18 ms·

The actual real reason is that most management is just bunch of morons busy optimizing for their own success, and no one worrying about any common sense good of

The actual real reason is that most management is just bunch of morons busy optimizing for their own success, and no one worrying about any common sense good of the company. The company downfall is always hiring the first "manager". After that managers will just keep inventing excuses to expand their dominion, until the company is 50% management, there's more people than actual work that needs being done, yet all work grinds to almost complete halt. Even if a given individual is not a self-serving moron, they are overpowered by the dynamics of the group and they either comply and play the game, or they are out. The bigger the group, the easier it is to hide in a corner with incompetence, stupidity, politics, optimize for your personal gain, and the harder it is to actually competently judge the performance and contributions of each member. Hierarchies make people optimize for raising in the hierarchy, and accumulating power, at the expense of actually doing what the group needs. The way human groups organize in practice is pretty much always complete dysfunction without motivated, benevolent and competent leaders at the very top. Our own self-interest combined with natural bias and blind spots in aggregate always win. And the dysfunction grows more than linear with the size of the group. At the corporate size there is practically no actual owner/leader overseeing things (even the board is just bunch of self-serving assholes), so you effectively get a smaller and private replica of a communist state. If you read anything about communist state politics and management you're going to see 1:1 with every corporation you've ever worked in.

