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Comment by Myrmornis | Hacker News Reader

My experience has generally been that a group of intelligent adults are capable of both planning and steering the course of their development efforts as well as carrying out those development efforts. It's not unprecedented, or a particularly radical thesis: in university research labs, as a PhD student, post-doc, or professor, you manage yourself (PhD students meeting with their advisor once every few weeks).

Sure, there are meta-conversations about process and compensation, and there are younger employees who may need more guidance, and there are intersections with product managers etc. But the ratio of managers to ICs is often higher than needed.

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I worked in a University lab during grad school, then worked in the private sector for 16 years, and have been back working on research software for the last four years. All I'll say is that the software world should not look at the research world for best practices on delivering software products, except maybe to do the exact opposite of what they do.

I've been in academia for 10 years, now 'out in the real world' for 3 years - I agree with your assessment, the only project management strategy academia knows is 'just work longer hours'.

I have done both and agree

I worked in academia for years before moving to the commercial sector, and in academia management seemed to run on the "in the real world" mantra. Yet if the managers in academia did half of what I saw them do in the commercial sector, they'd get walked out in minutes.

A lot of PI’s pull rank and crack the whip on post docs it’s super toxic and the hours are atrocious with weekends and expectation to work at night. I’ll take a tech middle manager over an arrogant PI every time.

> in university research labs, as a PhD student, post-doc, or professor, you manage yourself

That is not the real world.

Turns out working for your brother-in-law they let you manage yourself too.

Yes, it is the "real world" for research, of which industry does nearly zero. Research pushes humanity forward. The sort of anti-intellectualism in your comment is part of what is causing the decline we are seeing in society today.

> research, of which industry does nearly zero

wrong and painfully ignorant

I think it all depends on finding a group of people who share the same goal of making something great together. One person who isn’t interested in that goal can be insidious to a self-managed team. And getting everyone involved means having some reward for doing well, like a validating mission or direct interactions with customers, which can be hard in some roles.

I manage a team of software engineers. While they are all quite good at what they do and care about doing the Right Thing, collectively they're not always great at working towards a common goal.

One of the many challenges I have is that some of them will literally tinker their way to nowhere i.e. they have strong cases of Shiny New Toy Syndrome. If it weren't for me, there would be piles of unfun/unsexy work that never gets done and we'd suffer for it, and it would impact the rest of our engineering org.

It's a thankless job though, I often feel like no one likes me when I'm actually doing my job well. It's OK, I actually agreed to go back into management becauseI was terrified about the prospect of reporting to some new manager my company pulled in off the street (my old manager left).

I'll say this too, while I'm not very hands on these days, I understand what my team is doing and why and can speak with them about the details. I feel like that goes a long way helping me do my job well and understanding what they need to do, to do their jobs well. Non-technical software managers don't really make sense in my worldview.

These don’t even remotely compare. In academia, timelines are long, failure is extremely high, total team involvement on a project is small, motivation is different, as is team selection criteria.

Just look at a large project for academia that requires lots of people and is a deliverable. It reverts to standard practice

imagine comparing management at a small research lab to a multi-national corporation. Such unfounded hubris.

Imagine actually wanting to work at Amazon

Ahead of the game, soon we'll only be able to spend Bezos Bucks. Company Towns walked so the Company Country could innovate

edit: I've enjoyed two managers since I started working ~2008. The rest were either harmful or generally ineffective, unfortunately. We can get along well... but I know the job's not for me. It's like HR, for the business.

Contrary to GP, career development has yet to meaningfully happen within the same business. I have to move to advance, so I do.

Imagine refuting the idea that people are incapable of self-management.

If you view the university as one large company pushing research forward on many fronts then it is about the same

Universities are not a company model so the comparison is extremely disingenuous.

Have you ever worked at a university?

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