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Middle managers fear they've become irrelevant with work from home
- VariableStar 4y agoI am not surprised. I don't know how this plays out across different cultures, regional or corporate. I only witnessed how it went in the circles I work in here in Europe. My impression is that the group of people that clearly reacted mostly negatively to the work-from-home-during-the-pandemic period were indeed middle-managers, lowly heads of units, project managers, and those that populate the middle ranks of organisations with funny and unclear job titles. Perhaps these people are by nature of the extroverted people-person type that need extra social interaction to feel good. Or perhaps they found that their need to control others was more difficult to satisfy at distance. In my country it was also discussed at a point that many people were confronted during the pandemic with the meaninglessness of their jobs. I really believe it can be the case for many people, and not not only those middle-managers with funny job titles.
- bonecrusher2102 4y agoThat's interesting that you mention Project Managers, mainly because my experience has been just the opposite. We've been leaning much harder on those folks to manage the increased communication and coordination overhead that comes from WFH.
- yakak 4y agoFrom what I've seen those people are leaned on to continue to give management a sense of purpose. They need to organize lots and lots of video meetings with lots of unwanted participants showing up.
- bonecrusher2102 4y agoMy take here (as a T.PgM) is that I really see my role as doing the opposite of what you describe. We really do try to think quite a bit about if a meeting is necessary, can it be moved to async communications (whitepaper, email, ticket, slack conversation, etc.), and most certainly who are the minimum possible amount of people needed to resolve a given issue. And this is certainly not to be directly contrary to your post -- which does raise a great point. In fact, it is many peoples' (warranted) criticism of and aversion to pointless meetings that helps me and my colleagues keep minimizing communication and coordination overhead at top of mind. And everyone's interests tend to dovetail in this regard when these things are done well anyway: folks spend their time in meetings sparingly and efficiently, which in turn speeds up and makes more efficient the project/launch/program/whatever.
- hungryforcodes 4y agoOK but the meaningless of a job is supposed to be compensated by a paycheck -- I don't mean that as some patronizing middle manager -- but rather I've done loads of jobs I thought were meaningless, but did them anyways, because I needed to pay my rent.
- ip26 4y agoWe can get a sense of how an IC’s productivity changed during lock down. But it’s harder to tell how the effectiveness of management or leadership might have changed over a one or two year period.
- codezero 4y agoI think they mean micromanagers. I thrived as a middle manager of a remote team that was always distributed across three time zones. I’m not a micromanager and I built my team with that in mind, so my focus was hiring, onboarding, long term planning, and mentorship.
- algo_trader 4y agoCan you share tips about ensuring you get a good (enough) funnel of (remote) candidates and hires?
- codezero 4y agoI hire relatively entry level folks for advanced product technical support so my funnel is naturally large since they aren’t specialists and I can teach/train the stuff to anyone who is a technical hobbyist or enthusiast. This has been my best way to keep top of the funnel high, over the years I also got more and more comfortable hiring folks with less and less technical/startup background but mostly my advice isn’t helpful for roles that require a lot of specialization. At that point it’s good to have a solid network, a good reputation, and a successful company. That’s another thing that’s kept me from having to expand my funnel much - my company has been doing really well for eight years and is only becoming more well known and mostly we get a lot of inbound. Besides that, hire good recruiters, sourcers, and recruiting coordinators. They know their shit.
- hinkley 4y agoMaybe there’s a two dimensional chart here, but my best managers have been leaders, in which case they became mentors, or they’ve been service oriented, in which case I and my peers were up-managing them. The ones who are trying to herd cats come off as shrill, and nobody respects them. Fears them maybe, but no respect. Problem is that if you’re up-managing your boss, they aren’t up-managing their boss. I’m sure there’s a Law in there somewhere. The leader types tend to know what’s what and shield the team from bullshit so they can get busy making the boss look competent in every other area. You can talk your way out of a lot of stuff when people are happy with the rest of your results. Delay tactics if nothing else. Sorry we can’t work on bullshit #372 right now because we’re busy being awesome on feature #784. Come back in a month or two (then cross your fingers to see if they still remember or are focused on bullshit #381).
- mountainriver 4y agoYup as a manager you don’t do much, sort of like being a corporate lawyer. The company keeps you on payroll to delegate responsibility. The best teams I’ve worked for were more self organizing. When you have great engineers this is very effective and a wonderful work environment.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoIt all depends on the role. My immediate manager is good ( and likely the best manager I had so far ). But he actively cuts through red tape for us and deals with the usual corporate idiocy on our behalf. I actually declined a job offer partially because of him ( no friends at other place to vouch for the place ). I don't know how much other managers do, but he does a lot. Not just for us, but for the company.