Nextgrid 4y ago
> most management is just bunch of morons busy optimizing for their own success, and no one worrying about any common sense good of the company That might be true but unless you're the owner of the company or have a significant stake I don't see why you wouldn't do the same as an individual contributor? The "company" is not some sentient being you owe some compassion to. It's a legal structure with profit as its sole goal. It won't shed a tear if it makes more profit at your expense, so you shouldn't either if you manage to turn it upside down.
- 3a2d29 4y ago
  +1 to this I ageee managers optimize for their own success, at the expense of the company, but how does that make them morons? Sure the company is hurt and work grinds to a halt, but are you saying the rational thing to do is take actions that don’t optimize for your own success?
  - globalreset 4y ago
    I should have been more specific. A lot of them are morons, which is orthogonal and more of a problem than being self-serving. A competent self-serving manager is possibly not best for the company, but might be great to work with (under) and still way better than a moron.
- mason55 4y ago
  > That might be true but unless you're the owner of the company or have a significant stake I don't see why you wouldn't do the same as an individual contributor? And here you hit on one of the core tenets of a good manager. How to align things so that what's good for the individual is good for the company? It starts with the owner/shareholders and cascades down the hierarchy. It's a bit of a "tragedy of the commons"-type problem. If everyone optimizes what's best for themselves then the company likely goes out of business, which isn't good for most of the employees. A good incentive structure isn't going to make a terrible manager into a good one but it can have a big impact around the edges. Including things like "employee retention" in the evaluation of a manager helps to align things - now if the manager wants her bonus she has to treat the employees well and help find a balance between what's good for the company & what's good for the employee individually.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    That's correct, but it has to come from top-down. It is unlikely you'll make any change from the bottom (especially as that change would negatively impact your superior who is also playing this game), so you're better off playing the game too.
kadonoishi 4y ago
People have put in further thought about this and had good insights. A couple examples would be Rao's essay on The Gervais Principle [0] and, much heavier, Bob Jackall's 1988 book "Moral Mazes." [1] [0] 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-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes
f0e4c2f7 4y ago
See also: https://mobile.twitter.com/i/status/1536400820366823424 https://mobile.twitter.com/i/status/1536400820366823424
Mo3 4y ago
That’s a phenomenon I have observed mostly only in US-based companies I have worked for.
- globalreset 4y ago
  AFAICT, smaller, privately owned software companies are more popular in Europe, and they are often much more competently managed (because the owners actually care). Easy access to funding in US makes building large, collectively owned companies more popular, and these while usually very poorly managed can dominate global markets due to better funding, better initial market (one language, more people, richer users, whole world knows English anyway).
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    If it is, I have yet to see it. Managers, owners and middlemen making everything a slog to work with is very much a thing in Europe. And when you realize European managers are also sitting on ivory towers relative to ICs, it becomes pretty apparent why this behavior is somewhat universal.
  - Mo3 4y ago
    I know, I am European and am the CTO for a US-based institution these days. Of course the same mechanisms of management exist here also, but in no way, shape or form in the same way they do in the US. It’s still like night and day on average. After talking with the CEO a lot, he had some sort of realization himself and almost seemed like he began questioning his whole reality. Some of my (subjective) impressions after working for small- and medium-sized (=< 500) European companies for over a decade and now being in US executive management: Generally employees in the US tend do not have a sense of responsibility for the bigger picture, honestly, most just don’t give a shit. There’s no sense of belonging to a bigger cause. This is not meant as some sort of accusation, because I can understand 100% why that is. There's no reason for anyone to be actually motivated. People are treated like slaves, the general mindset is one of extreme superficiality, and even the most self-motivated and ambitious thought leaders end up being drained and exhausted and then dumped. US work environments have brutal and insane administrative and technical overhead, are extremely inefficient and there is an abhorrent amount of parasitic middlemen ventures that have penetrated deep into even the most simple tasks and concepts. The environment itself is hostile towards efficiency and creativity. US workers work more hours than in almost any developed country, yet efficiency is lower than anywhere else. It’s a common theme apparently, same shit with healthcare. Most expensive, least efficient and worst health outcomes in the developed world. Decreasing life expectancy, more infant deaths than in Russia and for some parts of the US, lower life expectancy than in Bangladesh. Sounds absolutely wonderful, and is a perfect example of exactly what’s wrong with the general work culture as well. It’s not about reaching some sort of long-term goal together, it’s just splitting the 3 step way up into 30 pieces and leeching and draining money out of every single one no matter the outcome. Short-term profit over anything else, fuck the future, fuck the new debt and fuck everyone else. Personally, I had to distance myself from getting too invested and attached as well (so, in a sense, also giving less of a shit) because I got seriously depressed after a while. But yeah, socialism is “evil”. Tell that to anyone of the happy, healthy and wealthy people in Europe enjoying their paid vacation after taking pride in their work, doing it efficiently and being respected as human beings. I guarantee you they’ll know you’re an American. We must have different definitions of freedom over here.
bennysomething 4y ago
That's a bold statement "most managers are morons". What evidence do you have for this? I've worked with some excellent managers.
- zild3d 4y ago
  Yes, "most <insert any large group of people> are morons" is only true if you also believe most people in general are morons, which is a different conversation
- globalreset 4y ago
