Middle managers fear they've become irrelevant with work from home

"Middle managers" are certainly needed as part of a corporate hierarchy. What is being exposed with WFH is -ineffective- managers.

Ineffective managers are at every level, including the C-suite. Middle managers just have a higher probability of being ineffective due to lack of experience/resources, so they get the headline.

There is a "hollowing out" of middle management - not from Covid or work from home, but software. It's still eating the world. Accountancy, or rather bookkeeping went first in the 1960s with rooms of people pulling levers on adding machines to the first IBMs. And now the data that those pounds and pence proxied for is actually being sent up the chain aggregated and compounded into a single straight through connection from the coal face to the board room. As Larry Ellison said "if you don't design it, build it or sell it Inwill do everything I can to automate you"

I am not surprised. I don't know how this plays out across different cultures, regional or corporate. I only witnessed how it went in the circles I work in here in Europe. My impression is that the group of people that clearly reacted mostly negatively to the work-from-home-during-the-pandemic period were indeed middle-managers, lowly heads of units, project managers, and those that populate the middle ranks of organisations with funny and unclear job titles. Perhaps these people are by nature of the extroverted people-person type that need extra social interaction to feel good. Or perhaps they found that their need to control others was more difficult to satisfy at distance. In my country it was also discussed at a point that many people were confronted during the pandemic with the meaninglessness of their jobs. I really believe it can be the case for many people, and not not only those middle-managers with funny job titles.

Side note, I don’t know if some of you have actually been key players in a large org without management, but I have, and it SUCKS. If you think random slack pings are bad, try random slack pings plus 5+ hours of meetings a day you need to decline, justify declining, communicate about async, just to have time to get your work done. It’s my experience that without management, top performers are easily looking at 80+ hour work weeks

I’m a middle manager at a company that is fully and completely embracing remote work, and I feel as needed as ever. It’s the bad middle managers who only know how to provide “value” by instilling fear and managing presence who should be afraid.

I think they mean micromanagers. I thrived as a middle manager of a remote team that was always distributed across three time zones. I’m not a micromanager and I built my team with that in mind, so my focus was hiring, onboarding, long term planning, and mentorship.

This is a bad title to an other unsurprising article.

Managers don't fear they will become irrelevant. It's bad managers who are having trouble figuring out how to manage without seeing people at their desk.

What's mind blowing to me is that despite two years of being forced to evaluate people by their impact rather than by their physical presence, so many managers still don't have a clue how to do this right.

Meanwhile, healthy remote teams are thriving, and competent middle managers there provide incredible value, from managing execution to keeping the social tissue of their teams together.

Middle management got obliterated in the recession in the 80’s. It’ll happen again in the next recession.

I often wonder at the parallels between military chain of command and civilian chain of command. Line managers and NCOs are down in the trenches, and most of them stay there. Everyone else is in an “up or out” situation. They are not stable titles and you’ll get burned if you aren’t incredibly lucky.

If you took a title for more pay, my advice is always to recall that it’s for more money but that money might go away. Save it. Spend it on incidentals. But don’t take out loans on it. In the next downturn you’ll be fucked. Spend like you are one job title behind where you currently are - so either don’t spend it, or keep climbing.

Yup as a manager you don’t do much, sort of like being a corporate lawyer. The company keeps you on payroll to delegate responsibility.

The best teams I’ve worked for were more self organizing. When you have great engineers this is very effective and a wonderful work environment.

I am not surprised, but I am annoyed.

There are clear benefits to remote. Our company posted record profits, ICs report increased individual productivity, but we have to roll it back, because it is 'hard' on managers? Whatever happened to, 'git gud'?

Schmidt:

"I don’t know how you build great management [with remote work]. I honestly don’t," he said. And about half of managers, 51%, genuinely believe that their workers want to return to the office.

Wesman:

“Clearly, managers are struggling,” said Max Wesman, GoodHire’s chief operating officer. “Organizations that find a work arrangement that satisfies the majority of their workforce will benefit in the areas of recruitment, productivity, employee satisfaction, and retention.”

Sorry but global remote work didn’t need to prove the Dilbert principle and Gervais rule. I’m willing to bet more people will leave jobs purely because they feel stuck behind an incompetent manager. Who wants to waste years of their life not growing?

