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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

I guess this is because they got a new CEO recently, which makes total sense as a shakeup is needed.

But; has anyone else ever experienced the "swell" of middle management and "restructuring" which always seems to result in more people in management positions?

I've now worked in three companies where this is extremely apparent. In the latest company I've gone from 3-degrees from the CEO to 6 in little over ten months.

I think I understand why this happens: you need to promote people, but:

1) Is it bad, I suspect it is because there's usually not _more_ managerial work than there is individual contributor work- but then more managers tend to need more managers to talk to/make powerpoints for/make decisions without involving the team

2) If it's bad, is there any way to stop it?

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If this is what they mean by shakeup then it’s just the regular stuff in recent Intel past.

When I was at Intel in 2 years I saw at least 6 reorgs and had 4 managers. You can imagine my career growth or the lack of it. Unfortunately it needs a real deep clean of non technical power pint happy management and clueless engineers.

And the politicking is so deeply entrenched in culture now that the new CEO himself might be a victim of it if he is under false illusion that restoring Intel to past glory is just about turning a few knobs.

Thankfully I left for a FAANG before it was too late with a wonderful hike, better colleagues and working conditions. The most irsksome thing for Intel to attract back those who have left is almost no one of those I know and in touch with who have left wants to be back and it’s not the money but the poor experience of working there.

If anyone can give Amazon a run for its money in treating its employees badly, my bet is on Intel.

> If anyone can give Amazon a run for its money in treating its employees badly, my bet is on Intel.

For sure this, but for me it is the money. In the last year I was promoted and gained 11% at Intel. I left for a startup, and gained 40% more.

I'm pending an offer from a FAANG now and I anticipate that within a year I will have 2.5x my previous total comp at Intel.

Further, Intel markets to its own employees in an extremely disgusting manner. Great Place to Work, Overpriced food branded as healthy, Programs for meditation and whatnot, which all sound nice, but mean next to nothing.

Just provide some decent comp and remove non-technical managers from managing technical people and processes. Pitching a project was always a nightmare of whether the non-technical manager would get the idea (or understand the possibilities) or not.

> When I was at Intel in 2 years I saw at least 6 reorgs and had 4 managers. You can imagine my career growth or the lack of it. Unfortunately it needs a real deep clean of non technical power pint happy management and clueless engineers.

My experience at Intel as well. Just about 4 years and had 7 managers through 6ish reorgs. Oddly enough, they never changed the director level management. They did an other reorg the week after I left.

I think Intel's problem is a senior leadership problem more than anything. They keep shuffling the pieces around just to get the same results.

> 1) Is it bad?

Yes and no. It's hard for any given manager to support a large team - managing too many often results in either burning out, or being very hands-off with the team... limited career coaching, limited knowledge of the individual context, etc. And it's somewhat worse at higher levels of middle management, where the individual is responsible for aggregating the needs of between say 2 and 25x that of the managers below them.

Of course, it's not that simple. avg 5 reports vs 10 is only 1 or 2 on org chart depth, but almost 2x on the number of middle managers. (And so 3 sounds particularly bad, if you're 'average').

If middle management is growing because the company is growing, that's probably fine, including resetting after large growth in the lower levels. If it's growing because fan-in is reducing, that's more of a concern... possibly managers are becoming lower quality, or there's a lot more top-down burden, or individuals are becoming harder to manage (for many reasons). None of those are great signs.

Relatedly, I'd love to see an experiment in segregating "people managers" from "organizational managers". Imagine having one manager who is responsible for coaching your career growth, helping ensure you have the right opportunities, etc; and another manager who is responsible for the product you work on. You could have lots of people managers for support, and few organizational managers for minimizing org chart depth between products and the CEO.

Of course, in some places this approximates the split between PM and eng. I don't have great breadth of experience, but I haven't seen that work amazingly... though admittedly, more from PM churn issues than necessarily fundamental infeasibility. But still, it might not be as simple as that.

What your describing is a matrix org. I’ve only seen managers praise it and every IC I know hates it, including myself. But maybe it’s done right somewhere.

"And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now."

This is roughly how some places do it with distinct management chains and technical leaders along the chain. So nominally leadership is the management, but the technical people under your directors are responsible for technical direction.

I'm (at Google) one of those "technical leaders" - peer to a manager of ~50 with an informal title of "Uber TL", and no reports of my own. Though for us at least, responsibility still accrues to the manager - I'm a consultant in some sense, with impact through my ability to influence rather than any direct authority.

I'd love to see the end of this road, if other companies have taken it further. I personally offer guidance to the TLs in my scope (and that of my director, to a lesser extent), but have no technical leadership above me. And I think that's where it gets really hard - finding folk capable of being TLs for say 500 to 1000 people is hard.

