We once more have no full-time managers at 37signals | Hacker News Reader

We once more have no full-time managers at 37signals

world.hey.com

5 pointsserial_dev5 comments

Mentoring one-on-one (and only one) is not necessarily the same as managing and having a manager. You can change the name of the role but the associated task don't disappear.

It's like saying "We need to save money, we don't need to have a project manager." Removing the role doesn't eliminate the need for the tasks of that role. That is, someone(s) end up doing proj mgr stuff.

Finally, a team of managers of one likely means few of them are good (not even great) at managing. How is that a good thing for the mentees? How is adding responsiblity to so many mentors a win?

One of his points is that if you have a full time manager, this manager will make sure to do managerial stuff for 40 hrs a week, even if, for the team's success, you only need 10 hours.

In my experience this is true, managers who don't have enough legit stuff to do are the biggest time wasters because they want to appear busy and indispensable.

Yep. I was in a team of 3 devs with a “full time” manager. At best it was a 20% job. I’ve managed much larger teams myself. The guy was “supposed to be technical” and help out with low priority dev tasks. All he did was go to meetings and have useless 1:1s.

It would still make sense to have a single manager that also makes then to have multiple mentors each kinda faking the managing part.

> You can change the name of the role but the associated task don't disappear.

Which he does admit but then says that just gets spread around.

But that doesn't mean people do it well, especially if it's not their primary role.

>Finally, a team of managers of one likely means few of them are good (not even great) at managing. How is that a good thing for the mentees? How is adding responsiblity to so many mentors a win?

Right, managing is a lot more than just a bunch of tasks you spread around. You need to have someone focusing on it, providing direction, identifying issues before they become too bad (which he also admits is a problem), among other things.

And managers can be IC's too! They don't have to be 100% managers.

Feels like he's saying "well some managers are bad so we'll just stop having them!"

The other thing is, for those that want to get into management, they will have to leave to advance. It's never good to have good employees leave because you don't have a position for them, especially when you arbitrarily remove it.

I'm not saying he's going to fail because of this, but they aren't going to be as good as they could be otherwise.

I like DHH, but he's way off on this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com