ICs have virtually the most power in most companies at higher levels of seniority. The demand demonstrates that, but more importantly, more people should stand up for themselves when they have a shitty manager. Life isn’t long enough to be a doormat.

There are good managers out there. They are very rare. If you have one, keep them. If you don’t, look for one. Your mental health will thank you later.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle

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

> Eric Schmidt even recently weighed in about the return-to-work debate, [...] "I don’t know how you build great management [with remote work]. I honestly don’t," he said. And about half of managers, 51%, genuinely believe that their workers want to return to the office.

Instead of believing, perhaps ask them?

In general, I find this article to say almost nothing. The headline is the clickbait bringing in a Fortune of clicks, I'm sure.

Actual work like coding and drawing has become much easier with WfH. People work, like managing and coordinating, has become much harder now that you can’t just walk up to people and have conversations with them anymore.

If anything, middle managers are more important than that were before. I’m sure upper management will just see them as a cost-cutting measure though and write specious articles like this to justify their idiocy.

The title of the original story:

"Fed-up managers declare WFH is over, as 77% say they’d fire you or cut your pay for not coming back to the office"

And the reasons the article describes are more along the lines of managers feeling that they cannot manage remotely, not worrying about their relevance.

The underlying reason might of course be worries about relevance, but that is not the content of the article.

I think it is worries about job-security. If everyone is remote every worker can be replaced by someone cheaper from some region with lower wages. As mangers are at the same location as their underlings, their relevance vanishes with local workers.

Much as I agree with the complete spin-doctor rewriting of this headline, we don't really do that on HN, do we?

As an IC, having an immediate manager that coordinates what my team works on and shields us from getting whipsawed by ad-hoc requests is really valuable, remote work or not. I may be a little biased, because all of my managers so far have been very technically competent. But having somebody above me who is both politically and technically savvy is a godsend. During times when my team has had no manager, everything was more chaotic and nothing went as smoothly.

My company (an F500) has made the inverse process: before COVID-19 there was just 2 levels of management between me and the C-level executive. Now I have 4 level of management. I don't think it's bad to have middle management, if they cover you from the shit coming from the top. If they don't, they are just unuseful.

Most of middle management work is being pushed onto employees, who can now absorb that work because remote work has led to everyone working 2-3 hrs extra.

In the past if upper management wanted a demo of what was coming up, the “middle manager” would put it together, especially if it involves several team members’ work.

Now, with the fact that everyone is putting in more time, and that we are now all accustomed to spending hours and hours in meetings, they just throw an hour long meeting in the calendar, and ask the 10 people on the team to each do a 10 min demo.

Far more inefficient, but that’s ok because upper management is getting it for free.

I truly believe that I can predict how effective/productive an organisation is based purely on the non-manager to manager ratio. The higher the ratio, the more effective/productive the organisation is. This has been the case for every organisation I have ever worked for and read about. Don’t get me wrong. You do need a minimum of management to glue the organisation together. But anything beyond the absolute minimum will rapidly decrease the effectiveness/productivity of the organisation. The most efficient/productive/successful company I have worked for had a ratio of 20 to 1. The worst/most inefficient company I have ever worked for had a ratio of 2 to 1 (I kid you not).

Really there are just too many managers doing too little work. They seem busy because they're in meetings 40 hours a week. 40 emails would be about as productive, and free up half their week (so they could do twice as much, hence we would need half as many).

I have wondered if there is a chance inflation will wane due to cost efficiencies related to WFH. One cost saving is from lower real estate expenses. If a chunk of employees are made/revealed to be redundant, that could be another cost saving.

That doesn’t guarantee that companies will lower prices — they may choose to try for higher profits. But it reduces the pressure for them to increase prices YOY in order to account for inflation.

Remote work is exposing a lot of foolishness in the workplace, like "busy work" and ineffective managers rather than a particular role.

This headline isn’t supported by the article at all

Title on HN doesn’t match the article’s original title, which is VERY different:

  Fed-up managers declare WFH is over, as 77% say they’d fire you or cut your pay for not coming back to the office

Nothing about middle managers becoming irrelevant, moreso highlighting the dynamic between trying to bring workers back in office and worker leverage.

