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Have you been a manager of managers? This sounds like the same problem the GP described (the problems are invisible until you are in the role). An upper level
by spenczar5 5y ago
Have you been a manager of managers? This sounds like the same problem the GP described (the problems are invisible until you are in the role).
An upper level management job can be very stressful. You have very little visibility into progress or issues, but are responsible for setting direction and making decisions with many consequences. If you get involved, you’re called a micromanager. If you don’t, you’re out of touch.
Cross-organizational pushes become harder, with more inertia, and more perverse incentives dragging things down. You spend all your time debugging the mess of an organization, not on the things that brought you to the industry.
It can be a very stressful, unpleasant job. I am not trying to claim it’s harder, or that the pay is proportionate or whatever. But the idea that they can rely on the work of others, coast by, and get the benefits is not at all true from what I have seen.
I worked mostly in startups and FAANG, maybe other sectors are different.
- jasondigitized 5y agoThis. Debugging the organization is a great way to describe it.
- dpe82 5y agoAnd reorgs are often the managerial equivalent of a code refactor.
- ksec 5y agoOh I like this I am going to steal it from now on. I use Debugging human to describe it. But Debugging organisation is just so much better. This also follows Conway's law. >Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.
- aahortwwy 5y ago> the mess of an organization Management is responsible for the organization, hence why comments about how hard it is to deal with a messy organization tend to fall on unsympathetic ears.
- sa46 5y agoJust as developers are responsible for the codebase. Yet folks seem rather receptive to the concept of technical debt. It’s not much of stretch to imagine organizational debt caused by pesky human problems.
- aahortwwy 5y agoI'm not denying the existence of organizational debt. I'm saying managers justifying how important and difficult their jobs are by pointing to all the organizational debt they deal with are missing the point.
- spenczar5 5y agoI agree that’s what happens in practice, but it’s quite silly. The right organizational structure depends on the problems being solved, but the business’s problems are always changing - either because of new technology, or competitors, or changing economics, or something else. Tech moves ludicrously fast, so the structure put in place 5 years ago is unlikely to make sense today.
- aahortwwy 5y agoIt's not just structure. A shocking number of managers don't even manage. They just run around putting out fires caused by a lack of management. Organizations can get stuck in this mode and it's really hard to pull them out of it, for sure, but just because someone's navigating a stressful and dysfunctional organization doesn't necessarily mean they're doing a great job at management.