Why Management is Not a Profession | Hacker News Reader

Why Management is Not a Profession

bobsutton.typepad.com

29 pointsrams9 comments

I have slowly been coming to the realization that just as the internet is doing its creative destruction thing on many obvious institutions (book distribution, music distribution, etc.) there are a lot more areas where it applies equally, although much less obviously.

Management as a career is one of those areas. Really, the whole need for managers (especially "middle" managers) is to maintain a line of communication between the leader of an organization and its producers/workers. Doesn't the internet make this type of job obsolete? In an efficient pipeline (of information), aren't they just bottlenecks?

We're certainly not there yet, quite possibly still a long way away, but once we get to the point where dissemination of pertinent information is at maximum efficiency, we won't need these arbiters of information in the system anymore.

I think this ties in to PG's thoughts on people not being meant to have a boss (http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html) as well as Berners-Lee's talk at TED about getting information onto the internet in as raw a form as possible.

but pertinent information needs to travel both ways.

for example: a company ceo might decide that say building a new box which does 3G access with deep-packet-inspection etc might be a very fruitful area to get into. most likely, he doesn't (shouldn't ?) know innards of say http/pop/imap etc etc.

grunts need to implement that. do you still feel you don't need someone closer to the worker-bees who can translate one lingo (techno-babble) into another (mgmt-speak) ?

"pertinent information needs to travel both ways"

I agree with your statement to a certain extent. It's the "travel" part that I think is not necessarily true.

Everyone (pertinent) must know everything (pertinent). And once information is ubiquitous, it will no longer need to travel.

As far as translating from one person's lingo into another (whether it's CEO<->Programmer or otherwise), then you can't argue with that. On the other hand, if the CEO and the worker's were able to understand each other directly, then you would have a much more efficient organization.

I would say that the latter example has an advantage over the former.

You make a great point and I do agree to a certain extent. However, there have been some projects I've worked on where having a great manager made all the difference in the world. Having someone that deals with all of the non-technical minutia so that programmers can keep building stuff is really valuable IMHO.

Maybe software could fulfill this role one day, but as you say we're not there yet.

It may be that I'm getting too old and cynical, but when I hear arguments about eliminating the middle-man I can't help but think of a quote from Malcolm Reynolds in the show Firefly:

"About 50% of the human race is middlemen and they don’t take kindly to being eliminated."

I agree completely with the quote. I may have been reading too much techdirt lately, but I believe that's pretty obviously the case with the RIAA and the rest of the entertainment industry trying to clamp down on file-sharing.

Taken to it's logical extreme, there are some other pretty radical examples of "middlemen":

* universities (another PG example, http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html) * banks * financial regulators (see: xbrl) * lawmaking bodies * large corporations * etc.

Are we ready for this kind of disruption? I have no idea.

In some way I think you need some form of middle-like management once an organisation gets beyond a certain size. I know Joel Spolsky has mentioned it and I agree with his reasoning. (http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080901/how-hard-could-it-be-ho...)

I can even see it at the startup I'm currently at. Even though the CEO/COO's door has always been "open", it's been harder and harder to enter it as the size of the company has increased. It's not a physical barrier, although the C*O's are busier now, but a psychological one in most cases, where once is (I don't want to say it but) afraid or cautious in disturbing the busy individual.

That being said the quality of the person being the manager is probably the most important detail. I can see that in the company I'm in. In the group I'm in we have a really good manager, one that's able to gather our grievances and ideas and present them to the higher ups. While the other group has a pretty lack lustre manager. The difference in morale, job satisfaction, and employee retention are striking. But none of these managers have an MBA.

That's a real shame, actually, because managers are essential to any project or large organisation.

However, in my experience, there are really many different kinds of managers (the term "manager" covers an enormous range of people), and not all of them are simply attempting to suck a living out of their customers.

Hmm, the title is a bit misleading because I thought it applied to managers in general. The best managers I've known are ones who care about their team (developers in my case) and that output in regards to the business. As part of that, they also care about product quality and customer satisfaction. Of course, these people whom I hold in high regards also never had MBA's. I recently told my friend who is going for one: "Don't become an asshole". An unhealthy focus on profiteering seems to lead there.

although mentioned in the article, this article by jeffrey-pfeffer et al. (http://www.aomonline.org/Publications/Articles/BSchools.asp) is very, very good.

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