Hacker News Reader

Comment by delusional | Hacker News Reader

Isn't that exactly what the OP is saying though. That's all fake work that's only done because the even higher ups are demanding it. It's not that the manager is bad because he's an idiot. It's that what the system asks of the manager doesn't actually make anything better.

View on HN

The point is it's not fake work. In fact these types of problems just become harder the further up you go. When you're upper management, now you have the problem of wondering if managers are doing their job correctly/efficiently, something even harder to manage and plan for. Imagine handing someone several million dollars in labor budget and just having to trust them that they're building the right things...I would be asking questions too. Coordination problems are tough.

> When you're upper management, now you have the problem of wondering if managers are doing their job correctly/efficiently, something even harder to manage and plan for.

If this becomes a problem, I would rather assume this as a strong sign that there are simply too many management levels in the organization, which makes managing the multitude of management levels difficult.

That’s the nature of bigger companies. You can cut out middle managers and have each manager manage 200 people but… that would work exactly as you’d expect (via implicit leadership, which will go well or poorly based on mostly luck). The more people you have, the harder it is to know who and what is working well and what isn’t. Attention only goes so far.

> I would rather assume this as a strong sign that there are simply too many management levels in the organization, which makes managing the multitude of management levels difficult.

Turns out the flat structure doesn't work out either; you will have a hierarchy, one way or the other (that is, planned or emergent.) I think us techies underestimate the necessity of coordination, and yet we paradoxically chafe at meetings.

at a certain size, it is inevitable.

you could not have a horizontal spunky start up land on the moon in the 60s. It is too complex and too much information to possibly transmit to everyone.

There are distinct issues and hard problems at each level of the company hierarchy.

its a lot like software architecture in a way. Getting up and running is easy in the beginning, one person can dictate how everything fits together and things are straight forward. Then as you scale, things that were easy and simple are now bottlenecks, so through refactoring, you create a more solid foundation, that if looking naively at the initial implementation is more complex and structured, but it allows a framework to handle bigger challenges. Success at this stage is how well the architecture lends itself to scaling.

Large companies require structure, and their success is dependent on how well that structure operates.

small companies need a group of smart people in a garage.

distributed systems are hard. if you're a techie worth his salt, you know this by experience earned in sweat, blood and tears. they're permanently broken in some fashion and there's a lot of work involved to just keep them running at all.

now realize that large organizations are basically distributed systems with more smaller unreliable components.

"shh" - The management

...sort of. I'm in this role myself, and I think a lot of middle management positions could at least in theory be eliminated. But it would require 'Developer Z' from the above example to have those uncomfortable conversations with management himself. Would that be a stressful distraction from the work he needs to accomplish? Almost certainly. Could it be a net savings for the company? Yes, iff the right processes/culture were in place.

Since taking this position I've started to think of middle managers as human lubrication on the gears of bureaucracy. The better the gears fit together, the fewer of us are needed. Unfortunately, we're not really incentivised to make ourselves useless, so designing better gears isn't something a lot of us spend time on. And I don't know how one could properly incentivise a whole class of mid-seniority people to work themselves out of a job.

If you've ever worked as a software developer in a small company you might have found yourself being both a developer and directly reporting to what constitutes upper management at a small company, often the owner or president of the company. I was in this situation early on in my career and managing the business side absolutely becomes a whole job, but also I think I did my best work and had a bigger impact of any job I had after because I was directly owning the outcomes of software I was writing. (Of course doing both well is incredibly challenging and often ends up resulting in poor software quality, or poor engagement with management) But it's pretty exhilarating if you can pull it off and maintain a high standard of quality.

Yeah, I think it's not so much the middle management that's the problem, but as you get higher and higher up a large company, and more abstracted from the actual work being done, there are a lot of demands for leadership. But our culture (at least in the US) kind of assumes that founders are special, ultra-people on the basis of them founding a company and providing jobs for everyone. In my actual experience, most of them are just characters ranging from the eccentric to the idiotic.

It does take a lot of vision and leadership to successfully run a large company. Unfortunately, I would argue, we tolerate a lot of unsuccessful companies.

> That's all fake work that's only done because the even higher ups are demanding it.

It's not, though. On the management side, you quickly learn that teams range from proactive (will get the job done without having to ask twice) to the most mind-bogglingly slow group of people you've ever worked with. If you're not constantly asking questions to understand each situation further, the latter group will abuse their lack of oversight to no end.

It doesn't make sense if you've always been responsible and ethical yourself, and you've always been surrounded by responsible and ethical people. But once you get into management, you realize that you can't count on everyone being honest like yourself. A small but troublesome minority of employees will take full advantage of any slack you give.

It doesn't mean you should make the situation bad for your high performers (common mistake), but it does mean that you do need to ask questions to understand what's going on when things are falling behind.

In the above example, the next management move would be to understand why the onboarding was so slow and to allocate some resources to fixing it so it doesn't happen again. Something that wouldn't happen if management hadn't started digging in to understand.

No it's not fake work, someone has to watch the organizational health, to make sure business goals can be met. Managers report up to other managers because one person can only do so much, and can't feasibly track the complex social dynamics across hundreds of other people.

> can't feasibly track the complex social dynamics across hundreds of other people.

indeed. i can't figure out what sort of organizations all of these "omg get rid of middle management" folks have worked for.

if you've got piles of middle management who only have a few reports each, well, sure, that's not great because now they've got too much time on their hands to pester you. but the other direction is no good, either.

i've seen a VP with 45 direct reports before. he didn't get much done, and shed bodies as fast as he could hire new ones. he didn't know anything about any of his people, and they didn't bother trying to take their problems to him, they just quit.

i totally agree with you. i think if you were a small product focused company, you could conceivably have engineers with a PM, and cut it off at that. why a PM? because talking to the customer and getting that feedback is a must, and potentially offloading that to someone specifically as their role sounds like a good separation of labor.

If I had my way, I’d get rid of the PM title and call them Customer Advocates.

It’s fine for non technical customer liaisons to have input, but putting non technical people in charge of a product doesn’t tend to work well in my experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com