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Comment by Ozzie_osman | Hacker News Reader

I listened to his podcast episode on the Sequoia podcast a few days ago. Interestingly, his argument was "we don't need middle managers" and he plans to have all 6000 employees eventually report to him.

In other words, companies don't need managers anymore. Except for one manager. Him.

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I've come to realize a lot of business trends can be reduced to "higher ups are now convinced that x is not actually necessary".

See "we don't need managers" (flat orgs), "we don't need infra" (DevOps philosophy), "we don't need QA" (devs handling testing), "we don't need product" (product engineering), "we don't need frontend devs" (no code generators) and of course all the AI related workforce reduction.

To me, it says something about how detached leadership is from how the sausage is made.

What is funny is the Adobe executive who proved that yearly employee review process is no longer needed over a decade ago but for some reason the trend never caught on across the corporate world. Seems that some trends just don’t catch on for some reason.

Getting rid of sadistic reviews of underlings? And take aways their fun? What's wrong with you?!

I was a manager of engineers and manager of managers. I've never heard the word fun used in conjunction with reviews.

It's a system and process put together by others, with forms and criteria that were flawed. It required real effort to do it even half successfully. It's not clear it ever had much impact on future behavior. and it had to be done on a timeline that interfered with doing the regular job.

If someone had a real performance issue, there were better approaches to the problem.

Yet every company I worked from from tiny startup to large Silicon Valley company insisted on it every year.

Why does anyone listen to him about product design/buisness running?

Twitter was a success _despite_ him. the original idea was strong enough to blast through all of the odd/wrong decisions he took. The time it took to make hashtags a thing, the terrible scaling, the huge overhiring, and deliberate duplication of teams, and his inability/reluctance to make any product decision. Sure he's got great connections, but he is a terrible leader of a buisness

Most of his product philosophy is negatively correlated with businesses that need to make a profit to survive.

I know what he'll do, he'll have someone make a bunch of agents to manage all these poor people via chat. he'll boast about how AI native the company is, it'll be chaos.

I think Google tried this a while ago (flattening the org).

It didn’t work, so they went back to having managers.

They did, I actually worked there at the time, my manager had 140 directs. It obviously didn't work.

But this time it will work. Because, AI, of course.

Wow, holy smokes… 140 directs. Kind of curious: what did the differences look like on a day to day in that sort of org structure?

I met my manager when I joined once, then every 6 or 12 months for performance review (which was aggregated feedback from my peers that he took 2 minutes to talk through: "looks like you're doing fine, if you need anything, my EA can schedule more time").

PMs and Engineers made the prioritization decisions.

If someone was severely underperforming, it'd probably take at least 6 months to notice.

Projects would get shut down with very little notice (though I guess that's been a Google constant).

Within two years they had added 3-4 more layers though, after realizing the managers were, after all, needed.

I've never had close to 140 directs (or even friends) but did get close to 40 (direct reports; never had more than a dozen friends or so). Frankly, it sucks. I was (IMO) doing a terrible job, dropping balls everywhere and not serving the people I had a responsibility & emotional commitment to help. It came down to one of: 1. fail at what you truly believe is your job, 2. give up on what you believe, or 3. don't play the game. I picked #3 and quit, but most go with #2 and many are VPs and CEOs today.

That is insane, Block seems to be very poorly run. The headcount still seems bloated, they'll blame AI and layoff more people for their own incompetence.

After reading a book about the history of Twitter ("Hatching Twitter"), I got the impression that Jack Dorsey is a disturbed individual with a poor grasp on reality. So it's not surprising that Block is poorly run.

If every manager initially had 5 reports, a quick geometric series shows that eliminating all managers would save you 20% of headcount. Of course, managers tend to get paid more, so maybe you'd save a larger fraction of wages.

I wonder if that's the main concern or if communication / coordination costs are the larger concern

It only works if the person at the top is a real visionary. And you’re talking about a handful of people on earth who have this frankly.

I think the charisma at the top masks what's happening internally though. I've never experienced - or learned post factum - of a mesiah leader who didn't have at least one amazing administrator operating in their shadow. Does Dorsey have this?

I’ve heard Jensen Huang has like 60 directs, but they are all senior enough to report to the CEO of NVIDIA, so the theory (I think) was that they needed less direct supervision.

Yes [1]. Of course, it was a total failure.

1: https://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/04/25/goog...

There's no doubt they see AI (or whatever the emerging tech) as disrupting everyone and everything EXCEPT themselves; the more interesting question is: conscious omission or reality distortion field of one?

He came to the same conclusion that Steve already had decades ago.

These people are amusing to say the least.

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