The biggest argument I've heard in favor of TLs (or shudder architects) is that it keeps a company from hemorhaging technical experts who have little interest in people managing.

When it's done right, it seems to work well.

People who are interested in managing people become managers.

People who are interested in deepening technical expertise become TLs.

I think the often unvoiced key expectation that needs to be set that TL skillsets include (a) evangelism, (b) consensus building, & (c) flexibility.

I.e. If you're an unrepentant asshole who can't work with your colleagues and "lose" decisions in a graceful way that leaves everyone feeling okay, the company probably shouldn't make you an architect.

> When it's done right, it seems to work well.

I think this is the most interesting truism of leadership. Which leads risk averse companies to minimize the harm a bad leader can have, and utilitarian companies to maximize the expected value - even when that results in tolerating terrible managers. I don't honestly know which strategy I prefer.

> ...is that it keeps a company from hemorhaging technical experts who have little interest in people managing.

In our defense, it's not quite that simple. I personally can and will write code in any product in my scope, often at the behest of an ongoing incident where the team in question lacks the necessary experience to get themselves out of the situation they find themselves in. E.g. breakdown of some communication protocol, backend knocked offline by a firehose of retries, corrupt database. But even more, my job is to _prevent_ incidents, whatever that takes. Over the last ~year I've concluded that a lack of sufficient staffing prevents any good long term future, and so my main (self imposed) project is evangelizing leadership for headcount. Primarily through the lens of technical arguments - I can tell you which systems will hit fundamental scalability limits first (that aren't being invested in!), and also the individuals across the org that are at highest burnout risk from toil.

Am I an architect? Sometimes. More often I'm a janitor. But most of all, I spend an inordinate amount of time understanding the technical product of hundreds of engineers, to be able to speak to any part of it.

And what does that qualify me for in terms of organizational responsibility? I have no clue :).

I’ve seen that engineering manager / pm split work like magic before. Usually there’s also an amazing tech lead in there making it work. It’s rocket fuel for the product (assuming market fit, big assumption) and the career growth for the team.

It doesn’t happen often because most companies don’t want to grow their people that much. Consider the frequent HN comment about finding it easier to get a promotion/raise by finding a new job.

That outcome usually comes from some carefully crafted policies at the company level. Stack ranking is an example, though it is more popular recently to talk about in terms of bell curves (of 4-7 people, hah). Caps on raises, onerous documentation processes, and explicit and implicit limits on the number of promotions a manager can request at a time are all popular. There’s a lot of creativity going into crafting policies that limit career growth without saying they are limiting career growth.

Managers that care about people eventually figure this game out, realize how career limiting it is to push too hard on it, and either leave management or switch to caring about org/product stuff more. This has been consistent in my unscientific study of a dozen friends.

That said, I agree with you. I’d like to see that experiment done with a lot of intentionality and care.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

If we imagine companies as empires, this almost comes as obvious or apparent.

> I've now worked in three companies where this is extremely apparent. In the latest company I've gone from 3-degrees from the CEO to 6 in little over ten months.

On the other end of the spectrum, I worked at a company where the CEO tried to eliminate middle management and manage engineers through 1 layer of management or even directly by himself. It was terrible.

Large companies require subdivision and layers of amazement. Getting it right is difficult. Getting it wrong is easy.

In my opinion, it requires an executive management team that is focused on deliberately building the right structure rather than letting it evolve organically. Organic middle management growth usually turns into a race for headcount because the quickest way to move up is to put more people underneath yourself. An upper management that knows how to set the structure from above and have zero tolerance for political games is key.

I've personally seen it go both ways, depending on the type of restructuring, the type of company, and the direction of the new leadership team. Sometimes you end up with more managers, other times managers are gutted to make the company leaner. Promotions rarely come into play unless there's a strong fear that good people will leave en masse if they don't get promoted.

I would say that whether it is good or bad depends on the goals of the restructuring and how well the result matches those goals. More middle management is neither good nor bad on its own - sometimes very flat organizations need more management to enforce processes and policies that let the company grow efficiently, other times very hierarchical organizations need less management between decision makers and ICs to move faster.

Highly hierarchical, "top-down" organizations end up requiring a lot of managers in order to "enact" the top down policy decisions. The more decisions are imposed top-down instead of bottom up, the more management and administrative overhead you incur. Management is needed for top-down decisions because you need someone to "convince" teams to do something for you. Ideally, it's obvious to employees that the change is good and necessary, but if it's not, then this coercement requires enforcement - hence more management.

The opposite end of the spectrum is "flat" orgs, like Valve software, who have few/no managers. In a flat org, all decisions are bottom up.

