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I assume this keeps popping up on Hacker News because of schadenfreude, but I'm going to say something controversial (and from a completely uninformed viewpoint

I assume this keeps popping up on Hacker News because of schadenfreude, but I'm going to say something controversial (and from a completely uninformed viewpoint), and that's "good riddance". Of all the managers I've ever had, maybe 1 or 2 of them have been any good at it. And by good at it, I mean they made me better at my job. All the other managers I've ever dealt with succeeded primarily in making my job harder to do. Good managers are glorified butlers. Their job is to do everything and anything they can to accommodate those whom they manage, and recognize that because they aren't actually creating anything, they defer to those who can and do whatever they can to help them do it. If they came from a creator position, then their main challenge is to not forget what it was like to be a creator and advocate for them as though they still are. One of the major problems with the whole concept of managers is that they are typically higher than the creators in the corporate hierarchy, and often get corrupted by that. They are proud to be managers because it's a promotion in most organizations, but they have to deal with the uncomfortable fact that they no longer actually make anything (or never did to begin with). Thus, they try to find other ways to make themselves feel valuable, and that often involves inventing extra work for the creators to do. If I ran a company, managers would be butlers. Their compensation would be directly tied to the level of happiness of the creators they are serving. I might even let the creators they serve set their salaries. I currently have a manager whose salary I would set higher than my own because he completely embodies this type of management style. If anybody on the team needs anything, he does it with a smile. He is our advocate, our cheerleader, our mediator, our friend, and our faithful servant. It's not a coincidence he's gotten employee of the year (based on embodying corporate values) two years in a row. I really appreciate what Zappos is doing here and I sincerely hope it works out. The worst thing that could happen is they lose their resolve and give up on it. That would be a very unfortunate signal to the rest of corporate America that the status quo is working just fine, and it would make me very sad indeed.

