Tear It Down
randsinrepose.com
randsinrepose.com
We are running a completely flat organisation, but with the full awareness that just saying there's no bosses in no way removes the power dynamics from human interaction. Breaking down power hierarchies and reconcieving leadership in the way Rand eloquently describes here requires constant conscious effort and innovation in information flows, communication, delegation, and decision-making.
Through practice, we've come to the very same conclusion that the fallacy at work in traditional hierarchical organisations that fail by many humanistic measures (happiness, creativity, autonomy) is not that management and leadership are important - they absolutely are - but that the people who perform those functions should be placed higher on some sort of pyramid and paid more, and that the work of management should be necessarily embodied in specific people as opposed to a function that can be spread amongst many, according to their specific abilities and capacity.
We're still working out the specific mechanics and processes, but we're making headway. It's great to see others thought leading in this space.
Worth mentioning is that it's possible to understand exactly how all the hand-waving applies to you and your team even if you're not a Lead or Lead of Leads. That may be a sign you're qualified to be one of those (whether you want to be is a different matter).
As such, the only thing I'd say is that the roles stated here are the things you expect from those people, but they aren't exclusive. It's possible for a “mere” engineer to have some strategic understanding of the playing field, but not want to take a lead role. It means their picture probably won't be as complete, but that additional understanding will probably help them do their job better—and possibly help them to help their lead do their job better in turn.
1. Not looking to their leads for guidance on this crazy inspired person. 2. Completely right and the guy is full of shit.
Worst case for a good director is people say something like "Wow, I am inspired, but I don't understand HOW to accomplish that lofty goal." and that is where the leads come in.
This analogy is getting closer to prophets and priests... still, I'm inclined to believe that if a director doesn't inspire some sort of positive craziness, then what else does he/she do?
Rands's article sounds all nice and dandy, but he can't even apply it effectively in practice.
Otherwise your words don't carry much weight. What you're doing is like going to a church and whispering to random churchgoers: "The priest sure likes to talk, but he's got some skeletons in his closet..." Is anybody going to listen if that's all you say?
Rands wouldn't be a good manager if he hadn't failed a lot as well. Just like the rest of us.
One vague anecdote of failure doesn't disqualify his advice.
I used to scoff at (to use his terms) some Leads, and especially Leads of Leads. But then I saw a few good versions of Leads of Leads, and I don't scoff in a generalized fashion any more. Having a good appreciation of what other teams across the org are doing, and being able to make the right connections, is a real talent. It's also a talent to not be parochial about the collaborations you encourage.
The reason why this seems so counter-intuitive for Engineers is that Management obviously doesn't take any more personal risk than an individual contributor does. If they screw it up badly enough? they get fired, just like we do.
The risk and responsibility that management takes? it is not personal risk. It is risking other people's money. It's a responsibility to those other people. In a real way, management is acting as the agent of the investor who actually owns the place.
It's not about fair. It's about who is closest to and has the most control over the actual cash, and who is in a stronger position because of that control to negotiate a higher rate. (or in a more ideologically pure world, the investor thinks that her interests are served by paying her agent well.)
It's sort of how sysadmins payscales are often not based on the difficulty of the task, but instead are based on how expensive the thing they are supporting is.
I am not so sure. Usually it isn't the entire team that gets fired, it's the project manager. The company still acknowledges the knowledge and value locked up in the engineer, and if he did his job, but the project manager / whomever made the wrong choices, the engineer is pretty safe.
Unless of course the entire company goes down, but when you have management tiers, the company is large so usually some project managers gets fired first before everybody else.
>>It's not about fair. It's about who is closest to and has the most control over the actual cash, and who is in a stronger position because of that control to negotiate a higher rate.
That is absolutely true, and is why the CFO is usually one of the best paid employees in a company, even though his value to the company might be lower than other key employees.
If the project fails, well, seeing to it that the project doesn't fail is the manager's job, so yeah, if the project fails, the manager is more likely to get fired than an Engineer, especially if other managers think that the project failed due to poor management.
However, if the engineer fails, it is the manager's job to fire the Engineer in question, before the Engineer's failure turns into a project failure.
So either way, yeah, if you are perceived to have failed at your job, you are likely to get fired. The manager has a different job than the engineer, and thus is likely to get fired in different situations.
But I don't think that managers have less job security than Engineers. In fact, I think Managers face rather less systemic risk in terms of technology changes than Engineers do. For instance, when UNIX beat mainframes? There were a lot of SysAdmins who had to scramble for serious retraining or to make the jump to management.
I'm glad he mentions this because it's what most people don't understand about management and their paychecks.
People who gripe about CEO pay don't understand that they're really paid based on their value to the company. Being the top, a good CEO's force multiplier is huge, even at mid-size companies. Same thing with the best athletes and actors. They're worth the money because they make everyone around them better and draw more external interest.
Or they have a more sophisticated understanding of economics and know that the theory you're advancing is only one of the possible explanations and that it doesn't explain all of the behaviour seen in the market (i.e. the continued trend towards across-the-board increases irrespective of job performance). There's a ton of work looking at the degree to which the trend is partially explained by other factors like the interconnected nature of boards and the ability of senior executives to suggest comparisons which favorably support compensation increases.