- rowanajmarshall 4y agoAlthough, most companies can't or won't hire great engineers, because great engineers are hella expensive and hard to hire.
- ip26 4y agoEven more simply, all engineers are not great engineers, and somebody is employing the ones that aren’t great.
- wittycardio 4y agoGo even further and conclude that most engineers are shit , which is why managers have jobs in the first place. The best teams are highly self driven and self organizing
- bb88 4y agoWhat's worse, is if you happen to hire a great engineer, you have to keep the pay raises and bonuses coming to that star engineer. Otherwise, he'll move on and take the %30 pay raise with a new job. The punishment/reward metric is skewed toward punishment in most companies.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoLet me correct that title for you: "Middle managers irrelevant, and now we know it with work from home"
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoI am not surprised, but I am annoyed. There are clear benefits to remote. Our company posted record profits, ICs report increased individual productivity, but we have to roll it back, because it is 'hard' on managers? Whatever happened to, 'git gud'? Schmidt: "I don’t know how you build great management [with remote work]. I honestly don’t," he said. And about half of managers, 51%, genuinely believe that their workers want to return to the office. Wesman: “Clearly, managers are struggling,” said Max Wesman, GoodHire’s chief operating officer. “Organizations that find a work arrangement that satisfies the majority of their workforce will benefit in the areas of recruitment, productivity, employee satisfaction, and retention.”
- Bud 4y agoI can think of a route towards Wesman's stated goal: if you fire most of the worthless middle managers, and let the real workers work from home, then a majority of the workforce will be satisfied.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoI am not against it. To be honest, one could argue that the nation-wise remote experiment already yielded results.. we could easily extrapolate, who is an actual contributor and who is just there, because... reasons.
- Bud 4y agoMuch as I agree with the complete spin-doctor rewriting of this headline, we don't really do that on HN, do we?
- jrockway 4y agoThe title in the <title> and <h1> tags on the actual article are also very different. I think they are playing some optimization game to get more people to click. It's possible that the HN title was once the title of the actual article.
- mvkel 4y ago"Middle managers" are certainly needed as part of a corporate hierarchy. What is being exposed with WFH is -ineffective- managers. Ineffective managers are at every level, including the C-suite. Middle managers just have a higher probability of being ineffective due to lack of experience/resources, so they get the headline.
- yike321123 4y agoNot really the entire hierarchical structures of corporations is actually highly inefficient it's something a lot of universities have been talking about for a while now. Which is ironic when you realize most universities are designed similar to churches with indentured servitude.
- darkerside 4y agoSo you're saying their theory differs from their practice? Hmm.
- yike321123 4y agoWhy share the cake when you can have it all to yourself. After all they did spent their entire life getting to that point shouldn't everyone else suffer as well? Maybe just a little worse every iteration until we just stop paying them. /s
- rootusrootus 4y agoI've never been too impressed with what academics think the corporate world is like. Some of them, maybe, are pretty knowledgable, but a lot of them have been inside the academic bubble too long.
- yike321123 4y agoHonestly, they're right more than they are wrong under the correct circumstances that is. Too bad being locked in a room for your entire life leads to a lot of other issues instead of experiencing the world and grabbing a better understanding of how everything ties in together. But who would change that after all if we believe what the modern psychologist says altruism doesn't exist.
- jimbob45 4y agoActual work like coding and drawing has become much easier with WfH. People work, like managing and coordinating, has become much harder now that you can’t just walk up to people and have conversations with them anymore. If anything, middle managers are more important than that were before. I’m sure upper management will just see them as a cost-cutting measure though and write specious articles like this to justify their idiocy.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago"If anything, middle managers are more important than that were before. I’m sure upper management will just see them as a cost-cutting measure though and write specious articles like this to justify their idiocy. " I only disagree about one thing in that sentence. It is missing one qualifier. 'Good middle managers are more important than there were'.
- thesumofall 4y agoThe article doesn’t even mention “middle manager”? It also does not make any sense. Increased WFH requires more effort to connect people, communicate context, mentor people, bridge silos, … all part of the job description of a middle manager
- hinkley 4y agoMiddle management got obliterated in the recession in the 80’s. It’ll happen again in the next recession. I often wonder at the parallels between military chain of command and civilian chain of command. Line managers and NCOs are down in the trenches, and most of them stay there. Everyone else is in an “up or out” situation. They are not stable titles and you’ll get burned if you aren’t incredibly lucky. If you took a title for more pay, my advice is always to recall that it’s for more money but that money might go away. Save it. Spend it on incidentals. But don’t take out loans on it. In the next downturn you’ll be fucked. Spend like you are one job title behind where you currently are - so either don’t spend it, or keep climbing.