  > What evidence do you have for this? Obviously there is no evidence for this subjective claim. However, the fact that you find it worthwhile to mention: > I've worked with some excellent managers. suggests you actually agree with me. If I've said "the sky is green most of the time" you would not find it worthwhile to say "I've seen some blue sky", would you? ;)
- justin_oaks 4y ago
  "Ninety percent of everything is crap" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  It's amazing how often I talk to people with polar opposite views about managers. Some people insist that most managers are terrible. Other people recount bad managers as outliers throughout their career. I have a suspicion that people who end up reporting to bad managers are more likely to get stuck in companies or career paths that put them under a sequence of bad managers. Perhaps bad management gets normalized in the formative early years of their career and they don't understand that they're in a bad situation or that they should (or even can) move to companies with better management practices. Obviously, there are a lot of bad employees out there of all job types. Managers are no exception. But the idea that managers are "mostly morons" is a ridiculous, hyperbolic claim. Whenever I mentor someone who has these ideas, I work hard to try to let them know that bad management is neither normal nor acceptable. Otherwise they just assume their bad situation is normal and that changing jobs wouldn't help, which is not the case with bad management.
cupofpython 4y ago
Moron or not, I dont want people to starve simply because they dont help a company perform optimally. If we were to implement some form of a universal basic income there would be no obligation to become a self-serving asshole at whatever company you can get yourself into. The people doing the work would be able to stand up for themselves and tell management to fuck off if they do become moronic or overly self-serving
- sfe22 4y ago
  A bureaucrat has never created a solution, so thinking UBI would solve anything is naive at best. Why not go for something simpler, like make basic life cheap and efficient so people can live with very little work? Bonus point: no need to take (steal?) money from people to implement.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    UBI might not be the solution but how is that in any way simpler to do or even to conceive
    - sfe22 4y ago
      All you have to do is have bureaucrats remove the hurdles they added. It will just take some time.
      - nickforr 4y ago
        Just to pick one example, do you see something like state-imposed food standards as a 'hurdle' added by bureaucrats? What about housing construction standards? One person's hurdle can be another person's safety net?
        sfe22 4y ago
        Yes monopolistic regulations are 100percent hurdles. Now free market standards that people can choose (if they want more safety net), or personal standards, well they don't affect everyone so those are fine.
yowlingcat 4y ago
If managers were just be a bunch of morons optimizing for their own success, then there would be no winners and losers, just losers. But that's not the case. There are companies which are very definitively winners (in that they avoid managerial dead weight), and especially ones in technology that don't hire managers the way you describe. You often see this at quant funds (Two Sigma, HRT, etc). Of course, not everyone can or wants to work at a quant fund. But the truth is, there's no room for a ladder climbing mediocre manager at such a company, so the culture ends up being quite different. I think the reason why you are wrong on the whole, is that you're not looking at the game that is being played. It is true that managers are busy optimizing for their own success, but if a company cannot align manager success with that of the broader company, whose fault is that, and who is wasting their resources? Leadership and investors. If you have only worked at companies with poor leadership and weak investors, it is easy to think that managers are always idiots optimizing for their own success at the expense of the company's. The truth is, there are many companies where managers get fired for just that, because the outputs are obvious and managers are looked at as intrinsic cost centers rather than profit centers. Why would I hire an ineffective layer of middle management when I could just fire all of them, hire one great leader, and have most of the team report to that great leader with strong senior ICs eventually becoming functional leads that help that single leader support the team at large? The simple answer to avoid the problem you are raising is to not work at companies with poor leadership and investor bases. Poor management is a symptom of, not a cause of that root cause. I wonder if the reason you blame it on managers (rather than investors and leaders) is the same reason you think of managers as morons -- because you are not looking at the bigger picture.
- ratww 4y ago
  Hmmm, I disagree. I also don't think that all managers are morons, but even if they were, the fact is that companies often succeed in spite of managerial issues. Sure, there's lots of people are optimizing for the wrong thing, but that doesn't mean it is affecting the final outcome. As long as managers and reports aren't being paid an exorbitant sum, the only loss is in the sanity of individual contributors. In a large enough company, managers have to do a lot to compromise the success of a company. I'm not saying managers are completely unimportant, but they're not as important as you think.
cs137 4y ago
What you're saying about management is true, but there's another reason why ultra-productive engineers aren't paid accordingly. It's context-dependent which engineers get to go into that state; put a "10x" engineer on a 0.1x project, and he'll probably just end up failing and making a bunch of enemies. Therefore, as the company sees it, they deserve the bulk of the rewards since they are (magnanimously) giving the opportunity to the 10x engineer. He'll still get his 10% bonus if he performs well, won't he? So why should they feel compelled to give him more? Obviously, this is bad for workers and bad for society, but it makes sense from the corporate viewpoint.
- mason55 4y ago
  > Therefore, as the company sees it, they deserve the bulk of the rewards since they are (magnanimously) giving the opportunity to the 10x engineer. I think it's really two things. 1. The company provides the structure in which the engineer works. Code is not valuable on its own, it's valuable when it solves a business problem. The company structure converts business problems to engineering problems for the engineer to solve. That transmogrification has value and the ability to build & maintain the transmogrifier (aka the rest of the company) is a skill that gets rewarded. The transmogrifier also uses money as one of its inputs (salaries for the rest of the company) and so some of the "pure value" that the engineer creates can't be converted directly to money for the engineer, because it has to be used in the "business problem to engineering problem" conversion process. It's similar to the argument about taxes. Why should I pay taxes for things I don't use? Well, even if I don't drive, the roads support other parts of society that benefit me. 2. The engineer effectively pays the company (meaning the owners or shareholders of the company) to reduce the engineer's risk. If an engineer wants to extract every cent of value they create then they need to also take the burden of all the risk. Otherwise the company owners will not make enough on the successes to cover the failures.