andygcook 11y ago
What you're describing is akin to servant leadership - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership
- marknutter 11y ago
  First I've heard of it. Sounds awesome, thanks.
- qrybam 11y ago
  Thanks for sharing - reading this reminds me a lot of what a scrum master does (or at least should do) for a team of developers. I've experienced first hand what it's like to work for someone you could call a "servant leader" and also someone who's autocratic to the core. "Situational contexts are not considered." I don't believe their is a one size fits all leadership philosophy. Different situations demand different approaches, and some people respond better to more "active" leadership. Being able to effectively self-manage under a servant leader requires a certain level of maturity and confidence that isn't always present in people. Actually being able to bring these qualities out in people who don't naturally exhibit them is a real challenge, and depending on the individual, sadly, can be very difficult to achieve. If you're lucky enough to work under someone who's responsibility it is to make you better (i.e. a wise and experienced mentor), make sure you grab the opportunity with both hands and learn as much as you can in the time you have together.
sopooneo 11y ago
Unless it turns out that profits are directly proportional to creator happiness, why would a for-profit company use that as the primary metric in deciding the compensation of managers? I am willing to bet there is correlation between the two, but not enough to make it as a primary metric.
- girvo 11y ago
  Totally fair, but I highly doubt "creating busywork and making employees less efficient" is tied to profits in a positive way either.
- loki49152 11y ago
  As I recall from my business management classes in college, no studies have ever shown a correlation between worker happiness and productivity. That doesn't mean that happiness has no effect on other metrics - but this subject has been studied in depth for the last century and researches keep getting the same result.
  - marknutter 11y ago
    It would be absolutely silly to use those studies as an excuse to ignore worker happiness. My guess is that those studies are overly simplistic and difficult to draw any real conclusions from. Happiness is notoriously hard to measure, for starters, and productivity can mean a lot of different things based on the industry and type of business that's being examined. For instance, how do you measure the productivity of your software engineers? Lines of code? Features shipped? Hours worked? Many, many attempts have been made to do this and none of them, to my knowledge, have been particularly successful. I think this is one of those cases where until we know with confidence one way or the other, we should probably just start out with the assumption that worker happiness is a good thing and put the burden of proving otherwise on the scientific community. Until then, let's go with our gut.
aNoob7000 11y ago
I don't get your response. You praise a manager that's like a servant and does all the blocking and tackling for you and all with a smile, but yet you want Zappos' flat organizational structure. I know plenty of creators that don't want to spend their days blocking and tackling. Most "creators" just want to sit in front of their computers all day getting stuff done. With Holocracy those creators you talk about would assume more responsibilities and can no longer hide behind the servant. Lastly, why are middle managers always seen in such a poor light? Why isn't a CEO/CFO/CIO seen in a lesser light since they really don't produce anything.
- marknutter 11y ago
  Who said I don't see C's in a lesser light? And yes, I used this post as an opportunity to rant about managers in a vertically structured company, but I see no reason why the type of manager I prefer could not exist at Zappos. In fact, it seems like it would be more likely to occur, given that they would no longer outrank the creators.
  - kybernetikos 11y ago
    Without me, my keyboard will achieve nothing. Without a manager, a good developer will go on trying to create value. The purpose of the manager is not to squeeze productivity out of a developer as you might blood out of a stone (although some seem to think it is), but to try to make sure that the developers are working on the right stuff for the company. In a healthy organisation, that can be done as part of a dialogue with the developers and takes the form primarily of communication.
    - marknutter 11y ago
      > The purpose of the manager is not to squeeze productivity out of a developer as you might blood out of a stone (although some seem to think it is), but to try to make sure that the developers are working on the right stuff for the company In my experience that responsibility has fallen on the CEO or the Product people.
    - 11y ago
ethbro 11y ago
The issue with inverting the hierarchy is that it precludes centralized control. And that's what your managers are really about. Their function vis-a-vis you is almost inconsequential. They exist so that those above them can direct and receive feedback from you (or more accurately, the 10s/100s/1000s of you) in an efficient manner. Whether you think that's necessary or not is up for debate, but examining the manager's role solely from the perspective of an employee is only half-informed. Personally, having to individually convince every software engineer in a company of a particular course of action sounds about as much fun as counting grains of sand.
- marknutter 11y ago
  My manager-servant would also be responsible for communicating with the stakeholders, yes.
  - ethbro 11y ago
    I'm assuming you mean bidirectional communication with stakeholders. But how do you then rectify the power dynamic between the presenter of stakeholders' views/requestions (i.e. the manager-servant) and the person with the authority to alter workflow (not the manager-servant)? It seems ill conceived to filter communication through a medium that can effectively be ignored.
    - marknutter 11y ago
      Ignoring certain communications can be extremely valuable. For instance, suppose a stakeholder moves the deadline a few weeks earlier, but the team of creators knows that it's completely unrealistic. To meet the deadline they need to stop doing things like writing automated tests or doing code reviews. They overrule the decision unless the stakeholder agrees to cut scope because they're unwilling to sacrifice quality. If a traditional manager role was in place they could simply overrule the group who does the actual creating and end up with bad output.
      - ethbro 11y ago
Angostura 11y ago
> If I ran a company, managers would be butlers. Their compensation would be directly tied to the level of happiness of the creators they are serving. Let's take the simplest case of this. You're a one man business, developing software perhaps. You're doing well, you're successful and you take on someone to help you out. Are you now their butler? Does that person set your salary? If not, at what size of organisation does manager-as-butler kick in?
- mbrameld 11y ago
  That's not the same case at all, though. The business owner may "manage" the new employee, but that role is completely different from the role of a manager in the context of this discussion.
  - Angostura 11y ago
    So you've said that it doesn't hold true for a 2 person company. At what size of company would you make the organisational shift then? 3, 20, 50? At the point where there is one person between the founder and the lowliest employee?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- marknutter 11y ago
  If your new hire is doing all the creating, then yes, it's your job to make sure their job is as easy as possible and they are as effective as they can be. But this example is a little absurd. Manager wouldn't be the correct term for the founder in your example since they would be filling myriad roles beyond manager, just like the first hire would be filling myriad roles beyond "software engineer".
- aries1980 11y ago
  Managers are not necessary the leaders. Managers manage resources, leaders lead people.
ako 11y ago
Maybe the compensation of managers has something to do with this: http://avc.com/2016/01/get-the-strategy-right-and-the-execution-is-easy http://avc.com/2016/01/get-the-strategy-right-and-the-execut...
jqm 11y ago
A managers job is to get things done using YOU as the tool. Your happiness is as irrelevant to this as the happiness of your keyboard. If you work better happy... fine, that's a consideration. But really it's the only one. The goal isn't for you to be happy. The goal is to get tasks accomplished. One keyboard breaks you go get another one. The store shelves are full of them. And that's how the pyramids got built.
- marknutter 11y ago
  > If you work better happy... fine, that's a consideration. But really it's the only one. Not only do I work better happy (I do), I stick around longer. And that's really the key, here. Sure you can squeeze productivity out of creators while disregarding their happiness, but everyone has their limits. They will eventually leave and take with them a wealth of tribal knowledge. Corporations are notoriously bad at measuring the cost of losing employees with domain specific knowledge about their products or services. The attitude is typically that creators are interchangeable like cogs in a machine.
randycupertino 11y ago
"I assume this keeps popping up on Hacker News because of schadenfreude," I don't know, I think there are chronic reposting lately in all categories, just not this topic. Don't we have a bot to remove duplicate posts? Because it doesn't seem to be working these days.
dba7dba 11y ago
Very good description of what a manager should be but very few achieve. Most managers seem more happy to be acting like a 'boss'.
ethnomusicolog 11y ago
It's an open secret to management . It buy you so much from your employees (ideas, loyalty, goodwill, money, initiative,...), for so little that I am kind of puzzled so few people get it. Actually, everytime I saw a great boss operating, it was more or less in this fashion.
draw_down 11y ago
I know what you mean, but unfortunately it does not necessarily follow that getting rid of all the managers will result in a better workplace. It could just be a new, worse, form of chaos.

