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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Definitely. Another factor I think about a lot is what I call "managerial diversion". As a simple example, imagine one of those meetings where a boss calls it to feel important. E.g., a "progress report" meeting where each person tells the boss what is going on while everybody else just tries to look alert.

To me this is a diversion of resources from productive use. Managers get to feel powerful, important, smart. But neither investors nor customers benefit. At the team level, it's often just wasted hours here and there. But as you scale up, it gets worse. I've plenty of expensive corporate projects that were really just resume-builders for some executive.

How much more productive would each of us be if the management chain was reasonably effective and reasonably selfless?

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This opinion feels to much like a cliche. Management needs to know what’s going on, even in well run companies. You might not like giving progress reports, because you feel like it takes time away from your job, but it’s possible that management is using the progress reports to better the company as a whole. For instance, if you’re behind schedule they can allocate more resources to your project, etc. I’m sure you have many anecdotes where management wasted peoples time. That happens often too.

i think the complaint is not giving status reports, but being forced to listen to others’ seemingly irrelevant status reports.

Exactly. As well as more efficient ways of keeping people updated. Think of all the people who have to enter a ton of stuff in to Jira and then give the boss a verbal status report.

And let's not forget obviating the need for status reports entirely. I've been part of teams that got solid work done without ever having to give status reports to anybody. We'd ship early and often; our "report" was frequent results.

Big meetings are more time effective and easy for a manager but worse for many workers and productivity.

This has been a huge advantage of the WFH culture lately. I can just keep working while I listen to other people update the manager.

Why do this?

Use that time to read or browse HN or something.

Lets say one hour meetings per day. This means 8-1 = 7 hours of real work. If you work the 8 hours + the meeting, if you ever have to go back to the office, either you will have to work 9 hours to produce the same as WFH (since now you have to sit on the meeting), or drop in productivity and get scolded by a manager (you are producing 12.5% less)

More often than not, I’ve spent about 20% of my time giving status reports or being around while others do. Very little of it has seemed like it was important or valuable for anyone and more of an exercise in most people finding something to say for the day.

Reporting does have value but has become way overdone.

> For instance, if you’re behind schedule they can allocate more resources to your project, etc

I have never seen this happen in my entire life, nor would it be useful

> For instance, if you’re behind schedule they can allocate more resources to your project, etc

See: The Mythical Man-Month

I agree that making sure that your work is observable is important, and usually Management's attention needs to be called to where the observed changes are being made. This is not the same as holding you hostage in a meeting culture where you need to sit through everyone else's reports on their progress. Instead of people taking five minutes to write out their progress report to their manager, who can then skim the progress reports and the work for a full team in fifteen to twenty minutes, instead we hold everybody hostage for thirty to sixty minutes. Typically this is a syndrome of a culture where labor is not expected to document their work, and nothing will scale without pulling senior engineers off their IC work to synchronously bring people up to speed. This necessarily reduces engineering velocity to a crawl.

Nobody can speak as fast as a progress report can be read. Verbal meetings cannot be indexed or searched. All meetings should have a product - a decision, language that is agreed upon, written out, saved to a knowledge base. If you call too many meetings, it's a sign that you're not delegating authority enough.

The original poster said resources, not necessarily human "resources".

The Mythical Man Month was also not saying adding manpower to a project makes it slower, simply that it potentially could and there's limits to parallelism.

Everything else mentioned rings true though.

The mythical man month does not apply as a default. Often in orgs, there are other employees equally versed in all aspects of the work you do, but are just currently working on another aspect of the project, or codebase.

Thus, some work may be immediately taken off your plate, without you having to dedicate your own time to training, etc.

Meetings suck. However they absolutely have a purpose, and really, sadly, you are never "held hostage" in a paid-for scenario.

> Often in orgs, there are other employees equally versed in all aspects of the work you do, but are just currently working on another aspect of the project, or codebase. Thus, some work may be immediately taken off your plate, without you having to dedicate your own time to training, etc.