  - cs137 4y ago
    If an engineer wants to extract every cent of value they create then they need to also take the burden of all the risk. This is, of course, the argument that capitalists use to justify their disproportionate take, but it doesn't hold water, because they don't really take on much risk. They risk capital they have. often in massive amounts; laborers have to work because they don't have capital to put at risk in the first place. The only thing the bosses are actually risking is becoming workers again, which they'll fight furiously to avoid, because they know how much it sucks, because they're the reason why it sucks.
Micoloth 4y ago
Thank you! I wanted to tell you that I really needed to hear this today. I’m not even sure you are right about evertything, and you are probably oversimplyfing a bit. But lately I’ve been stuck on this projects with 2 developers (1 is me) and 5(!) managers/project managers assigned to it, plus 3 more on the client side. The amount of emails exchanged where nothing is said is very funny. And you know the drill, when it goes right the merit is of the managers (everyone wants the piece of the cake), while when something goes wrong, the fault is the developer’s. It’s honesly been a shitshow, so it’s been really good for me to read this!
- waynesonfire 4y ago
  One of the skills as a lead dev that I need to exercise more is knowing when a project needs more people, and then making the case for it to management. Management seems by default to assign according to bus factor not getting it done. So we have like the same six projects in flight for over a year. Also, on failed projects, where an understaffed team never completed the assignment, they finally staff it properly the second time around. But, the project still takes a long time to finish having to make sense of what the previous team did and even more time sucking, purging the unnecessary bits, frequently being the majority of the work. It takes 2x the amount of time to delete something than it took to make it.
sizzle 4y ago
Do you consider a Director as a manager of managers?
- globalreset 4y ago
  Yeap. It's manager^2. Thankfully at that level they are so detached, that they could be a highly paid potato and it wouldn't change much for the people at bottom doing the actual work.
mbrodersen 4y ago
It’s easy to massively improve the performance of most companies: 1. Fire 50% of managers. 2. Use the salary money saved to hire people doing the actual work. 3. Wait for a while to see how much things have improved. Repeat if overall performance has improved (it almost always has).
- pc86 4y ago
  You'll run into the same problem you run into with stack ranking where you up firing x% of ICs every quarter - the good ones leave, the bad ones stay. Say you fire half the managers. Let's say you live in a fantasy world where you can accurately measure who is the bottom half vs. the top half by whatever metric matters to you. So you fire the worst half. You've just done a couple things: 1. Probably triggered some sort of "layoff" legislation/notice/severance/whatever and sent a ton of people looking for work before the next round, whether you expect there to be a next round or not (but you've already said there would be). 2. The good managers, who could probably walk into another management role without much trouble, do so. Why risk being in the second round? 3. You're left with something approaching the middle quartile, but now they're doing more than 2x the work after the top 5-10% of your management leaves after your purge. How many people do you know suddenly get better at their job after you double their workload? 4. I don't know how true it is but there is an old saying "people don't leave jobs they leave managers," and so now for half the company you've fired their manager and given them someone very overworked. For some non-trivial percentage of the company their new manager is worse than their old manager. 5. Due to #1 and #4, your best ICs start to leave, so engineering and product quality (and velocity) drop precipitously. 6. You've lost your best managers, who would fight to keep the hiring bar high, so the weak ones compromise on shaky candidates. Engineering and product quality drop even more, and morale tanks. Congratulations, you've just filed for bankruptcy with extra steps.
  - mbrodersen 4y ago
    I think you are right if it is the good managers being fired. If it is the bad managers being fired then it is 100% a good thing. A real world example is Steve Jobs turning Apple around after Sculley nearly ran it into the ground. Jobs did it by firing most of middle management. Basically anybody who was not directly contributing to products. It worked.
anonreeeeplor 4y ago
I like how you think because largely correct. I believe it has probably gotten much worse in “inflation driven bubble growth” times we had the last ten years. Non productive individual contributors have proliferated … because why not hire and retain them if money is free? Managers are 2nd or 3rd order derivatives of IC productivity. If you have over-hired and too many managers to the point where no one knows what productivity is or who is doing any work, then everyone would prefer to be management since no real work is getting done anyway, and any of the work you do as an IC often gets credited : stolen : reassigned to others to spread the credit around. I categories managers in the following ways: 1. Truly awful or toxic, malicious Actively interfere with you , fight with you, stop you from being productive. I have had several of these. They are the cancer of companies. 2. Leave you alone This is one of my favorite types of manager. They just kind of hire you and let you survive and do whatever. Unless you run into political challenges requiring real management, or need resources or get lost. If you are highly self motivated and talented and can figure out what to do yourself, these are fine, mostly. 3. Enablers : Encouragers These are the managers who really accelerated my career. I have literally only ever had 2 of them, after working for like 20 years. My personal estimate is that out of 13 managers, 2 have been excellent. That is a really bad ratio. Of the 13, 3 have been the leave me alone kind which was ok for a bit. 4-5 have been actively malicious or completely incompetent to the point of making me leave. The rest in between somewhere.