andygcook 11y ago

What you're describing is akin to servant leadership - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership

marknutter 11y ago
First I've heard of it. Sounds awesome, thanks.
qrybam 11y ago
Thanks for sharing - reading this reminds me a lot of what a scrum master does (or at least should do) for a team of developers. I've experienced first hand what it's like to work for someone you could call a "servant leader" and also someone who's autocratic to the core. "Situational contexts are not considered." I don't believe their is a one size fits all leadership philosophy. Different situations demand different approaches, and some people respond better to more "active" leadership. Being able to effectively self-manage under a servant leader requires a certain level of maturity and confidence that isn't always present in people. Actually being able to bring these qualities out in people who don't naturally exhibit them is a real challenge, and depending on the individual, sadly, can be very difficult to achieve. If you're lucky enough to work under someone who's responsibility it is to make you better (i.e. a wise and experienced mentor), make sure you grab the opportunity with both hands and learn as much as you can in the time you have together.

sopooneo 11y ago

Unless it turns out that profits are directly proportional to creator happiness, why would a for-profit company use that as the primary metric in deciding the compensation of managers? I am willing to bet there is correlation between the two, but not enough to make it as a primary metric.

girvo 11y ago
Totally fair, but I highly doubt "creating busywork and making employees less efficient" is tied to profits in a positive way either.
loki49152 11y ago
As I recall from my business management classes in college, no studies have ever shown a correlation between worker happiness and productivity. That doesn't mean that happiness has no effect on other metrics - but this subject has been studied in depth for the last century and researches keep getting the same result.
- marknutter 11y ago
  It would be absolutely silly to use those studies as an excuse to ignore worker happiness. My guess is that those studies are overly simplistic and difficult to draw any real conclusions from. Happiness is notoriously hard to measure, for starters, and productivity can mean a lot of different things based on the industry and type of business that's being examined. For instance, how do you measure the productivity of your software engineers? Lines of code? Features shipped? Hours worked? Many, many attempts have been made to do this and none of them, to my knowledge, have been particularly successful. I think this is one of those cases where until we know with confidence one way or the other, we should probably just start out with the assumption that worker happiness is a good thing and put the burden of proving otherwise on the scientific community. Until then, let's go with our gut.

aNoob7000 11y ago

I don't get your response. You praise a manager that's like a servant and does all the blocking and tackling for you and all with a smile, but yet you want Zappos' flat organizational structure. I know plenty of creators that don't want to spend their days blocking and tackling. Most "creators" just want to sit in front of their computers all day getting stuff done. With Holocracy those creators you talk about would assume more responsibilities and can no longer hide behind the servant. Lastly, why are middle managers always seen in such a poor light? Why isn't a CEO/CFO/CIO seen in a lesser light since they really don't produce anything.

marknutter 11y ago
Who said I don't see C's in a lesser light? And yes, I used this post as an opportunity to rant about managers in a vertically structured company, but I see no reason why the type of manager I prefer could not exist at Zappos. In fact, it seems like it would be more likely to occur, given that they would no longer outrank the creators.
- kybernetikos 11y ago
  Without me, my keyboard will achieve nothing. Without a manager, a good developer will go on trying to create value. The purpose of the manager is not to squeeze productivity out of a developer as you might blood out of a stone (although some seem to think it is), but to try to make sure that the developers are working on the right stuff for the company. In a healthy organisation, that can be done as part of a dialogue with the developers and takes the form primarily of communication.
  - marknutter 11y ago
    > The purpose of the manager is not to squeeze productivity out of a developer as you might blood out of a stone (although some seem to think it is), but to try to make sure that the developers are working on the right stuff for the company In my experience that responsibility has fallen on the CEO or the Product people.
  - 11y ago

ethbro 11y ago

The issue with inverting the hierarchy is that it precludes centralized control. And that's what your managers are really about. Their function vis-a-vis you is almost inconsequential. They exist so that those above them can direct and receive feedback from you (or more accurately, the 10s/100s/1000s of you) in an efficient manner. Whether you think that's necessary or not is up for debate, but examining the manager's role solely from the perspective of an employee is only half-informed. Personally, having to individually convince every software engineer in a company of a particular course of action sounds about as much fun as counting grains of sand.