And just to defend top-down orgs a bit, the corollary is that because different teams might make different decisions, flat/bottom-up organizations tend to be less standardized - more flexible at the cost of some chaos. A tendency for launching and killing products in quick succession is one possible implication. For Valve launching different games that works, at Google launching/killing chat apps is starting to hurt their reputation.

An ideal company is a mix of both, but which policies are ‘imposed from above’ and which are allowed to ‘boil up from the bottom’ is usually an endless source of discussion - I wonder which way Intel is going

> An ideal company is a mix of both

The best company I've ever worked at (retail, surprisingly) squared the circle thusly:

Strategy (i.e. goals, culture, priorities) flowed top-down. And the company spent serious time doing it pervasively and well.

Solutions (i.e. implementations, features, products) flowed bottom-up.

Part of their corporate culture was that a manager above team level should never suggest how to do something. You could bounce ideas off them, but they were pretty serious about it being the person doing the implementation work's decision.

Wow, that seems like a really strong set of guiding principles. I like that a lot.

What is "bottom up" exactly if as you say there is no hierarchy?

I used to work for a flat organization, with few formal managers. I now work for a much "taller" organization, with four levels of management between myself and the owner.

In practice, at the flat organization, there were ways that the people at the top were able to impose their views and preferences on the company. Most obviously, the folks who had been at the company for a long time were friends with the owners, and they had a lot of unofficial influence over things went, even if there was no org chart putting them over other people. If a change seemed good and necessary to the in-group, then they were in a position to enforce it. If it did not, there was no way to get them to go along with it.

Also, in practice, at the taller organization, there are a lot of bottom-up decisions anyway. It's just that those decisions get to be in fact bottom up - I go to my manager, who talks to some other manager while I keep hacking on something else, and either that manager agrees, or more likely they point out something else and my manager comes back to me with a more balanced alternative. At the flat organization, decisions were bottom sideways. I had to go to a bunch of ICs from different teams and try to convince them of the merits of some idea, and if they had conflicting goals, I had to mediate that myself.

I'm much happier at the taller organization which has a paperwork-heavy performance review and promotion process (compared to the flat organization, which also had no titles and where performance reviews were a brief closed-door meeting with the one manager between you and the owners). I find it works better for me: I understand better other people's expectations of me and I am better able to communicate what I want to change too. It's extra time, but it's well worth it for the predictability, and I feel much more supported trying to make difficult cross-team changes.

It doesn't work for everyone, of course; different people have different personalities.

I can pretty much guarantee Valve has hierarchy it just maybe more implicit than an overt org chart. There will be leaders and there will be followers, almost guaranteed.

Hierarchy will naturally appear in some form as we try to achieve something that requires more than handful, I'm sure there is some sort of inflexion point but not sure exactly what that is.

You sort of need top down after a certain point. Buttons up fails pretty badly when there are multiple sites and nobody can agree on the right way to do anything so there are no common tools or processes even though the sites may be making very similar products

This is a well known phenomenon that was described by C. Northcote Parkinson[1]. While Parkinson's law is often misunderstood by readers, including Wikipedia editors, who can't make it past the first paragraph of a work, the actual law is a formula describing the growth of bureaucracies: x = (2k^m + p)/n, "where k is the number of staff seeking promotion through the appointment of subordinates; p represents the difference between the ages of appointment and retirement; m is the number of man hours devoted to answering minutes within the department; and n is the number of effective units being administered. Then x will be the number of new staff required each year." In this context "minutes" are basically printed out emails.

There's much more to it and it's a great read.

And to answer your second question, in virtually all cases the only thing that can be done is to wait for the organization to fail. There's a reason there aren't many 100 year companies.

[1] http://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf

"It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

This is gold

Last company I was at did a reorg which switched from product to functional based orgs (I guess) ... and I went from 4 managers to the CEO, to like an almost incomprehensible web of directors. Then a manager was added to my team which sent us a level down even further. This was ostensibly done to 'streamline' the orgs which seems deeply hilarious

Doesn't it depends? I mean you cant expect everyone to be within 3-degrees from the CEO if you are at Apple or Intel. The organisation is way too large.

Google thought all management sucks only to find themselves in complete chaos once they grow to certain size.

I mean everything is a balancing Act. But Silicon Valley, and technology somehow has some embedded extremism within it. And I dont understand why.

Managers outwardly grow by acquiring prestige/reports/products. There are many counterproductive methods of gaming this success criteria via empire building, irrational promotion of internal managers, and over-hiring.

Growing startups either need to hire skilled management from successful firms by offering an outwardly visible step up - or promote internally. Either way your odds of hiring a manager gaming the metrics to one extent or another are pretty high.

A good alternative is to aim for less management overall and explicitly avoid using metrics like hiring etc in your evaluation of managers. Almost every large and successful firm I’ve known has gone through a “less management” phase prior to reverting to the mean.

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