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Comment by justmarc | Hacker News Reader

So they finally figured out most managers are not just useless, but literally a drag to the company and progress?

The managers are just following the (fairly absurd imo), amazon internal processes for the most part. If the processes don't change, there are just going to be a bunch of overloaded managers. The current processes, culture, and 'principles'/dogmas are inefficient, contradictory and toxic af.

Who created the policies and procedures?

Bezos.

(Bezos all the way down)

If the answer you were looking for was "managers", then you have no concept of just how big Amazon is.

According to TFA they have about 106000 managers before this layoff. You don't give 106k people any meaningful control over the company's policies and procedures, that has to come from the layers above the managers, probably several layers up.

So, the people that manage the managers?

Try the people that manage the people that manage the people that manage the managers. Maybe.

Definitely not the people being laid off.

So the layoffs make sense?

If you are not responsible for whatever decisions you make, and you don't even make any decisions that amount to anything at all, plus you don't do anything(code, SRE etc) why should you have a job?

Execs.

that's the definition of an incompetent / mediocre manager. Most organizations expect their employees and managers in poarticular to be "breaking doors", which is the opposite attitude to blindly following any internal process.

You have a very warped view of the world if you think most companies, or even Amazon in particular, are expecting their employees to be “breaking doors”.

They are literally mandating people come in to sit in a room on video calls with people sitting in a room in other offices all around the country/world. That’s the most egregious one, but add up all the controls, pair it with layoffs and threats of more, and you’re not going to end up with an employee base that’s testing the limits of what’s possible. You’ll end up with a well behaved herd of docile workers.

They’re not going to change that behavior by getting rid of middle managers when those demands are coming from the C levels or the board

To be fair, OP was talking about the companies' expectations, not the behavior they are incentivizing. Many companies expect their employees to innovate, while implementing processes that prevent innovation. Many companies expect their employees to "take courageous risks" while punishing risk-taking that goes wrong. Many companies expect their employees to "act like they are owners" while giving them no equity or profit sharing.

Ah yes, I do see that distinction. I was only talking about what they were _doing_, not what they _expected_

Exactly. It is about expectations, and it is about inbalance. Every employee expects ideal benefits with minimal work, every emplyer expects ideal work with mininal benefits. The reality is balance here is one of very many possibilities with leverage being most of the times one one side, rather than in the middle.

Complaining about the structure is like your sales complaining that your customers choose your competition's product - nobody cares.

You only need managers to the extent their actions can have an effect down the line. Otherwise they don't "manage" anything, hence they become communication brokers, potentially unnecessary. The reality is that in most cases that's the reality, but that doesn't make the reality the goal and, in fact, motivates these decisions.

I think Gervais captures these dynamics the best https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

this is same as saying soldiers in the military have the right to decide which orders they can disobey and which not

Almost - it's called "mission command" and the core idea is to prioritize initiative, flexibility, and independent judgment over strict adherence to orders’ exact wording.

https://www.army.mil/article/106872/understanding_mission_co...

Yeah the existing managers left behind will probably be overloaded, because one person cannot scale over so many direct reports. So then perhaps Amazon has figured out how to scale middle managers so they can effectively manage multiples more. Perhaps an AI/ML tool of some kind, which would seem kinda dystopian, but might not be awful... who knows, this is just wild speculation.

But it is neat that the internal tooling is 15 years behind the times. It’s like being teleported to 2005. The nostalgia value surely makes up for any “inefficiency” /s

I'm interested to hear what type of structure you prefer over one that has managers overseeing developers.

Or are you saying you just need to find the good managers? I might have misunderstood.

I'm honestly interested in alternatives.

In my experience, the worst of them are lodged in there tighter than trichinella larvae.

Yeah because the good ones already left the shitshow to get a job somewhere better. Because they can.

The best are always the first to leave

Their upper managers don't want "best", they want loyal, they want yes men that will make perfect henchmen, that's what best is for them so they get exactly what they're looking for. People who rock the boat aren't gonna cut it.

This is true. I've also found that there are perverse incentives when it comes to (especially upper) management. Building up enough political clout in your organization that aren't answerable to many people, and managing your image among the few you are answerable to, is the best skill one can have if the outcome is steady long term employment. Providing value to your company and coworkers doesn't correlate as much with surviving corporate haircuts like these.

You realize alot of these managers are making seven figures? The "good ones" arent leaving. They are clinging to that money

A manager decides to spend their energy managing their relationships up, down or sideways. The very worst will focus solely on managing the upwards relationship, but that's precisely what makes them hard to dislodge: Every second of their day is spent on efforts that helped their job security by relationship building.

So it's not just that the best manager is also the best at finding a new job, but that every second they spend improving their org's performance is a second they don't spend trying to fool a typically not-so-good middle manager into thinking they are indispensable.

This is also why, every time I've seen manager culls, I have found that it was rare for upper management's idea of who was easier to replace was to match that of peers and reports. The ability of the bad manager to hide the truth from the exec is much stronger than people realize.

what was the purpose of that analogy?

No now just senior managers are supposed to pickup the slack and drag the company behind on there own. and also program managers & useless product managers.

jokes apart, long ago when I was there, once somebody did the internal org site scraping and found out in our org there were almost 6 workers (status givers) to 1 status takers. and sr. engineers are supposed to 'manage themselves', so really full of political BSers.

Don't forget principals. Most of them do nothing the whole day and are compensated to create BS projects that go nowhere.

Well come back around. We will retry the flat structure again, realize that just leads to terrible throughput, team wise political battles and defacto leaders and start hiring the managers again. Just look at older industries that have reached a steady state because they’ve been around longer. No one is constructing a large building without a project manager, foremen or architects.

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