Zuck credits Elon with kicking off trend of firing middle managers | Hacker News Reader

Zuck credits Elon with kicking off trend of firing middle managers

fortune.com

6 pointstim_sw9 comments

This is probably a very unpopular opinion but I really would like to see Zuck firing himself and shutting down Facebook and Instagram, Elon firing himself and shutting down Twitter and Spez firing himself and shutting down Reddit.

Partly thanks to the services they are running the World Wide Web turned into a ego and rage infested shithole.

And I really want to see the clock turned back to the fun place it was around the year 2000.

Also Jared Lanier: https://mindful.technology/jaron-lanier-delete-social-media/

Militaries for centuries have found that 10 people is the maximum effective size one leader can control (a squad). Given that, and when avoiding middle managers, that makes the max effective size of a company as about 100 people. Guess meta has a whole lot more people to whack.

Absolutely. Of course how many people you can control depends on the nature of their work and and your mutual communication. Say I bet one could control directly more, say, sanitary workers, than software developers.

> Say I bet one could control directly more, say, sanitary workers, than software developers

Why? On, say an bigger open source project, what is the ratio of "management" to contributors like? If people understand their goals and have the right incentives and autonomy, very little management is necessary.

On the other hand low skill workers need much more managing, both to make sure they do they job and to coordinate their work. Surely not as much management as modern tech thinks it needs, but the army heuristic of 10 people on a crew seems much more applicable here. If you're paying someone to empty garbage or whatever, you're almost certainly not paying them to think, or care much about their work, so that has to be supplied separately.

That's just my opinion, what did you mean in your comment?

Think of it as threads stepping over each other modifying and reading the same mutable state, vs threads that work in their own sandbox and share mostly immutable state. The former require a lot more alignment and synchronization. Software has a lot more “shared state” and “ad hoc” decision making than say a sanitary worker each taking a floor in an office building and doing the same thing they do every time. Discipline and control is another matter. I was assuming everyone is acting in good faith.

'Zuck' and 'Elon' ? seriously? ... that's so off putting... as though they were everyone's best friends.

https://archive.ph/krMzN

2000 employees is still probably way too much for twitter

Elon didn't simply fire middle managers. Zuckerberg's statement is just another example of public figures hearing and saying what benefits them personally. So I guess Zuckerberg wanted to make it comfortable for himself to fire middle managers.

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