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Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

> This is how large companies operate once they surpass the innovation phase

I heard someone smart (maybe Naval Ravikant) say on a podcast that this becomes prevalent in orgs which have two or more layers of management between real customer-facing work and business ownership (CEO, co-founder, CTO, etc). Having worked in several startups as well as F500 FAANG-ish valley tech companies, I agree. When a manager reports to a manager who's reporting to someone else degradation begins to occur. Another tip is to look at the org chart. If your manager's manager has more than six (maybe up to 8) direct reports, that's a bad sign.

However, there are exceptions to be found in specific sub-groups in some orgs. I've been witness to it more than once.

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I don’t understand. Literally every company I’ve ever worked for, successful startup included, had at least an engineering manager reporting to a director reporting to a VP reporting to a senior VP reporting to a CTO. Is this not a normal or good way of doing things?

Startup with 6 levels of management? What kind of a startup is this? In my experience, working in startups for a couple of decades, this is nothing like normal.

I think the difference is not in the amount of layers between an IC and the top - but the amount of layers between the customers and users and the top. As long as c-level still keeps on touch with reality outside the org and doesn't depend on truth being filtered through four layers you might have a chance

I work for a company of ~200 total employees with ~30 in engineering and the org chart for an engineer goes Individual Contributor -> Manager -> VP Engineering -> CEO. 4 total layers, 2 of managers.

In AWS, many orgs have manger to senior manager to director to VP to SVP to CEO. It looks AWS is really well managed if startups have the same structure.

> If your manager's manager has more than six (maybe up to 8) direct reports, that's a bad sign.

A bad sign of what? A bad sign that the company is too large to be innovating?

Span of control. As you get above that number of reports, the manager is splitting their attention to the point that hot/cold spots are inevitable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_of_control

So, many layers are bad, but large span is also. This means you are limiting both width and depth of the management tree, effectively limiting the total size of the workforce to ... a few hundred? That doesn't sound right.

> That doesn't sound right.

IMHO, it's correct but that doesn't mean it's good or desirable that things tend to bog down in wider / deeper org structures. Maintaining high efficiency and effectiveness in large org structures is hard to do and that's why the exceptions are notable and worth studying.

Separation of concerns also applies to organizations. You may see huge companies, but where business areas, divisions, product lines etc. work in isolation just fine. At the strategic level, things are steered like a mix of governmental and portfolio management, effectively abstracting the differences between the lower layers away.

To study single-mission mega projects, the classics are the Manhattan Project, the Apollo missions and the first ICBM systems. The management of these projects were awe inspiring.

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