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Any business is an interconnected system of systems - and Roughly speaking 50 years ago, a "manager" would design / improve those systems, optimise them and ge

Any business is an interconnected system of systems - and Roughly speaking 50 years ago, a "manager" would design / improve those systems, optimise them and get the workers to operate inside the system - via design, training, incentives or shouting. The (capable) managers were rewarded As Software eats the world, more and more workers in the systems are CPUs and GPUs. And the coders are the new managers. More and more of what a business is and does, especially day to day BAU, is done in software - for some industries like finance and comms (FNG) almost exclusively in software. And that means that if you have an organisation "above" the coders, you are asking how do we organise the managers of the managers? At some point you have to ask, why do we have them there? History has shown time and again some central bureaucracy trying to co-orindate and control ends up inefficient and detrimental - and I think traditional management structures have simply been rendered unnecessary Maybe the answer to engineering the organisation is ... dont

H8crilA 4y ago
History shows the exact opposite. What higher level managers, directors and executives do is politics (the practice of allocation of resources).
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  But politics (ie negotiations for resources between peers) that occur between whom? With work moving "down" a layer to servers and by implication the non-allocative management of resources down a layer to the coders, there are waaaay too many managers and the allocation of resources (ie allocation of those who are now managers) is a totally different discussion - one should be giving AWS budgets to coders and saying run this division. Now that sounds a lot like microservices / and or two pizza teams. And the allocation of resources is much more a financier problem - in short there exists a layer of "managers" who don't manage the actual work being done, and have hierarchical control over something that is a financial non hierarchical problem. in short managers who don't code are dinosaurs Edit: to try and build a very simplified model of management - allocate (scarce) resources to desirable projects [financier] - organise resources to ensure success of project (engineer / planner) - improve quality of resources (training, maintenance) - something something read more Drucker Once the work sits in software (ie search engine) then it's just coders and servers except when you want to create a new business function. And that is to all intents a VC / financier role. I mean look at how Drucker refers to managers (bestriding the business world) to how google does (8 rules for "coaching" coders) Google recognises the chnage I think

H8crilA 4y ago

History shows the exact opposite. What higher level managers, directors and executives do is politics (the practice of allocation of resources).

lifeisstillgood 4y ago
But politics (ie negotiations for resources between peers) that occur between whom? With work moving "down" a layer to servers and by implication the non-allocative management of resources down a layer to the coders, there are waaaay too many managers and the allocation of resources (ie allocation of those who are now managers) is a totally different discussion - one should be giving AWS budgets to coders and saying run this division. Now that sounds a lot like microservices / and or two pizza teams. And the allocation of resources is much more a financier problem - in short there exists a layer of "managers" who don't manage the actual work being done, and have hierarchical control over something that is a financial non hierarchical problem. in short managers who don't code are dinosaurs Edit: to try and build a very simplified model of management - allocate (scarce) resources to desirable projects [financier] - organise resources to ensure success of project (engineer / planner) - improve quality of resources (training, maintenance) - something something read more Drucker Once the work sits in software (ie search engine) then it's just coders and servers except when you want to create a new business function. And that is to all intents a VC / financier role. I mean look at how Drucker refers to managers (bestriding the business world) to how google does (8 rules for "coaching" coders) Google recognises the chnage I think