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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

>removing up to three layers of management in some functions so leaders are closer to the work.

I wish them the best of luck with that plan. Middle management is where the institutional knowledge sits on how to actually get shit done despite challenges & broken processes/systems.

It's an even worse plan than eliminating juniors.

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Middle management is also why there’s so many broken processes and challenges in the first place.

Middle management exists to turn conflicting marching orders from the directors into less conflicting marching orders for the line workers, and to keep any negative feedback on how fucking stupid the directors are from ever reaching them.

They don't cause the broken processes. They are the symptom of a broken executive process. A fish rots from the head down, and the people at the top get exactly the kind of company that they ask for.

A Director is middle management. Line managers are the ones that turn that into action and they are not middle management.

Not with 8 layers of it. Institutional knowledge lies between managers and engineers and maybe one layer above that, not further

Middle managment is also where most of your negative feedback is lost. I think moving fast in general needs tighter feedback loops and this is simply not possible in large organizations.

Do you really think that upper management wants feedback that the stupid fucking ideas they have are boneheaded? The point of middle management is to absorb it so it doesn't reach the children at the top and make them feel bad

Negative feedback is not lost, it's filtered. No one at the top is equipped to deal with the actual feedback from ICs, unless your org is 10 people in a bike shed.

Being unrealistic here, but maybe they should be.

> Middle management is where the institutional knowledge sits on how to actually get shit done despite challenges & broken processes/systems.

Really? In my experience it's the rank-and-file employees who have this knowledge of how to get on with it without ceremony and politics. And the broken processes and politics are created BY the middle managers.

Agreed - 75% of the front line managers I’ve had are pure managers without any domain/company/industry knowledge

middle management is hired to delegate but persists mostly grow itself and its influence

Not really. Middle management is there to be in meetings all day long with nothing produced but identifying low performers.

GitHub was famously flat and far more successful than them.

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