Nextgrid 4y ago

> most management is just bunch of morons busy optimizing for their own success, and no one worrying about any common sense good of the company That might be true but unless you're the owner of the company or have a significant stake I don't see why you wouldn't do the same as an individual contributor? The "company" is not some sentient being you owe some compassion to. It's a legal structure with profit as its sole goal. It won't shed a tear if it makes more profit at your expense, so you shouldn't either if you manage to turn it upside down.

3a2d29 4y ago
+1 to this I ageee managers optimize for their own success, at the expense of the company, but how does that make them morons? Sure the company is hurt and work grinds to a halt, but are you saying the rational thing to do is take actions that don’t optimize for your own success?
- globalreset 4y ago
  I should have been more specific. A lot of them are morons, which is orthogonal and more of a problem than being self-serving. A competent self-serving manager is possibly not best for the company, but might be great to work with (under) and still way better than a moron.
mason55 4y ago
> That might be true but unless you're the owner of the company or have a significant stake I don't see why you wouldn't do the same as an individual contributor? And here you hit on one of the core tenets of a good manager. How to align things so that what's good for the individual is good for the company? It starts with the owner/shareholders and cascades down the hierarchy. It's a bit of a "tragedy of the commons"-type problem. If everyone optimizes what's best for themselves then the company likely goes out of business, which isn't good for most of the employees. A good incentive structure isn't going to make a terrible manager into a good one but it can have a big impact around the edges. Including things like "employee retention" in the evaluation of a manager helps to align things - now if the manager wants her bonus she has to treat the employees well and help find a balance between what's good for the company & what's good for the employee individually.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  That's correct, but it has to come from top-down. It is unlikely you'll make any change from the bottom (especially as that change would negatively impact your superior who is also playing this game), so you're better off playing the game too.

kadonoishi 4y ago

People have put in further thought about this and had good insights. A couple examples would be Rao's essay on The Gervais Principle [0] and, much heavier, Bob Jackall's 1988 book "Moral Mazes." [1] [0] 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-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes

f0e4c2f7 4y ago

See also: https://mobile.twitter.com/i/status/1536400820366823424 https://mobile.twitter.com/i/status/1536400820366823424

Mo3 4y ago

That’s a phenomenon I have observed mostly only in US-based companies I have worked for.

