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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

I have a conjecture that developers are the new managers.

Software defines (or will defines) a company - what it can do, how it does it, how it reacts. If you cannot read the code you don't know what the company does. If you don't write the code, you cannot define the company.

Defining the activities of an organisation is management. All the people called managers are at best coaches, giving a towel and water in the corner.

And so productivity is measured by organisation chnage - otherwise you are trying to measure typing speed.

(this is not to say we do not want to look at the tools we use to produce software, but this should be focused on CI-like throughput (ie Speed vs stability) not "correctness"

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> Defining the activities of an organisation is management.

while being a developer myself and thinking that 70-80% of all management decisions are well undercooked, i believe that there is so much more in here that is not what developers do or want to do. Yes, we write how software and - in the long end - companies work, but to actually specify this there are so many factors to be included.

What is the market doing? How do the customers react to certain approaches? What are our ressources? How competent are the users in our company with using processes/software/communcation?

IF we are the new managers, we should try and raise our heads from time to time and look at the whole company. I've seen so many developers producing good software, but software that is not working with and in reality (being a running business with people and real life problems).

It's not quite like that

Let's divide management up into administrative / supervision and leadership / creation and mentor / culture

the first part os getting replaced no matter what. The last part - mentorship etc, well I am not sure that is done well almost anywhere.

And that's probably 80% of current management work

The real nitty gritty is leadership / creativity.

Look at some of the best in OSS - let's try Linus, or Van Rossum. Yes code is produced. Daily. But also politics is navigated, usually

The good things here are that the politics is open because the only means of communication is open(ie email). If those with commit bits could meet in smokey back rooms they would. it's easier.

not sure where i am going but software gives huge speed and flexibility advantages that not to replace most decision making in your company with software is like refusing armoured cars because horses are brave.

As soon as your company grows, those who decide and define the activities are more and more not writing code anymore.

Some activities/behaviours may still be injected at the developers’ level, but only if it does not contradict or impair what was defined as the main activity.

So while, yes, developers may evolve in those roles where they will be in position to learn and understand what the company should do, and communicate it, and steer people to implement it (in code and other things), they won’t have much brain power left to read or write code. They will specialize in their new role and rely on other specialists.

My view is that 80% of the work done in a growing company is ... well it could be a simple black box (ie HR, payroll, even a lot of the hiring process etc etc). If SaaS companies had useful APIs and one could easily code over the top of them (which i guess is coming) we will see much "management" being amenable to coders

the rest of the 20% matters - "culture", core competencies and so on.

but strip out much of the busy work - have a "scalable company in a box" and just ask the founders to focus on the bits that really matter, and i think the brain space will be found

If you make hiring an outsourced black box, you might be surprised by the results.

I understand this bias/will in the software industry to abstract things out of the physical/human world, but in the long run, what makes a company/business run is the people running it, not the tools/gears.

If a company can be just founders alone, fine, why not, but it's not sustainable in the long run. If you need to hire and lead people for that purpose among others, software/APIs/implementations are a competitive advantage, but not what makes the business heart beat.

The hard part isn't building the black box, it's deciding what to put into the black box. I built a migration and I 99% knew that it was going to work, I spent one and a half hours doing a diff of the current state vs the migration and then spent 5 seconds clicking on the button on the black box to let it do its job.

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