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Comment by axpy906 | Hacker News Reader

This just reaffirms my belief after a decade in industry that middle management is useless. I wish businesses could move to a more decentralized form. You just don’t need these people if they can’t help you in you current or future job.

All managers should know the below. It’s proof the job is not effective.

> Here are the facts your manager might not know about you and your team that we’ll cover in this post:

>What’s slowing the team down

>Exactly what individual people on the team are working on

>Where the technical debt is

>How to help you get better at your job

>What your goals are

>What issues they should be escalating

>What extra work you’re doing

How compensation/promotions work at the company

Edit: It’s by Julia Evans too. Awesome.

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I think this is talking about direct (line) managers.

But I’ve had managers who lead. I’ve had managers who facilitate. I’ve had managers who manage their boss (which overlaps with facilitation but is different). I’ve had managers who only serves as tiebreakers. All have their value, but it’s very hard to relate to someone who doesn’t want to do any of those. Especially ones who are scribes.

Why is being a scribe bad? You only chronicle data that you don’t participate in so that later you can report on who did what. In other words, it’s not my fault it was Steve who made that decision.

And then we had Mike whose only job seemed to be getting promotions. Still have no idea what he did all day, except get promotions. Wouldn’t lead, wouldn’t tie break, didn’t chronicle, didn’t up manage, barely down managed.

All managers should know everything relevant; all people should be perfect. But meanwhile, no one is, and this post is useful advice for reality.

I cannot claim to know everything I "ought to" know for my job, and I don't expect my manager to either. But that doesn't make me, or management in general, "useless". We do what we can.

Then split up the job. If it is obvious you're spread too thin, stop doing it and making yourself near useless, split the job into multiple and focus.

We've done this with multiple other disciplines. Management is one of few continuing to converge and trying to do the impossible while insisting they are a net gain on average. That's irresponsible from a support role with a disproportionate amount of power compared to those they manage.

All the people here must be incredibly awesome because in my experience after having worked as a contributor, a project manager and a manager, when you leave developers to themselves they spend a lot of time fixing issues they care about and improving systems they like working on but very little time actually wondering if these bugs and these systems were the one who needed to be worked on right now to be able to keep the engagements we took towards our customers and for the project to survive.

as an IC.. i agree. boss me around a little bit. Don't make me miserable but I don't give a hoot what makes money, i just want to write quality code. if you need to steer me towards something more profitable, do it, that's your job, i don't like thinking about those things.

Middle management is not there for you. They are there to provide the same type of support to your managers, that your mangers provide to you.

Us lower managers are only human.

Are there any current companies you would call decentralized?

Not GP, but I'm in a company which is pretty decentralized (after being heavily centralized a decade ago). Decentralization puts different pressures to have good middle management (at a minimum), but I think in some ways, it even increases the pressures on management to make a decentralized company effective.

Well and I think you’ve been seeing a lot of it the past couple of years. There’s some natural informal organization if a team is physically collated—which often isn’t the case and can be good or bad in any case. If everyone is remote, a lot of that informal organization doesn’t happen.

It’s also the case that the realty of any established company is budgeting, procurement, etc. There need to be processes. I expect a lot of developers wouldn’t like to spend a day a week on this sort of necessary evil.

Valve?

Valve Handbook for New Employees

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...

My experience with "flat" structures in the past has been the lack of an explicit hierarchy created an implicit hierarchy, which caused compensation to not match actual role and some diabolical politics. Never again. I've kind of moved on to wanting to work at places that run on information and not confidence instead. You can work out which type of place you are at pretty quickly by talking to upper management. Unfortunately most people want confidence and not information.

currently dealing with questions about how to get a fairer TC without breaking eggs.. strange venture.

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