9 ms·

"Middle managers" are certainly needed as part of a corporate hierarchy. What is being exposed with WFH is -ineffective- managers. Ineffective managers are at

• yike321123 5y ago
  Not 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 5y ago
    So you're saying their theory differs from their practice? Hmm.
    • yike321123 5y ago
      Why 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 5y ago
    I'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 5y ago
      Honestly, 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.
      • taeric 5y ago
        Are they, though? Specifically in predictability of models. Really good at explaining, but not good at hedging on how likely what happened was to have happened.
        • yike321123 5y ago
          It depends. Science doesn't occur in a vacuum. Change occurs overtime with the experiences of others. No one can do anything independent from the world. In several instances in the world the most meaningful leaps and changes in scientific theory have been when individuals have gone and seen real experiences. Such as nightingale and her contribution to sanitation. In my opinion, any model that predicts any sort of outcome when doing so accurately is overfitted and lacks the proper contextual knowledge necessary. Should the work of actuarial science be validated as just a series of lists to prove the risk and likely hood of death? Should we all have numbers above our heads dependent on the fate and caste we are born into? These are all things these models ignore and misrepresent. If I was born into a lower middle class black family if no one knew who I was would they care about me? My struggles, my pain? So far all that I've seen are people who would rather choose to mock me. Wearing my clothing, pretending to sing my songs, my struggles. Yet nothing changes, no one cares about me, it's not my problem they say. What my ancestors did is not my fault nor my problem. While some in the scientific community care about these issues, the majority just ignores it. Even today all they care about is what book they need to read in order to follow their identity politics over real system change. Having been forced to live a lie, I can't see how or why others would care without having people who have seen and experienced it themselves. When you exclude more than half the world it really does make you wonder if we are right more than we are wrong.
          • edmundsauto 5y ago
            > In my opinion, any model that predicts any sort of outcome when doing so accurately is overfitted and lacks the proper contextual knowledge necessary For me, models that do not make predictions are not very useful. Without predictions about the future, it's very hard to tell if the work is useful moving forward, or if it should be read as a historical analysis that doesn't matter in the current environment. Predictions are critical, they are a primary mechanism to find out if something is useful.
  • stult 5y ago
    This touches on the controversy that sparked Coase's Theory of the Firm. He proposed the idea that firms exist to reduce transaction costs as an explanation for why capitalist firms look like mini-soviets internally, with highly centralized control and planning. Which seems like a contradiction to classical economists. If free markets are so effective, why can't you run a company like a free market? eg have workers bid for tasks from managers. Turns out that is wildly inefficient because of the transaction costs involved in coordinating competitively instead of cooperatively (at least in successful companies). I suspect pandemic WFH has revealed there are much more efficient ways to coordinate cooperatively than simple centralized planning, and those methods generally do not require as much managerial facilitation because they rely much more heavily on asynchronous communication.
    • lupire 5y ago
      The offices solution to Coase's paradox is that central planning doesn't scale well. This is similar to federalism -- central governments don't work very well for everything, but scaler local governments are still effective for local issues.
      • vkou 5y ago
        Except that the most successful companies work in the opposite manner from what you describe. Your line workers and manager may know how best to solve a problem, but they are almost never empowered to implement that solution, because upper management is not interested in delegating that power to them. Pour one out to anyone who has ever done a sprint retrospective, or a company 360 review, where all the important problems get skipped over because 'there's nothing we can do about this, this, and that.' Line workers and managers are given an incredibly narrow window in which they are permitted to operate. Anything beyond that needs beurocratic approval. Much like in the Soviet Union, sometimes that beurocracy is staffed by intelligent human beings, but usually it is staffed by donkeys. People who care enough about doing their work find ways to work around the latter, or just give up and punch in their 9-5.
        • inglor_cz 5y ago
  • throwaway93982 5y ago
    Yep, hierarchy comes from religion (hierarkhia, "rule of a high preist"). Traditional capitalist hierarchical organization is just one of many potential hierarchies, so definitely it could be improved. But hierarchy is ingrained in culture, and culture is probably the third hardest thing in the universe to change, after genetics and cancelling your gym membership.
    • hallway_monitor 5y ago
      It seems to me that hierarchy is ingrained in nature, and human nature is an extension of that. There will always be a hierarchy in any system of living (and therefore competing) organisms. It seems more productive to focus on making sure the difference between the top and bottom doesn't get too extreme, rather than lamenting the fact of nature and wishing there was no such thing as competition.
      • trhway 5y ago
        The nature didn't for the most part had software nor networks, and thus couldn't fully explore and utilize the alternative approach of self organization from the bottom up with closed loop feedback to achieve desired emergent properties/product/etc. There are good chances that many known human hierarchies are going the way of dinosaurs.
        • FerociousTimes 5y ago
          Does this scale?
        • la6472 5y ago
          Exactly lot of middle management functions can be automated and even more objective evaluation can be done.
    • marcosdumay 5y ago
      If you are talking about hierarchy copying the Catholic Church, well the church also copied the Roman government, that appeared mostly naturally from the existence of an imperium.
  • xwdv 5y ago
    By far the most inefficient part of the hierarchy is at the very bottom. Workers slacking off, not working optimally, and still getting paid for the full 40 hours. Wouldn’t need so much redundancy if you could truly get their full output.
    • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      That's a management problem as well.
    • alan-hn 5y ago
      Are you aware of any data or studies that back up this claim? I would love to read about it
    • phoe-krk 5y ago
      > if you could truly get their full output. Getting the relative most out of the bottom line workers and finding and taking care of the underperformers is the direct responsibility of their managers, and I'm saying this unironically. Managing is about being a performance multiplier, and the most hands-on part of management always involves concrete teams of people doing concrete dirty work. It's the manager managers that are the problem mentioned here.
