Comment by unknown_error | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unknown_error | Hacker News Reader

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I think you're conflating diversity in skillsets with corporate hierarchies. I think the article was less about devs vs marketing vs any other dept, but rather about managers as a distinct class above all the rest, with all the decision-making power.

Different depts having a seat at a table is great if your org is flat enough that the table is actually the group making the decision. If their decisions just get overridden by middle management, it's back to the same problem again: not that there are too many depts with their own limited perspectives, but that managers with little to no technical background are making decisions that affect their more skilled minions, typically without their minions' buy-in.

The problem isn't any particular skillset, but the professional managerial class whose management skills are too often dubious to begin with, unmeasured, untested, and yet prioritized over technical skills, be they marketing or HR or dev. Some orgs help mitigate that by having a feedback loop for their managers and the ability to underlings to skip a step or provide meaningful feedback that can result in the discipline or "impeachment" of someone above them, but that's the exception rather than the norm. In most orgs I've seen managers are recruited from other management backgrounds horizontally instead of rising up the ranks from a technical background. Maybe the intent is to recruit better people-people instead of super-smart devs who don't understand humans, but in my limited experience that rarely works past a certain tiny scale...

Most don't have "tables" to begin with, just thrones and various forts.

I understand what you're saying, and had the article put it in similar terms I wouldn't take much issue with it. Instead the article took the tone of developer superiority vs. managerial incompetence & intransigence. Where, by implication if not direct statement, all failures are failures of management.

I don't like that management gets bashed so consistently, because it is a view blinded from the truth: good management isn't actually all that rare as this POV would make it seem: Good management is nearly invisible. It smooths over things, putting fewer roadblocks in workers ways, and thereby only gets noticed when there's a problem. And even the best managers will encounter problems, meaning people really only take note of management when there's something negative going on.

Maybe it's because I've had all three types that articles like this put me on the defensive. I've seen bad management, I've seen invisible management that generally makes my life easier in ways I only notice because I've had bad managers, and I've had at least one manager that was so good that they not only made my life easier, they made me much more effective at my job.

Rising through the ranks is also no guarantee of success: management is a skill, and it does not always overlap with being good at the jobs you manage. All that does is make sure the manager understands the work, not actually understand how to manage a group/department/division etc., Which is a different skillet. I'm not a manager, despite opportunities, precisely because I understand that fact, my own preferences, and my own limitations.

It's also important to remember that "bad management" is frequently not monolithic. There may be very good managers throughout an organization, but one bad mid-high level manager makes them all look bad when even after they fight back against something,they lose the fight and their job is still to implement it. No different than an excellent developer forced to write something useless/bad/inefficient. Is the developer a bad developer? There are some fights like that-- won or lost-- that I've only found out about long afterwards, because again: good management is often invisible.

Those are very fair points. Yes, good management can make projects (and people) function more smoothly, and yes also that it can be a thankless job that only gets noticed when something goes wrong, not for all the times it goes right.

For all those reasons, it would be nice of the skillset of management could be decoupled from the hierarchy, pay, and prestige of management. Too often the "managers" in an org, and by the extension the CxOs, are there not due to their skill in managing people/projects, but more or less "awarded" the position as a consequence of their connections, founder status, length of employment, whatever.

If only "management" could be thought of more as "facilitation" (or mediation, or HR, or similar) in that it's a unique skillset, yes, but no more or less valuable to a group than any other skillset -- not an inherent part of some hierarchical and unaccountable structure. Managers should not be above the people they manage, but be able to offer workflow & worklife improvements, help resolve and mediate conflicts, etc. And there's no inherent reason they should get paid more or less than workers of any other skillset.

Top-down control != group facilitation skills, but present-day corporate hierarchies try to pretend they're one and the same, to the detriment of many orgs, and especially anyone under (visibly) bad management.

A "seat at the table for all" implies a level of idealistic flatness that's just not there in most hierarchical organizations. I think it's easier to teach a flat organization better people and project management skills than to try and flatten a purposefully-hierarchical organization that uses middle-management not to improve the productivity of self-directed workers, but to corral a disposable workstaff who have miserable lives because they're thought of mere doers-of-tasks, not partners in planning -- a vicious cycle reinforced by the existence of a professional managerial "class" (as opposed to skillset).

Startups would never beat large organizations if good management was common. The only reason startups can compete is that management is totally awful at larger organizations preventing any real value from being delivered. Of course many managers are less bad, but most are still bad.

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