This article and others like it reappear on HN every few months, and that’s a good thing. Absentee leadership is a big problem, especially in tech, where managers have been led to believe that the best way to lead engineers is to “leave them alone.” Instead that should be, “leave them alone when they need to work, but provide structure and support when necessary.”

There’s a similar though different problem in tech, where organizations are kept very flat in the hopes that leadership will simply “emerge.” Sometimes a staff engineer will be unofficially implied as the team leader, but without any actual management duties nor reporting lines. It’s a way for a company to have their cake and eat it, and it ends predictably.