marknutter 11y ago
My manager-servant would also be responsible for communicating with the stakeholders, yes.
- ethbro 11y ago
  I'm assuming you mean bidirectional communication with stakeholders. But how do you then rectify the power dynamic between the presenter of stakeholders' views/requestions (i.e. the manager-servant) and the person with the authority to alter workflow (not the manager-servant)? It seems ill conceived to filter communication through a medium that can effectively be ignored.
  - marknutter 11y ago
    Ignoring certain communications can be extremely valuable. For instance, suppose a stakeholder moves the deadline a few weeks earlier, but the team of creators knows that it's completely unrealistic. To meet the deadline they need to stop doing things like writing automated tests or doing code reviews. They overrule the decision unless the stakeholder agrees to cut scope because they're unwilling to sacrifice quality. If a traditional manager role was in place they could simply overrule the group who does the actual creating and end up with bad output.
    - ethbro 11y ago

Angostura 11y ago

> If I ran a company, managers would be butlers. Their compensation would be directly tied to the level of happiness of the creators they are serving. Let's take the simplest case of this. You're a one man business, developing software perhaps. You're doing well, you're successful and you take on someone to help you out. Are you now their butler? Does that person set your salary? If not, at what size of organisation does manager-as-butler kick in?

mbrameld 11y ago
That's not the same case at all, though. The business owner may "manage" the new employee, but that role is completely different from the role of a manager in the context of this discussion.
- Angostura 11y ago
  So you've said that it doesn't hold true for a 2 person company. At what size of company would you make the organisational shift then? 3, 20, 50? At the point where there is one person between the founder and the lowliest employee?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
marknutter 11y ago
If your new hire is doing all the creating, then yes, it's your job to make sure their job is as easy as possible and they are as effective as they can be. But this example is a little absurd. Manager wouldn't be the correct term for the founder in your example since they would be filling myriad roles beyond manager, just like the first hire would be filling myriad roles beyond "software engineer".
aries1980 11y ago
Managers are not necessary the leaders. Managers manage resources, leaders lead people.

ako 11y ago

Maybe the compensation of managers has something to do with this: http://avc.com/2016/01/get-the-strategy-right-and-the-execution-is-easy http://avc.com/2016/01/get-the-strategy-right-and-the-execut...

jqm 11y ago

A managers job is to get things done using YOU as the tool. Your happiness is as irrelevant to this as the happiness of your keyboard. If you work better happy... fine, that's a consideration. But really it's the only one. The goal isn't for you to be happy. The goal is to get tasks accomplished. One keyboard breaks you go get another one. The store shelves are full of them. And that's how the pyramids got built.

marknutter 11y ago
> If you work better happy... fine, that's a consideration. But really it's the only one. Not only do I work better happy (I do), I stick around longer. And that's really the key, here. Sure you can squeeze productivity out of creators while disregarding their happiness, but everyone has their limits. They will eventually leave and take with them a wealth of tribal knowledge. Corporations are notoriously bad at measuring the cost of losing employees with domain specific knowledge about their products or services. The attitude is typically that creators are interchangeable like cogs in a machine.

randycupertino 11y ago

"I assume this keeps popping up on Hacker News because of schadenfreude," I don't know, I think there are chronic reposting lately in all categories, just not this topic. Don't we have a bot to remove duplicate posts? Because it doesn't seem to be working these days.

dba7dba 11y ago

Very good description of what a manager should be but very few achieve. Most managers seem more happy to be acting like a 'boss'.

ethnomusicolog 11y ago

It's an open secret to management . It buy you so much from your employees (ideas, loyalty, goodwill, money, initiative,...), for so little that I am kind of puzzled so few people get it. Actually, everytime I saw a great boss operating, it was more or less in this fashion.

draw_down 11y ago

I know what you mean, but unfortunately it does not necessarily follow that getting rid of all the managers will result in a better workplace. It could just be a new, worse, form of chaos.