      • cpeterso 5y ago
        And the productivity of line workers doesn't matter if management is prioritizing the wrong projects. Bad managers have a bigger negative impact than bad line workers.
    • akomtu 5y ago
      It's always the horses who fail the king. If only those lazy animals did more than the bare minimum, the king wouldn't need to be such a despot.
    • willcipriano 5y ago
      > Wouldn’t need so much redundancy if you could truly get their full output. The incentive structure is that those workers capture much less than the value of their total output. If they worked harder so the firm required less employees, how do they benefit?
  • mvkel 5y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean. If you have a > 100 person company, you either have managers, or you have too many reporting to too few.
  • blindmute 5y ago
    Yeah I'm sure the academics with a preconceived agenda against hierarchy of all forms have figured out how every successful business is doing it wrong
• newsclues 5y ago
  There is also an excessive number of middle management, even if all of the were competent. Technology has made it possible to be a more effective manager and leader.
  • CSMastermind 5y ago
    > Technology has made it possible to be a more effective manager and leader. How so? I've built a few different organizations now and each time I've found that I need to introduce a middle management layer somewhere around 18 and 24 engineers. The limit is always things that are really hard to automate or replace with technology like 1 on 1s, keeping a pulse on how the team is feeling, coaching people on career growth, etc.
    • AndrewDucker 5y ago
      You no longer have to spend 5 minutes walking between meeting rooms and can now go straight from one meeting to another with no time to collect your thoughts at all!
      • bin_bash 5y ago
        I understood that as 18-24 engineers in a company, not per manager.
    • newsclues 5y ago
      Cars and planes made multi site management more effective. Phones, cellphones, email, etc have all made management communication more effective. Address book in your iPhone is faster than your secretary, a Rolodex and the switchboard. Automate the easy stuff, and have the management do the human leadership tasks. I’d ask the engineers what else can be done differently but maybe you have implemented lean leadership already.
      • kkfx 5y ago
        Beware a thing: the classic production of the '900 manufacturing industry do just require organization because anything is done on the assembly line, but creative works (witch means anything not already designed and now in mass production stage) is another thing. You can't subdivide a problem in tasks effectively until you figure out how to solve it in the first place, you can't easy share ideas quickly without "work's social life" etc. To be more precise, it's doable but demand years of experience, our society except for very few jobs lack such experience and as always anyone want young people with decade of experience behind...
• perfopt 5y ago
  I agree. Also, most companies need a lot fewer middle managers than they have. I picked a "management" path because promotions are easier. But I still do technical work - I write code, review code, create and review tech documents. Successive teams I have managed liked it that their manager is "one of them". We dont have boring team meetings. All are technical except select 1-1s which are career conversations
• Accujack 5y ago
  >Middle managers just have a higher probability of being ineffective due to lack of experience/resources, Actually, I think it's because they're more difficult to discover; Determining whether a middle manager's performance is good or not is a far less trivial task than determining whether a technical employee is producing value. Middle managers are adequate by default. Individual contributors are not. If a middle manager does not obviously cause damage or liability, they are generally assumed to be "working". If they do not appear to be exceptional or effective, it's assumed that their role has not presented any chances to excel. They are protected partially by the empathy that other managers have for their position. Managers are rarely fired simply for not producing results, which is very much not the case for individual contributors. The difficulty of weeding out ineffective middle managers means they will be present as a higher percentage of total manager head count than e.g. ineffective line managers.
• la6472 5y ago
  Actually lot of middle management jobs can be automated specially tasks allocation and tracking. It is not that difficult to imagine a system like that where these functions can be automated and this middle managers can be free to do more “valuable” tasks.
• ozfive 5y ago
  Ineffective managers also seem to threaten.
• jurschreuder 5y ago
  I can't think of a more useless profession than manager. Managers should not be paid because they don't do actual work and they don't know about the technology. They just squeeze all the joy out of work by commanding developers to do things they know will not work, and take away all intrinsic motivation. The accumulation of managers is a sign of a sick company. When engineers build things, out of an intrinsic interest in building stuff, they gain status as the company becomes more successful. This attracts people only interested in status that drag the company down. A top priority of tech companies as they scale should be to keep engineering in charge.
  • jjeaff 5y ago
    Surely you understand the need for managers at some level?
  • danielrpa 5y ago
    Sounds like you're describing ineffective or incompetent managers. A good engineering manager will teach/grow their reports, helping them focus on the things that they love while harnessing their energy towards building good systems and products. Few groups of engineers are able to work together effectively towards a goal without some sort of leader or manager in place. Middle managers are a totally different beast altogether and are supposed to be coordinating resources for strategic rather than tactical goals. It's a lot easier to coast in this position, however, as many competent frontline managers often have the same skill set.
  • xyzzy21 5y ago
    I hope you don't believe that "things will just happen on their own". Because they don't and won't. It's the same with selling products that generate company revenue - in general products DO NOT SELL THEMSELVES. Ever. And "worse" - even the best designed product that "flies off the shelf" will usually only do that for the first 3-9 months - after that, the lack of awareness for product or problem, the mismatch of buyer/seller knowledge, product features to market need, etc. is large enough that nothing will be an obvious match. All these things are why there are sales people with commissions et al.
  • apple4ever 5y ago
• stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Exactly. You will always need people to wrangle the cats on a medium business scale (20-50 workers), including programmers.