Comment by yamtaddle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yamtaddle | Hacker News Reader

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I think a lot of the friction is upper-middle or middle-but-anxiously-trying-to-claim-upper-middle (in a class sense—income's related to, but not identical to, class, in this analysis, following Fussell) management not wanting their reports to have equal or greater standing, in social status terms.

Probably this treating programmers as a status-threat dates to the merging of high-status analyst and low-status programmer into a single role, way back in the 80s—there was little threat with a few upper-middle or near-upper-middle analysts running around, but increase the total number of people in programming and merge "analyst" and "programmer" and now there are too many, and no-one to be "under" them in status, and what's the point of status if you don't have inferior people to lord it over? If there's nobody you can credibly boss around or tell to take care of some bullshit for you, and expect them to just say "yes" and do it without pushing back? Nobody to do the actual work while you're "working" at the golf course or goofing off in your private office! Clearly, that would be a threat—why, they might all get dragged down to bottom-tier status, if there's no one under them!

One bit of corpo-speak that I have seen cropping up to address this is relabeling "managed by" as "supported by", as in, "team X will be supported by person Y." It may not work overnight, but I would like to see a shift in the culture of a manager "managing" like a king manages his kingdom and the peasants within, to "supporting", like a coordinator. But I fear that we will fall back to the ape mentality of hierarchies and end up twisting the words to fit our predetermined outcomes.

I’m a program manager my role is very close to this. People are confused when I give them my title and explain that I don’t have direct reports, but I “manage” our team about as much our director does.

That means handling administrative tasks, organizing work, stakeholder management, or any of the other million tasks involved in running a successful team that developers shouldn’t need to worry about. It’s very easy to conflate prioritizing and planning with telling people what to do, and sadly in many orgs that is the case. However, those tasks and everything else falling under the “management” umbrella should not imply a hierarchy.

It’s just a different type of work to be done by people with different skill sets. I don’t know if that reality will ever be embraced by my fellow business bros, but that simple mindset has made me a better manager than any class, book, or course I’ve experienced.

I read the concept recently of a people manager vs. a process manager. A program manager from my experience is a bit of both but mostly process.

If you don't mind being part of the "support staff" you can have the job!

You can't change human nature. Hierarchy is inevitable. All you'll do is replace explicit hierarchy for a covert implicit hierarchy, because most people are natural minions who will look for someone to take charge.

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