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Comment by danjl | Hacker News Reader

The only management technique that works is not to have any. Keep companies small, below 50 people, and you don't need anyone with the title "manager". Instead of taking your best individual contributors and making them managers, as Jobs suggests, keep them as the leads. The problem is big companies, not how to manage people.

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Then who does performance reviews, sets expectations, hires and fires, makes the case for raises, ensures you have all the support you need, acts as a point of contact for any issues, etc?

Coherent group of adults can hire, support, set expectations, evaluate contributions and resolve conflict among themselves. If someone really does a bad job, the group will build a consensus and escalate the problem. If you save on managers, you can pay more people that actually do the work, so they don't have to beg for reasonable compensation every month, make up bullshit to justify their employment, and waste time "being managed". Instead they can focus on doing what needs to be done. If there's no ladder to climb, performance reviews and internal competition, people who are not satisfied with the work itself, and just look for titles and promotions will just leave. The things that do sometimes need escalation, can be handled by the owners/leadership.

Reasonable high caliber people don't need to be "managed". You can manage people working in the restaurant, make them a schedule, make sure they show up, etc. In a creative and intellectually challenging industry like SWE, why would you hire most bright people to pay them lots of money and then think they require continuous "managing". They might need someone to report to and escalate when need arises but that should be very lightweight.

Generally managers are used for handling failure of culture and the cause of that failure at the same time. If you are running a shitty shop, full of crappy devs, who you want to pay crappily, then you need a manager for ~ every 8 people, to whip them and make sure they are doing their jobs, and get fired if they don't.

Have you ever seen a group able to operate the way you described?

Yes. I work in 2nd one in my life currently, around 30 people, 15 technical/15 non-technical, remote. Not a single manager. I think we can scale it to 50. At some size I guess it would become harder, but I'd like to think it the spirit of it can be kept (lean and very low managers head count, just for coordination, HR and severe conflict resoultions stuff; let the people do their job and take accountability, pay them well and don't make them play carrier ladder games and internal competition trying to get promoted and destroying the cooperative culture).

That sounds very interesting. So when the unfortunate happens and it's time to fire someone, how is that approached?

First you hire more selectively, slower, with higher "fit" requirements (talented, flexible, aligned with technical choices), and everyone are well motivated, so it just doesn't happen that often. You just accept that people vary, some will have better ideas, more productive, go through things, etc. and that's OK. People should not have to constantly stress about their day to day peformance that much. But when there is a problem, multiple people talk about it with the top leadership over time and then it's eventually handled the usual way.

I have some fantastic leads who are great at tactical thinking but abysmal at the longer term, strategic planning. They are so bad they can't even entertain a 12 month conversation. I trust them absolutely to think is 3 month of less cycles. They cannot manage a a team for long and they don't want to, which is why the middle management layer exists.

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