Let me correct that title for you: "Middle managers irrelevant, and now we know it with work from home"

They were before too. But in any case their role isn't about relevance or production of whatever the company produces.

It's just a way the company expands after a certain size as an organism and starts feeding itself, growing bigger while allowing for redududancy and waste - like a state does.

That's completely untrue, they just found out they were never relevant in the first place.

It's far easier and preferable for a manager to punish employees than reward them.

I'm really sick of this management mentality of "A good employee gets a 3% pay raise, but step out of line once and you'll get a PIP."

The article doesn’t even mention “middle manager”?

It also does not make any sense. Increased WFH requires more effort to connect people, communicate context, mentor people, bridge silos, … all part of the job description of a middle manager

well I declared middle managers over last year and switched to full remote because I didn't want to comply with mandatory day per week in the office anymore.

Told HR on the exit interview my middle manager is not providing me any value and I don't want to make profit for his pay and rather found a company that realized enabling fully remote gives them competitive advantage and I can keep this part of the money for myself. They starred at me like I said a blasphemy

Looking back at it with the experience of almost a year I should have done it much earlier.

LOL

If they truly believe that, then they do NOT understand their roll and thus they are probably ALREADY obsolete and irrelevant.

If they understand - it should not be a problem of need but of methods and skills.

“I have people skills!”

It's wild how often people defend middle management.

Every middle management role I ever had was in name only. I was basically a SDE that also acted as a proxy between project people and other engineers

I see a lot of folks here with the attitude that middle management is kind of pointless. Do you feel similarly for line managers?

Current corporation structure is not meant to increase individual productivity, but rather it increases on group productivity (at the cost of individual productivity) which is why middle managers are always be important.

People leave, go on vacations, get sick, priorities changes, all of which need to be dealt with. And in an environment where the amount of work available to do is always higher than the resources available, you need middle managers to deal with other teams, PMs, customers etc.

IMVHO there are various issues, as anything "new for most people" (even if is not something really new) and that's not just on the administrative, middle-man, side:

- working by targets is not easy, because fixing targets is not easy. Formally we design everything up front so we know what to do at any point in the future, in practice we do design something up front but not all, especially not much "ordinary things". That means that control work progress is not easy and many feat to discover too late that someone is behind the schedule. Not all WFH jobs produce code that can be seen in a common repo every day;

- people who do not know each other sometimes have issue to act as a team and effectively communicate and interact as needed, most tend to communicate just the bare minimum and others too much;

- being really remote means no real geographical constraints so potential economical issues for workers (a new job market with workers from very different countries with very different cost of living), administrative issue (different laws, contacts etc) and practical issues for all (different time zones etc);

Meanwhile there are many advantages like for the employer no office space expenses, just furniture and hw for workers, for them the possibility to live in lovely and cheap places, no commuting, less fatigue and more free time having erased the itinere part etc. BUT to elicit those advantages we need a tested setup that's new and unknown for most, witch means a challenge with potentially long pain while experimenting. Most people still live nearby their offices in cities and there they do not have much space at home for a proper setup etc.

In the end the worst part: hybrid works that force in-office workers to work as they are at home and makes people at home less visible, disadvantage them, makes them feeling guilty to be more in comfort etc + all the issue of double/movable office setup from home to office and vice versa.

Long story short IMVHO:

- part of management, not just middle-man fear for their role

- part fear the challenge of completely change work paradigm

- part are simply not ready nor they can't be quickly to really WFH

That's why some like WFH and some do not. Of course techies tend to like it the most, because they are those already more organized and perhaps WFH since years, others are less organized and others are just old to feel well in digitally-centered environments.

I honestly think that around 30% of jobs can be done from remote effectively but just 10% of these 30% can be done now. Because only a small percentage is ready in humans and paradigms terms. To spread this percentage we need time and incentives...

What we should do right, hear me out, is build a really big spaceship, put all the middle managers on it and fire them into space.

We’ll tell them it’s to escape the giant mutant star goat or something and the rest of us will be along later, but they don’t need to know we’re not going to.

Yes. Yes they have.

Once a decade, there is a story about middle managers becoming irrelevant. Somehow they manage to cling on. I'm sure in another decade, we'll get another article about something else making middle managers irrelevant.