4 ms·

The point is it's not fake work. In fact these types of problems just become harder the further up you go. When you're upper management, now you have the proble

by extr 5y ago

The point is it's not fake work. In fact these types of problems just become harder the further up you go. When you're upper management, now you have the problem of wondering if managers are doing their job correctly/efficiently, something even harder to manage and plan for. Imagine handing someone several million dollars in labor budget and just having to trust them that they're building the right things...I would be asking questions too. Coordination problems are tough.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
q-big 5y ago
> When you're upper management, now you have the problem of wondering if managers are doing their job correctly/efficiently, something even harder to manage and plan for. If this becomes a problem, I would rather assume this as a strong sign that there are simply too many management levels in the organization, which makes managing the multitude of management levels difficult.
- gmadsen 5y ago
  at a certain size, it is inevitable. you could not have a horizontal spunky start up land on the moon in the 60s. It is too complex and too much information to possibly transmit to everyone. There are distinct issues and hard problems at each level of the company hierarchy. its a lot like software architecture in a way. Getting up and running is easy in the beginning, one person can dictate how everything fits together and things are straight forward. Then as you scale, things that were easy and simple are now bottlenecks, so through refactoring, you create a more solid foundation, that if looking naively at the initial implementation is more complex and structured, but it allows a framework to handle bigger challenges. Success at this stage is how well the architecture lends itself to scaling. Large companies require structure, and their success is dependent on how well that structure operates. small companies need a group of smart people in a garage.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  "shh" - The management
- cloverich 5y ago
  That’s the nature of bigger companies. You can cut out middle managers and have each manager manage 200 people but… that would work exactly as you’d expect (via implicit leadership, which will go well or poorly based on mostly luck). The more people you have, the harder it is to know who and what is working well and what isn’t. Attention only goes so far.
- sangnoir 5y ago
  > I would rather assume this as a strong sign that there are simply too many management levels in the organization, which makes managing the multitude of management levels difficult. Turns out the flat structure doesn't work out either; you will have a hierarchy, one way or the other (that is, planned or emergent.) I think us techies underestimate the necessity of coordination, and yet we paradoxically chafe at meetings.
- baq 5y ago
  distributed systems are hard. if you're a techie worth his salt, you know this by experience earned in sweat, blood and tears. they're permanently broken in some fashion and there's a lot of work involved to just keep them running at all. now realize that large organizations are basically distributed systems with more smaller unreliable components.

by extr 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

q-big 5y ago

> When you're upper management, now you have the problem of wondering if managers are doing their job correctly/efficiently, something even harder to manage and plan for. If this becomes a problem, I would rather assume this as a strong sign that there are simply too many management levels in the organization, which makes managing the multitude of management levels difficult.

gmadsen 5y ago
at a certain size, it is inevitable. you could not have a horizontal spunky start up land on the moon in the 60s. It is too complex and too much information to possibly transmit to everyone. There are distinct issues and hard problems at each level of the company hierarchy. its a lot like software architecture in a way. Getting up and running is easy in the beginning, one person can dictate how everything fits together and things are straight forward. Then as you scale, things that were easy and simple are now bottlenecks, so through refactoring, you create a more solid foundation, that if looking naively at the initial implementation is more complex and structured, but it allows a framework to handle bigger challenges. Success at this stage is how well the architecture lends itself to scaling. Large companies require structure, and their success is dependent on how well that structure operates. small companies need a group of smart people in a garage.
willcipriano 5y ago
"shh" - The management
cloverich 5y ago
That’s the nature of bigger companies. You can cut out middle managers and have each manager manage 200 people but… that would work exactly as you’d expect (via implicit leadership, which will go well or poorly based on mostly luck). The more people you have, the harder it is to know who and what is working well and what isn’t. Attention only goes so far.
sangnoir 5y ago
> I would rather assume this as a strong sign that there are simply too many management levels in the organization, which makes managing the multitude of management levels difficult. Turns out the flat structure doesn't work out either; you will have a hierarchy, one way or the other (that is, planned or emergent.) I think us techies underestimate the necessity of coordination, and yet we paradoxically chafe at meetings.
baq 5y ago
distributed systems are hard. if you're a techie worth his salt, you know this by experience earned in sweat, blood and tears. they're permanently broken in some fashion and there's a lot of work involved to just keep them running at all. now realize that large organizations are basically distributed systems with more smaller unreliable components.