transformation", but there are a bunch. And for software specifically, Mary Poppendieck's work is great, as well as Reinertsen's "Principles of Product Development Flow".

Thanks for the recommendations!

As a category, American companies are the most profitable in the world, so they’re doing something right.

Surely some portion of that can be attributed to agency ("doing") but I'd contend a non-trivial amount is due to being recipients of American hegemony ("being")

But is that something actually right? IE in the sense we would want more of it in our lives.

Or is the profitability less about agility as per the GP comment and more to do with employee manipulation(for lower wages) and political sway (for lower taxes).

Hell, given where FAANG pay taxes, are they even American?

I'm pretty sure FAANG pays quite a lot in payroll tax, property tax, and they also ensure that FAANG employees pay quite substantial income tax, property tax, and sales tax.

FAANG are notable primarily for employing very few people relative to revenue.

This may change in the case of Amazon with its fulfilment centres, but see above comments re: Manna.

I think the Tik-Tok saga has amply demonstrated just how unprepared Americans are to actually compete purely on merit.

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