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Comment by ipaddr | Hacker News Reader

Let's be honest. Engineer managers are largely replacable and more easily than individual engineers. The pool is larger and can accept more manager unrelated experience. There is more to this.

As the person senior leadership communicates with this person is seen as more important than they are. Senior leadership wants to maintain a leveling system to separate groups of people. It's a hedge a flat organization which makes senior leadership less important.

You could swap out this person with another without losing speed but it doesn't work as well with an engineer.

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Then why don’t companies adopt a flatter structure with higher compensated engineers? The goal of a company is to make money after all. If management could be removed and top engineers retained with higher salaries, then a company would surely have an advantage in the marketplace. Since this doesn’t happen, there must be more to the picture than people in upper management simply clinging to their jobs. If removing middle management were so obvious a change to make, then shareholders would demand it.

I would be careful with the "if they do it it must be sensible" reasoning. There are a lot of reasons that modeling firms using homo-economicus and perfect markets doesn't pan out.

To me, this is a case to apply Occam’s razor. What is more likely, that this decades old, Dilbertesque criticism of management is true, yet somehow eluded the purview of shareholders? Or that businesses are being run in a relatively efficient manner given the current human condition?

Rules for Rulers is real.

It's not that management is dumb, it's that every layer of management is self-interested. Every hierarchy has to contend with principal agent problems. Organizations can do a better or worse job of it, but the incentives are always there and they lead to predictable inefficiencies which are frequently observed. Everyone knows this, but unless you know how to get someone to manage without self-interest, you aren't in a position to solve the problem. Nobody is. That's why it lingers.

Is self-interested management really an inefficiency if it’s unavoidable? You don’t get to run a company in a vacuum. You have to run it within the bounds of human behavior. Saying that “if only all humans acted in some way against their nature, then the system would be more efficient” isn’t an effective management strategy.

You were arguing that RfR / Dilbert coludn't be true because if it were, it would have been optimized away. I argued that no, just because it happens and is broadly understood doesn't mean that it can be optimized away.

You can play semantic games about whether or not it should be called inefficiency -- I don't really care what you call it -- but the RfR / Dilbert dynamic is very real and very prevalent.

Just because something is good for shareholders doesn’t mean it’s good for non-management employees or society at large.

I never claimed it was. I was replying to a discussion on worker efficiency.

this kind of reasoning simply does not follow in the real world. There are many, many cases of some companies out competing others. Why? if they were all rational actors none would have any advantage over the other.

I’m not claiming management structure is the only factor in whether or not a business is competitive. It’s just a factor, and business usually try to optimize the factors under their control to be the most competitive. Of course, there are many factors outside of the businesses control as well.

Many start out flat and as they grow they need to introduce middle management.

Middle management becomes necessary.

But the question is around pay. Should they always make more because they sit higher in the org chart?

I would suggest they make more because of power structures not utility or because they are not as easy to replace.

Because of first class shares, senior leadership shares percentages shareholders with a vote are often the people in power. Common shareholders don't hold much power.

> Then why don’t companies adopt a flatter structure with higher compensated engineers? The goal of a company is to make money after all.

Let's not forget that companies aren't real sentient beings, do not really take decisions and do not really have their own interest. They are legal fictions. Trying to understand the behavior of a company based on its self interest can therefore be misleading.

Why do bureaucracies develop? Why is Google launching yet another chat app? Why are so many companies disrupted by new techs instead of adapting? All this is against their interest after all.

Companies are ultimately led and controlled by many individuals, in pursuit of their own individual interest (mostly). Some groups of individuals within a company have more control than others, and will consequently bend the company toward what's in their own interest.

I'm not versed into sociology of organisations, but from a cursory look at some big corp internals it seems to me that this easily explains the frequent growth in numbers and importance of the coterie with the more agency over hiring, regardless of whether it's good or bad for the company as a whole, ie the growth of middle management cancer.

Ironically they see engineers as replaceable and view every member of leadership as a Jeff Bezos level unique business edge. I’m all honesty I have just always viewed managements role as a different skill set, one that has successfully thrived longer then the IT industry has even existed. Even while we as engineers tend to feel they are replaceable I think we don’t see the value in the work they do to ensure we get funding, resources, and leadership support.

I hate to say it, but I can imagine that a group of engineres with a manager nipping at the heels can be much more valuable in total to a company than a group of engineers left to their own devices. Some may be great at being independently productive but most probably are not.

Of course some random idiot nagging the engineers won't be worth much, they need to be experts at the specific business and domain to bring value in this situation. Which also makes them harder to replace.

Certainly, companies with engineers who are capable and independet problem-solvers, and who are experts at the company's needs and the domain it operates in, are the most valuable. These are not uncommon either. But a fast-growing company in a fast-growing industry has zero chance of solely hiring such people. They need to widen their net to people that require managing.

The project manager has the nudging role and the best insight on deliveriables. A manager usually manages other administration aspects and inspirational at times.

The Rules for Rulers theory vs the Leveraged Value Creation theory.

Naturally, reality is a bit of both, but people on top push LVC hard while they never mention RfR. A good leader earns their salary multiples over, but many poor leaders rake in the dough just from RfR.

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