- trentgreene 4y agoThis headline isn’t supported by the article at all
- bckr 4y agoYeah, this is heavy editorializing
- trentgreene 4y agoSide note, I don’t know if some of you have actually been key players in a large org without management, but I have, and it SUCKS. If you think random slack pings are bad, try random slack pings plus 5+ hours of meetings a day you need to decline, justify declining, communicate about async, just to have time to get your work done. It’s my experience that without management, top performers are easily looking at 80+ hour work weeks
- brightball 4y agoWhen a middle manager is removed, all the communication goes to the most senior member of the team instead keeping that person from being able to actually get things done. The middle manager's time is a lot less expensive in most cases.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoThose aren't middle managers. Removing a middle manager entails an existing end line manager reporting to someone higher up.
- j4yav 4y agoA middle manager should have managers reporting to them, not ICs.
- closeparen 4y agoStaff+ engineers generally report to middle managers, and are expected to work across that middle manager’s subordinate teams. In upper management it might be one very senior “right hand.” In the lower tranches of middle management there will be more and more hands-on technical-track leaders.
- Mikeb85 4y agoAlso, being a middle manager isn't much fun either. Basically all meetings and bullshit, and you get shit from people below you and above you. Upper management blames you for anything going wrong and workers blame you for, well, everything. You need to motivate, teach and provide resources while dealing with all the bullshit from above and a lack of resources. But as you pointed out, it's necessary otherwise everyone has to deal with the bullshit.
- mattkevan 4y agoWhat we should do right, hear me out, is build a really big spaceship, put all the middle managers on it and fire them into space. We’ll tell them it’s to escape the giant mutant star goat or something and the rest of us will be along later, but they don’t need to know we’re not going to.
- adhesive_wombat 4y agoExcept it turned out the telephone sanitisers can stay.
- dhruvrrp 4y agoCurrent corporation structure is not meant to increase individual productivity, but rather it increases on group productivity (at the cost of individual productivity) which is why middle managers are always be important. People leave, go on vacations, get sick, priorities changes, all of which need to be dealt with. And in an environment where the amount of work available to do is always higher than the resources available, you need middle managers to deal with other teams, PMs, customers etc.
- kbos87 4y agoI’m a middle manager at a company that is fully and completely embracing remote work, and I feel as needed as ever. It’s the bad middle managers who only know how to provide “value” by instilling fear and managing presence who should be afraid.
- deltaonefour 4y agoSome of them matter. Most of them don't. I would say you belong to about 1% of middler managers that actually matter.
- mistrial9 4y agomy middle manager at Apple Inc in California purposefully instilled distrust between members of his group. It gave him control and he would do it repeatedly over different situations. At the same time, there was this vague message that if you wrote patent applications, you could possibly maybe be promoted, with a bonus, but there was no time allocated to do that. 1990s
- bb88 4y agoIf managers treat their employees as "liabilities", employees will treat the company as a "liability" to their career.
- INTPenis 4y agoMy manager has been great during covid. He immediately scheduled a daily group meeting for 30 minutes and it made me feel more involved with my staff group than ever. Because we're all so spread out so whenever I visited the HQ I only ever met a few of them. But our org is so confusing that he has very little to do with my daily tasks, I have other types of managers for that.
- dhd415 4y agoDaily 30-minute meetings sounds to me like the antithesis of good management. If you feel like you need 30 minutes of synchronous time per day from your team of engineers, you are not a good manager.
- throwaway93982 4y agoReally there are just too many managers doing too little work. They seem busy because they're in meetings 40 hours a week. 40 emails would be about as productive, and free up half their week (so they could do twice as much, hence we would need half as many).
- qiskit 4y agoOnce a decade, there is a story about middle managers becoming irrelevant. Somehow they manage to cling on. I'm sure in another decade, we'll get another article about something else making middle managers irrelevant.
- cosmiccatnap 4y agoIt's wild how often people defend middle management.
- gnicholas 4y agoI have wondered if there is a chance inflation will wane due to cost efficiencies related to WFH. One cost saving is from lower real estate expenses. If a chunk of employees are made/revealed to be redundant, that could be another cost saving. That doesn’t guarantee that companies will lower prices — they may choose to try for higher profits. But it reduces the pressure for them to increase prices YOY in order to account for inflation.
