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I really appreciate the idea of having a career path that doesn't involve moving "up" to management. I'm a developer because I love development, and my own per

I really appreciate the idea of having a career path that doesn't involve moving "up" to management. I'm a developer because I love development, and my own personal hell is managing a team and never getting to code.

josefresco 16y ago
Imagine how the engineers at Google think now that they're "back in charge" (/sarcasm) I'm sorry, I know it's fun to bash on managers but they exist for a purpose and asking engineers to be in charge is a burden I don't think many want.
- generalk 16y ago
  > I'm sorry, I know it's fun to bash on managers but they exist for a purpose The point is that it's possible to run a company where managers don't have a purpose and aren't necessary.
  - pmjordan 16y ago
    At Google's scale? Successfully? I find that rather unlikely. If you have any examples of this, please do share. Otherwise, all I can imagine is reducing the depth of the tree, and in some cases not to make it a strict tree, but a somewhat interconnected graph. (that said, throwing people into distinct "manager" and "engineer" bins is disingenuous anyway, a manager managing engineers had better have some kind of engineering understanding)
    - michaelchisari 16y ago
      The Mondragon worker cooperative federation has 85,000 employees. If you look at how it's structured, it's not hard to imagine how Google could operate similarly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
      - kwis 16y ago
        Mondragon has annual revenues of €174/employee. I have trouble viewing that as a proven model.
        michaelchisari 16y ago
        I'm pretty sure the revenues on Wikipedia are off, and I can't find what reference they're using to get that number. This study from around 2002/2003 puts their revenues at $8 billion annually with 60,000 employees. That puts their per-employee revenues at around $133k. http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/conferences/bilbao/papers/Herrera.pdf http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/conferences/bilbao/p... This puts their revenues at $24.2 billion in 2008, which is almost $300k per employee, if you use the ~85,000 employees figure. http://willblogforfood.typepad.com/will_blog_for_food/2011/01/the-mondragon-cooperative-a-blueprint-for-america.html http://willblogforfood.typepad.com/will_blog_for_food/2011/0...
        kwis 16y ago
        It looks like I got confused because whoever edited the wikipedia article came from a country that uses '.' as a thousands separator. Looking more closely, they're a strange sort of conglomerate. At a glance, I see two banks, two insurance companies, roughly two hundred industrial companies, a dozen retail shops, a dozen food-related businesses, a dozen research firms, and ten education companies. In a way, it reminds me of Idealab, in that each new company is a new pool of equity (with the associated incentives that result from ownership), and that failures are not punished, but rather result in retraining or placement in a different firm. (for full co-op members). It's also interesting to see that the founder was a priest who started off with a co-operative polytechnic school and bootstrapped everything from that base.
        brianleb 16y ago
        174/employee was calculated by assuming that the period in the number of employees is a comma while the period in revenue is a period (e.g. 17M/85K employees instead of 17B/85K employees). So those figures would indicate 174,000 Euros per employee, which makes a lot more sense.
- VladRussian 16y ago
  >asking engineers to be in charge is a burden I don't think many want. if your environment has a significant amount of elements that engineers (or generally - employees) wouldn't want to be in charge for, then you are already deep into the problem and the shortest solution here is to assign managers to be in charge of those things. The key is to not allow the situation to degrade into creating "demand" for managers. For example, once you create one manager for a group, s/he would want to talk to somebody, preferably managers, from other groups. That burden on the other groups would naturally trigger response - creating managers in the other groups. That starts to structure the information and decision flow the way that rank-and-file employees lose much of the visibility into the product and business and thus lose the ability (and motivation) to take even small decisions, thus requiring even more management ...

josefresco 16y ago

Imagine how the engineers at Google think now that they're "back in charge" (/sarcasm) I'm sorry, I know it's fun to bash on managers but they exist for a purpose and asking engineers to be in charge is a burden I don't think many want.

generalk 16y ago
> I'm sorry, I know it's fun to bash on managers but they exist for a purpose The point is that it's possible to run a company where managers don't have a purpose and aren't necessary.
- pmjordan 16y ago
  At Google's scale? Successfully? I find that rather unlikely. If you have any examples of this, please do share. Otherwise, all I can imagine is reducing the depth of the tree, and in some cases not to make it a strict tree, but a somewhat interconnected graph. (that said, throwing people into distinct "manager" and "engineer" bins is disingenuous anyway, a manager managing engineers had better have some kind of engineering understanding)
  - michaelchisari 16y ago
    The Mondragon worker cooperative federation has 85,000 employees. If you look at how it's structured, it's not hard to imagine how Google could operate similarly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
    - kwis 16y ago
      Mondragon has annual revenues of €174/employee. I have trouble viewing that as a proven model.
      - michaelchisari 16y ago
        I'm pretty sure the revenues on Wikipedia are off, and I can't find what reference they're using to get that number. This study from around 2002/2003 puts their revenues at $8 billion annually with 60,000 employees. That puts their per-employee revenues at around $133k. http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/conferences/bilbao/papers/Herrera.pdf http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/conferences/bilbao/p... This puts their revenues at $24.2 billion in 2008, which is almost $300k per employee, if you use the ~85,000 employees figure. http://willblogforfood.typepad.com/will_blog_for_food/2011/01/the-mondragon-cooperative-a-blueprint-for-america.html http://willblogforfood.typepad.com/will_blog_for_food/2011/0...
        kwis 16y ago
        It looks like I got confused because whoever edited the wikipedia article came from a country that uses '.' as a thousands separator. Looking more closely, they're a strange sort of conglomerate. At a glance, I see two banks, two insurance companies, roughly two hundred industrial companies, a dozen retail shops, a dozen food-related businesses, a dozen research firms, and ten education companies. In a way, it reminds me of Idealab, in that each new company is a new pool of equity (with the associated incentives that result from ownership), and that failures are not punished, but rather result in retraining or placement in a different firm. (for full co-op members). It's also interesting to see that the founder was a priest who started off with a co-operative polytechnic school and bootstrapped everything from that base.
      - brianleb 16y ago
        174/employee was calculated by assuming that the period in the number of employees is a comma while the period in revenue is a period (e.g. 17M/85K employees instead of 17B/85K employees). So those figures would indicate 174,000 Euros per employee, which makes a lot more sense.
VladRussian 16y ago
>asking engineers to be in charge is a burden I don't think many want. if your environment has a significant amount of elements that engineers (or generally - employees) wouldn't want to be in charge for, then you are already deep into the problem and the shortest solution here is to assign managers to be in charge of those things. The key is to not allow the situation to degrade into creating "demand" for managers. For example, once you create one manager for a group, s/he would want to talk to somebody, preferably managers, from other groups. That burden on the other groups would naturally trigger response - creating managers in the other groups. That starts to structure the information and decision flow the way that rank-and-file employees lose much of the visibility into the product and business and thus lose the ability (and motivation) to take even small decisions, thus requiring even more management ...