globalreset 4y ago
AFAICT, smaller, privately owned software companies are more popular in Europe, and they are often much more competently managed (because the owners actually care). Easy access to funding in US makes building large, collectively owned companies more popular, and these while usually very poorly managed can dominate global markets due to better funding, better initial market (one language, more people, richer users, whole world knows English anyway).
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  If it is, I have yet to see it. Managers, owners and middlemen making everything a slog to work with is very much a thing in Europe. And when you realize European managers are also sitting on ivory towers relative to ICs, it becomes pretty apparent why this behavior is somewhat universal.
- Mo3 4y ago
  I know, I am European and am the CTO for a US-based institution these days. Of course the same mechanisms of management exist here also, but in no way, shape or form in the same way they do in the US. It’s still like night and day on average. After talking with the CEO a lot, he had some sort of realization himself and almost seemed like he began questioning his whole reality. Some of my (subjective) impressions after working for small- and medium-sized (=< 500) European companies for over a decade and now being in US executive management: Generally employees in the US tend do not have a sense of responsibility for the bigger picture, honestly, most just don’t give a shit. There’s no sense of belonging to a bigger cause. This is not meant as some sort of accusation, because I can understand 100% why that is. There's no reason for anyone to be actually motivated. People are treated like slaves, the general mindset is one of extreme superficiality, and even the most self-motivated and ambitious thought leaders end up being drained and exhausted and then dumped. US work environments have brutal and insane administrative and technical overhead, are extremely inefficient and there is an abhorrent amount of parasitic middlemen ventures that have penetrated deep into even the most simple tasks and concepts. The environment itself is hostile towards efficiency and creativity. US workers work more hours than in almost any developed country, yet efficiency is lower than anywhere else. It’s a common theme apparently, same shit with healthcare. Most expensive, least efficient and worst health outcomes in the developed world. Decreasing life expectancy, more infant deaths than in Russia and for some parts of the US, lower life expectancy than in Bangladesh. Sounds absolutely wonderful, and is a perfect example of exactly what’s wrong with the general work culture as well. It’s not about reaching some sort of long-term goal together, it’s just splitting the 3 step way up into 30 pieces and leeching and draining money out of every single one no matter the outcome. Short-term profit over anything else, fuck the future, fuck the new debt and fuck everyone else. Personally, I had to distance myself from getting too invested and attached as well (so, in a sense, also giving less of a shit) because I got seriously depressed after a while. But yeah, socialism is “evil”. Tell that to anyone of the happy, healthy and wealthy people in Europe enjoying their paid vacation after taking pride in their work, doing it efficiently and being respected as human beings. I guarantee you they’ll know you’re an American. We must have different definitions of freedom over here.

bennysomething 4y ago

That's a bold statement "most managers are morons". What evidence do you have for this? I've worked with some excellent managers.

zild3d 4y ago
Yes, "most <insert any large group of people> are morons" is only true if you also believe most people in general are morons, which is a different conversation
globalreset 4y ago
> What evidence do you have for this? Obviously there is no evidence for this subjective claim. However, the fact that you find it worthwhile to mention: > I've worked with some excellent managers. suggests you actually agree with me. If I've said "the sky is green most of the time" you would not find it worthwhile to say "I've seen some blue sky", would you? ;)
justin_oaks 4y ago
"Ninety percent of everything is crap" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
It's amazing how often I talk to people with polar opposite views about managers. Some people insist that most managers are terrible. Other people recount bad managers as outliers throughout their career. I have a suspicion that people who end up reporting to bad managers are more likely to get stuck in companies or career paths that put them under a sequence of bad managers. Perhaps bad management gets normalized in the formative early years of their career and they don't understand that they're in a bad situation or that they should (or even can) move to companies with better management practices. Obviously, there are a lot of bad employees out there of all job types. Managers are no exception. But the idea that managers are "mostly morons" is a ridiculous, hyperbolic claim. Whenever I mentor someone who has these ideas, I work hard to try to let them know that bad management is neither normal nor acceptable. Otherwise they just assume their bad situation is normal and that changing jobs wouldn't help, which is not the case with bad management.

cupofpython 4y ago

Moron or not, I dont want people to starve simply because they dont help a company perform optimally. If we were to implement some form of a universal basic income there would be no obligation to become a self-serving asshole at whatever company you can get yourself into. The people doing the work would be able to stand up for themselves and tell management to fuck off if they do become moronic or overly self-serving

sfe22 4y ago
A bureaucrat has never created a solution, so thinking UBI would solve anything is naive at best. Why not go for something simpler, like make basic life cheap and efficient so people can live with very little work? Bonus point: no need to take (steal?) money from people to implement.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  UBI might not be the solution but how is that in any way simpler to do or even to conceive
  - sfe22 4y ago
    All you have to do is have bureaucrats remove the hurdles they added. It will just take some time.
    - nickforr 4y ago
      Just to pick one example, do you see something like state-imposed food standards as a 'hurdle' added by bureaucrats? What about housing construction standards? One person's hurdle can be another person's safety net?
      - sfe22 4y ago
        Yes monopolistic regulations are 100percent hurdles. Now free market standards that people can choose (if they want more safety net), or personal standards, well they don't affect everyone so those are fine.