- lormayna 4y agoMy company (an F500) has made the inverse process: before COVID-19 there was just 2 levels of management between me and the C-level executive. Now I have 4 level of management. I don't think it's bad to have middle management, if they cover you from the shit coming from the top. If they don't, they are just unuseful.
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- patrick451 4y agoAs an IC, having an immediate manager that coordinates what my team works on and shields us from getting whipsawed by ad-hoc requests is really valuable, remote work or not. I may be a little biased, because all of my managers so far have been very technically competent. But having somebody above me who is both politically and technically savvy is a godsend. During times when my team has had no manager, everything was more chaotic and nothing went as smoothly.
- galoisscobi 4y agoThat's awesome! As an IC, I have a supportive manager but a lot of ad-hoc requests are just taken on, some of them don't make sense, and then I have to push back. When I push back, my manager supports me but a lot of time is wasted in meetings and slack messages to keep protecting my time to do actual work. On the positive side, I'm not a confrontational/assertive person. So, I had to learn how to say no and to articulate well why I push back.
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoThere is a "hollowing out" of middle management - not from Covid or work from home, but software. It's still eating the world. Accountancy, or rather bookkeeping went first in the 1960s with rooms of people pulling levers on adding machines to the first IBMs. And now the data that those pounds and pence proxied for is actually being sent up the chain aggregated and compounded into a single straight through connection from the coal face to the board room. As Larry Ellison said "if you don't design it, build it or sell it Inwill do everything I can to automate you"
- 2ion 4y agoThis is pretty accurate as an observation I believe. "My" middle manager does a lot more and acts more like a PO/PM combination fixing things in a horizontally integrated manner, whereas most typical PO/PM roles do their PM/POeing in a vertically integrated manner, on a product/product team basis. He's very good at that and therefore far from feeling irrelevant. Instead, he's drowning in useful work.
- 2ion 4y ago> Eric Schmidt even recently weighed in about the return-to-work debate, [...] "I don’t know how you build great management [with remote work]. I honestly don’t," he said. And about half of managers, 51%, genuinely believe that their workers want to return to the office. Instead of believing, perhaps ask them? In general, I find this article to say almost nothing. The headline is the clickbait bringing in a Fortune of clicks, I'm sure.
- bb88 4y agoIt's far easier and preferable for a manager to punish employees than reward them. I'm really sick of this management mentality of "A good employee gets a 3% pay raise, but step out of line once and you'll get a PIP."
- kkfx 4y agoIMVHO there are various issues, as anything "new for most people" (even if is not something really new) and that's not just on the administrative, middle-man, side: - working by targets is not easy, because fixing targets is not easy. Formally we design everything up front so we know what to do at any point in the future, in practice we do design something up front but not all, especially not much "ordinary things". That means that control work progress is not easy and many feat to discover too late that someone is behind the schedule. Not all WFH jobs produce code that can be seen in a common repo every day; - people who do not know each other sometimes have issue to act as a team and effectively communicate and interact as needed, most tend to communicate just the bare minimum and others too much; - being really remote means no real geographical constraints so potential economical issues for workers (a new job market with workers from very different countries with very different cost of living), administrative issue (different laws, contacts etc) and practical issues for all (different time zones etc); Meanwhile there are many advantages like for the employer no office space expenses, just furniture and hw for workers, for them the possibility to live in lovely and cheap places, no commuting, less fatigue and more free time having erased the itinere part etc. BUT to elicit those advantages we need a tested setup that's new and unknown for most, witch means a challenge with potentially long pain while experimenting. Most people still live nearby their offices in cities and there they do not have much space at home for a proper setup etc. In the end the worst part: hybrid works that force in-office workers to work as they are at home and makes people at home less visible, disadvantage them, makes them feeling guilty to be more in comfort etc + all the issue of double/movable office setup from home to office and vice versa. Long story short IMVHO: - part of management, not just middle-man fear for their role - part fear the challenge of completely change work paradigm - part are simply not ready nor they can't be quickly to really WFH That's why some like WFH and some do not. Of course techies tend to like it the most, because they are those already more organized and perhaps WFH since years, others are less organized and others are just old to feel well in digitally-centered environments. I honestly think that around 30% of jobs can be done from remote effectively but just 10% of these 30% can be done now. Because only a small percentage is ready in humans and paradigms terms. To spread this percentage we need time and incentives...
- bigmattystyles 4y ago“I have people skills!”