Not everybody's time is worth the same, and it's a classic organizational fallacy to treat your employees' time as having equal worth. Simply put, five minutes of a senior engineer's time is worth more than five minutes of a junior engineer's time. This is clearly obvious even if you only compare their salaries (and not the value that each worker brings to the company). If their time was worth the same amount, we wouldn't hire juniors in the first place.

Thus, it's inherently unreasonable to use five minutes of a senior engineer's time to save five minutes of a junior's time. I expect juniors to struggle with something for at least a few hours before asking a senior for help.

This is besides the point that, if employees are documenting their work properly, there is less need to synchronously synchronize. "I don't remember, read the documentation, that's why I wrote it."

Yes it does, you are not taking into account communications overhead, which as a project grows larger becomes a significant factor.

More resources doesn't mean more man months. It may mean assigning the most productive and expensive people to the project for example.

This is not the 1950s, we are on a software forum on the internet. Lots of metrics can be extracted directly at source, lots of status can be extracted from auto-distilled tickets.

The management situation you posted is also a bad management decision: https://blog.devgenius.io/why-adding-more-people-to-a-projec...

But i digress, fractally, outwards, not really caring..

Wouldn't the companies that allow this "managerial diversion" quickly fall behind competitors that did not allow it?

Companies also have different ratios of managers to employees. If managers drag down productivity wouldn't you expect to see much flatter orgs in successful companies.

Only to the extent that a) there is direct competition sufficient for this to make a difference, and b) bad management isn't an endemic problem across wide swathes of American business. But there are widespread concerns about declining competition. [1] And some, me included, see American business culture as captured by managerialism. [2]

By your theory, all companies should be pretty efficient and managers pretty effective. But how many people would say that about their companies? If that's how most of your friends talk about their bosses, let me know where they live and I'll move there.

One good example to look at here is the notion of bullshit jobs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

[1] E.g.: https://hbr.org/2018/03/is-lack-of-competition-strangling-th...

[2] This is a good book on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...

From bullshit jobs it looks like 37% of some surveyed Britons thought that their jobs did not contribute 'meaningfully' to the world. So that means the vast majority do think they contribute meaningfully.

Most people I know do seem to like their manager, if they don't they switch jobs. But tech jobs are also plentiful here (SV).

About half the places I’ve worked did fail and the other half didn’t have competition adequate enough to cause failure.

Once you achieve a certain amount of success and market share success stops being driven strongly by quality fast execution and you can spend decades in a slow decline unless you’re lucky enough to have a disrupter targeting you which you can usually just buy.

Employ a lot of people to inefficiently maintain what you already have and you’ll be fine for a good long time. A lot of this work doesn’t need to be done but nobody gets a promotion for doing more with a smaller team.

It’s like the problem with the Navy buying ships, big ones are less useful and more vulnerable but captains and admirals feel more important with bigger ships and drive decisions that way.

A lot of what happens is to make middle management more money, look more important, and keep busy.

This assumes that competition exists and self-regulates, it doesn't (always, or much in later states of a system), contrary to a lot of economic theory that's peddled as fact by those who benefit the most from it.

The market only cares about aggregate performance. If every company has its own set of problems that are difficult to fix, the situation is stable. Especially if the market is dominated by a small number of companies, which makes it unlikely that anyone manages to fix their hard problems.

I feel like flat orgs are a resounding success. Valve comes to mind. Netflix to a degree.

I'll sometimes just give a 10-second status update: "Working on feature X, it's coming along nicely", or "Fixed a dozen pesky bugs".

Eventually, others start to do the same. Granted, there will still be a couple of "long talkers".

You should try working in management before coming to conclusions

Nah, that would require doing work and something that is outside their comfort zone.

I think that having a person on staff who has special training in organizing would be helpful for large teams, but MBAs are absolutely not that.

You should try not making assumptions about what people have and haven't done.

The MBA hacks need to slither in and “create value” from things that they have no real expertise in. Look at the debris field they created value GM, GE, Intel

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