yowlingcat 4y ago

If managers were just be a bunch of morons optimizing for their own success, then there would be no winners and losers, just losers. But that's not the case. There are companies which are very definitively winners (in that they avoid managerial dead weight), and especially ones in technology that don't hire managers the way you describe. You often see this at quant funds (Two Sigma, HRT, etc). Of course, not everyone can or wants to work at a quant fund. But the truth is, there's no room for a ladder climbing mediocre manager at such a company, so the culture ends up being quite different. I think the reason why you are wrong on the whole, is that you're not looking at the game that is being played. It is true that managers are busy optimizing for their own success, but if a company cannot align manager success with that of the broader company, whose fault is that, and who is wasting their resources? Leadership and investors. If you have only worked at companies with poor leadership and weak investors, it is easy to think that managers are always idiots optimizing for their own success at the expense of the company's. The truth is, there are many companies where managers get fired for just that, because the outputs are obvious and managers are looked at as intrinsic cost centers rather than profit centers. Why would I hire an ineffective layer of middle management when I could just fire all of them, hire one great leader, and have most of the team report to that great leader with strong senior ICs eventually becoming functional leads that help that single leader support the team at large? The simple answer to avoid the problem you are raising is to not work at companies with poor leadership and investor bases. Poor management is a symptom of, not a cause of that root cause. I wonder if the reason you blame it on managers (rather than investors and leaders) is the same reason you think of managers as morons -- because you are not looking at the bigger picture.

ratww 4y ago
Hmmm, I disagree. I also don't think that all managers are morons, but even if they were, the fact is that companies often succeed in spite of managerial issues. Sure, there's lots of people are optimizing for the wrong thing, but that doesn't mean it is affecting the final outcome. As long as managers and reports aren't being paid an exorbitant sum, the only loss is in the sanity of individual contributors. In a large enough company, managers have to do a lot to compromise the success of a company. I'm not saying managers are completely unimportant, but they're not as important as you think.

cs137 4y ago

What you're saying about management is true, but there's another reason why ultra-productive engineers aren't paid accordingly. It's context-dependent which engineers get to go into that state; put a "10x" engineer on a 0.1x project, and he'll probably just end up failing and making a bunch of enemies. Therefore, as the company sees it, they deserve the bulk of the rewards since they are (magnanimously) giving the opportunity to the 10x engineer. He'll still get his 10% bonus if he performs well, won't he? So why should they feel compelled to give him more? Obviously, this is bad for workers and bad for society, but it makes sense from the corporate viewpoint.

mason55 4y ago
> Therefore, as the company sees it, they deserve the bulk of the rewards since they are (magnanimously) giving the opportunity to the 10x engineer. I think it's really two things. 1. The company provides the structure in which the engineer works. Code is not valuable on its own, it's valuable when it solves a business problem. The company structure converts business problems to engineering problems for the engineer to solve. That transmogrification has value and the ability to build & maintain the transmogrifier (aka the rest of the company) is a skill that gets rewarded. The transmogrifier also uses money as one of its inputs (salaries for the rest of the company) and so some of the "pure value" that the engineer creates can't be converted directly to money for the engineer, because it has to be used in the "business problem to engineering problem" conversion process. It's similar to the argument about taxes. Why should I pay taxes for things I don't use? Well, even if I don't drive, the roads support other parts of society that benefit me. 2. The engineer effectively pays the company (meaning the owners or shareholders of the company) to reduce the engineer's risk. If an engineer wants to extract every cent of value they create then they need to also take the burden of all the risk. Otherwise the company owners will not make enough on the successes to cover the failures.
- cs137 4y ago
  If an engineer wants to extract every cent of value they create then they need to also take the burden of all the risk. This is, of course, the argument that capitalists use to justify their disproportionate take, but it doesn't hold water, because they don't really take on much risk. They risk capital they have. often in massive amounts; laborers have to work because they don't have capital to put at risk in the first place. The only thing the bosses are actually risking is becoming workers again, which they'll fight furiously to avoid, because they know how much it sucks, because they're the reason why it sucks.