- Jemm 4y agoYes. Yes they have.
- insulfrable 4y agoThis is a bad title to an other unsurprising article. Managers don't fear they will become irrelevant. It's bad managers who are having trouble figuring out how to manage without seeing people at their desk. What's mind blowing to me is that despite two years of being forced to evaluate people by their impact rather than by their physical presence, so many managers still don't have a clue how to do this right. Meanwhile, healthy remote teams are thriving, and competent middle managers there provide incredible value, from managing execution to keeping the social tissue of their teams together.
- bfung 4y agoTitle on HN doesn’t match the article’s original title, which is VERY different: Fed-up managers declare WFH is over, as 77% say they’d fire you or cut your pay for not coming back to the office Nothing about middle managers becoming irrelevant, moreso highlighting the dynamic between trying to bring workers back in office and worker leverage.
- thenerdhead 4y agoSorry but global remote work didn’t need to prove the Dilbert principle and Gervais rule. I’m willing to bet more people will leave jobs purely because they feel stuck behind an incompetent manager. Who wants to waste years of their life not growing? ICs have virtually the most power in most companies at higher levels of seniority. The demand demonstrates that, but more importantly, more people should stand up for themselves when they have a shitty manager. Life isn’t long enough to be a doormat. There are good managers out there. They are very rare. If you have one, keep them. If you don’t, look for one. Your mental health will thank you later. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
- someweirdperson 4y agoThe title of the original story: "Fed-up managers declare WFH is over, as 77% say they’d fire you or cut your pay for not coming back to the office" And the reasons the article describes are more along the lines of managers feeling that they cannot manage remotely, not worrying about their relevance. The underlying reason might of course be worries about relevance, but that is not the content of the article. I think it is worries about job-security. If everyone is remote every worker can be replaced by someone cheaper from some region with lower wages. As mangers are at the same location as their underlings, their relevance vanishes with local workers.
- mbrodersen 4y agoCompanies that doesn’t offer flexible WFH will be less competitive in the jobs market. In other words, companies that force everybody to be in the office 5 days a week will end up with developers that can’t get jobs anywhere else.
- nathias 4y agoThat's completely untrue, they just found out they were never relevant in the first place.
- lazyant 4y agoRemote work is exposing a lot of foolishness in the workplace, like "busy work" and ineffective managers rather than a particular role.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- coldtea 4y agoThey were before too. But in any case their role isn't about relevance or production of whatever the company produces. It's just a way the company expands after a certain size as an organism and starts feeding itself, growing bigger while allowing for redududancy and waste - like a state does.
- throwawayHN378 4y agoEvery middle management role I ever had was in name only. I was basically a SDE that also acted as a proxy between project people and other engineers
- mbrodersen 4y agoI truly believe that I can predict how effective/productive an organisation is based purely on the non-manager to manager ratio. The higher the ratio, the more effective/productive the organisation is. This has been the case for every organisation I have ever worked for and read about. Don’t get me wrong. You do need a minimum of management to glue the organisation together. But anything beyond the absolute minimum will rapidly decrease the effectiveness/productivity of the organisation. The most efficient/productive/successful company I have worked for had a ratio of 20 to 1. The worst/most inefficient company I have ever worked for had a ratio of 2 to 1 (I kid you not).
- petval 4y agowell I declared middle managers over last year and switched to full remote because I didn't want to comply with mandatory day per week in the office anymore. Told HR on the exit interview my middle manager is not providing me any value and I don't want to make profit for his pay and rather found a company that realized enabling fully remote gives them competitive advantage and I can keep this part of the money for myself. They starred at me like I said a blasphemy Looking back at it with the experience of almost a year I should have done it much earlier.
- djohnston 4y agoI see a lot of folks here with the attitude that middle management is kind of pointless. Do you feel similarly for line managers?
- xyzzy21 4y agoLOL If they truly believe that, then they do NOT understand their roll and thus they are probably ALREADY obsolete and irrelevant. If they understand - it should not be a problem of need but of methods and skills.
- thawaya3113 4y agoMost of middle management work is being pushed onto employees, who can now absorb that work because remote work has led to everyone working 2-3 hrs extra. In the past if upper management wanted a demo of what was coming up, the “middle manager” would put it together, especially if it involves several team members’ work. Now, with the fact that everyone is putting in more time, and that we are now all accustomed to spending hours and hours in meetings, they just throw an hour long meeting in the calendar, and ask the 10 people on the team to each do a 10 min demo. Far more inefficient, but that’s ok because upper management is getting it for free.