Micoloth 4y ago

Thank you! I wanted to tell you that I really needed to hear this today. I’m not even sure you are right about evertything, and you are probably oversimplyfing a bit. But lately I’ve been stuck on this projects with 2 developers (1 is me) and 5(!) managers/project managers assigned to it, plus 3 more on the client side. The amount of emails exchanged where nothing is said is very funny. And you know the drill, when it goes right the merit is of the managers (everyone wants the piece of the cake), while when something goes wrong, the fault is the developer’s. It’s honesly been a shitshow, so it’s been really good for me to read this!

waynesonfire 4y ago
One of the skills as a lead dev that I need to exercise more is knowing when a project needs more people, and then making the case for it to management. Management seems by default to assign according to bus factor not getting it done. So we have like the same six projects in flight for over a year. Also, on failed projects, where an understaffed team never completed the assignment, they finally staff it properly the second time around. But, the project still takes a long time to finish having to make sense of what the previous team did and even more time sucking, purging the unnecessary bits, frequently being the majority of the work. It takes 2x the amount of time to delete something than it took to make it.

sizzle 4y ago

Do you consider a Director as a manager of managers?

globalreset 4y ago
Yeap. It's manager^2. Thankfully at that level they are so detached, that they could be a highly paid potato and it wouldn't change much for the people at bottom doing the actual work.

mbrodersen 4y ago

It’s easy to massively improve the performance of most companies: 1. Fire 50% of managers. 2. Use the salary money saved to hire people doing the actual work. 3. Wait for a while to see how much things have improved. Repeat if overall performance has improved (it almost always has).

pc86 4y ago
You'll run into the same problem you run into with stack ranking where you up firing x% of ICs every quarter - the good ones leave, the bad ones stay. Say you fire half the managers. Let's say you live in a fantasy world where you can accurately measure who is the bottom half vs. the top half by whatever metric matters to you. So you fire the worst half. You've just done a couple things: 1. Probably triggered some sort of "layoff" legislation/notice/severance/whatever and sent a ton of people looking for work before the next round, whether you expect there to be a next round or not (but you've already said there would be). 2. The good managers, who could probably walk into another management role without much trouble, do so. Why risk being in the second round? 3. You're left with something approaching the middle quartile, but now they're doing more than 2x the work after the top 5-10% of your management leaves after your purge. How many people do you know suddenly get better at their job after you double their workload? 4. I don't know how true it is but there is an old saying "people don't leave jobs they leave managers," and so now for half the company you've fired their manager and given them someone very overworked. For some non-trivial percentage of the company their new manager is worse than their old manager. 5. Due to #1 and #4, your best ICs start to leave, so engineering and product quality (and velocity) drop precipitously. 6. You've lost your best managers, who would fight to keep the hiring bar high, so the weak ones compromise on shaky candidates. Engineering and product quality drop even more, and morale tanks. Congratulations, you've just filed for bankruptcy with extra steps.
- mbrodersen 4y ago
  I think you are right if it is the good managers being fired. If it is the bad managers being fired then it is 100% a good thing. A real world example is Steve Jobs turning Apple around after Sculley nearly ran it into the ground. Jobs did it by firing most of middle management. Basically anybody who was not directly contributing to products. It worked.

anonreeeeplor 4y ago

I like how you think because largely correct. I believe it has probably gotten much worse in “inflation driven bubble growth” times we had the last ten years. Non productive individual contributors have proliferated … because why not hire and retain them if money is free? Managers are 2nd or 3rd order derivatives of IC productivity. If you have over-hired and too many managers to the point where no one knows what productivity is or who is doing any work, then everyone would prefer to be management since no real work is getting done anyway, and any of the work you do as an IC often gets credited : stolen : reassigned to others to spread the credit around. I categories managers in the following ways: 1. Truly awful or toxic, malicious Actively interfere with you , fight with you, stop you from being productive. I have had several of these. They are the cancer of companies. 2. Leave you alone This is one of my favorite types of manager. They just kind of hire you and let you survive and do whatever. Unless you run into political challenges requiring real management, or need resources or get lost. If you are highly self motivated and talented and can figure out what to do yourself, these are fine, mostly. 3. Enablers : Encouragers These are the managers who really accelerated my career. I have literally only ever had 2 of them, after working for like 20 years. My personal estimate is that out of 13 managers, 2 have been excellent. That is a really bad ratio. Of the 13, 3 have been the leave me alone kind which was ok for a bit. 4-5 have been actively malicious or completely incompetent to the point of making me leave. The rest in between somewhere.