21 ms·

Excess management is costing the U.S. $3T per year (2016)

• sillystuff 4y ago
  In both public sector and private sector places I have worked, management usually was, at best, dead weight. More often than not, management was an active impediment of getting work done for the ordinary worker doing the actual productive work of the institution. At one place, a director and the VP she reported to both retired. A temporary director was hired under contract who was mostly hands-off (and remote), but she immediately fired the manager who was her direct report. The group I worked in had reported to the fired manager. Without managers, productivity soared. We literally got more accomplished in a year without managers than we did in the prior five years combined. All of our deferred maintenance issues, some dating back over a decade, were addressed in the first 6 months of being freed of the managers. Sadly, it didn't last. They re-hired the full hierarchy of positions. And, the pace of work ground to a halt. Quality of work also suffered due to the artificial deadlines imposed by the managers-- combined with their shifting priorities based on which other manager(s) it was most politically expedient for them to please on any given day. At another, the new VP of marketing said in a meeting, about 9 months into his tenure, "What?! We're a software company?" Imagine all the value he must have added for those prior nine months.
  • Rury 4y ago
    Yes, that's because managers are the quintessential bureaucratic worker, and bureaucracy is an antithesis to productivity. Unfortunately though, some amount of bureaucracy is inevitably needed to sustain an organization.
    • meltyness 4y ago
      I agree with your sentiment but argue that rather than harming productivity, bureaucracy harms autonomy. This can cut both ways. On one hand, having a clear cut process is often a boon.
      • lumost 4y ago
        I suspect that this is the nature of org evolution. Any project has a certain probability of success/failure. When a failure means exit/promotion pause... then continuing to deliver projects is just rolling the dice. Eventually the smart people in an organization wise up and move to less measurable parts like management. It doesn't make sense to disallow this - as you smart/successful people moved into the bureaucracy and keep the training wheels on. On the other hand, it can get out of hand - particularly when hiring in a bureaucracy from the outside world.
    • namaria 4y ago
      I find this view interesting if you think the origin of the concept (of bureaucracy) illustrates the transition from arbitrary management towards a rule-based, rational (and very much productivity enhancing) approach...
      • quickthrower2 4y ago
        Great for work that is amenable to strict process. Getting burgers out in 3 minutes for example.
        • namaria 4y ago
          Also great when you want national resources managed by policy and not by cronyism. I get the modern trope that bureaucracy = bad, the whole point I'm trying to make is: the concept was first proposed as an idea of improvement in administration in the 1800s.
          • pixl97 4y ago
            One half of people think that bureaucracy is bad because it's in the way of the work they are trying to get done. The other half think it's bad because they can't steal everything that's not nailed down.
            • pishpash 4y ago
              And sometimes stealing everything that's not nailed down is the way work gets done, i.e. disruption. Trying to manage this out based on some anodyne rules out of a committee makes for a perfectly harmonious but completely static, risk-averse organization of little potential. It's like trying to censor speech. You get rid of "bad" speech but you also get no interesting speech. Is it really worth it?
      • bawolff 4y ago
        Most things have a golden middle amount, where its great in the right amount but sucks if you have too much or too little. Bureaucracy is no exception. Trying to make a large group of people work towards a common goal effectively is really hard without some management. Too much though is extremely stifling.
    • ajmurmann 4y ago
      A lot of things that we categorize as bureaucracy were created as a reaction to something bad happening. Someone shipped the product with an obvious security flaw -> every new product needs security review; some product had a name that violated someone else's trademark -> making committee gets created; someone kept expensing insane meals -> let's create clear expense guidelines; managers keep approving things that violated the expense policy -> let's higher auditors who review every expense report. This will keep happening to even the most incompetent person cannot do anymore harm. Meanwhile top performers leave. AFAIK the best way out of this has been Netflix's "freedom and responsibility". You expense crazy meals, you get a warning. You do it again, you are fired.
      • lll-o-lll 4y ago
        Tell me more about this Netflix “freedom and responsibility”. The natural trend towards inefficient “process for all the things” hits hard as a really deep insight. Security for example. Every new things needs security review. How does this fit into the Netflix “freedom and responsibility” concept?
      • naasking 4y ago
        > bureaucracy were created as a reaction to something bad happening Probably, but not every bad thing happening requires a response. Sometimes mistakes or bad things happen, and you just say, "use better sense next time", and then you move on.
        • Aeolun 4y ago
          Most people have been taught to do a Root Cause Analysis and improvement plan for everything.
          • gerash 4y ago
            that's still good. The missing piece is taking into account the cost of these "processes" throughout their lifetime when deciding whether or not to add yet another procedure.
      • 4y ago
  • _8j50 4y ago
    I don't have strong opinions about this but the working strategy I have come up with so far, when it comes to implementing my ideas is to keep it a secret/hidden from management until all the ground work is laid out and only then take on responsibility for it and publicly pursue it. As soon as management finds out it gets mananged into the least risky form that threatens the status quo minimally. I had many good ideas that were managed to death or inefficacy. The problem of perverse incentives is a pandemic at this point. Even after whatever i did showed a ton of value for little cost of any kind, they will eventually find a way to manage it into an inefficient thing or replace it by something much less blame inducing. As a worker, my focus is on generating value. Either I produce revenue or reduce risk and liability. For managers, this is a distant secondary concern, they are worried of what their boss might think and how they will appear in the management team and what the risk to them (not the company) would be if their reports fail or decide to leave. So, I could do the best job ever but that might make my manager look like he can't control me. I know what those of you that work in startups might think, the manager should feel like they succeeded in extracting value out of me instead right? That's startup culture, a startup wants to extract all the value out of you to maxize their success. Every other large org has politics and incentives such that even CEOs can't shake things up without gathering support, they can't create a culture that maximizes profits and productivity because that means less people might be needed or would have to do more or the worst case, what irks me the most: "If we do all that now, we will look bad if we don't keep doing this much in the future", i.e.: if you are a rockstar now, that only hurts you when you inevitably become less than a rockstar. So the snowballing inefficiency in my opinion is a result of trying to keep the balance between doing as little as you can vs making some sort of a profit and burning through budget money so you look important and valuable (the enemy of open source!). It really is frustrating if you get bored easy. I was surprised at the whole "quiet quitting" thing because I have been seeing people do that for a long time, people getting mad at me because now they think they look bad because I did anything more than the minimum. But really, just observing not complaining. I am now understanding these reasons. But it is difficult to fall in line and comply.
    • anonreeeeplor 4y ago
      In my opinion if you are creative, imaginative and have ideas - You should choke up on it. Creative work, inventing things - it’s the most value able thing. Not the “management.” If you are in a non creative environment and you find you have all the ideas, your focus should be either on leaving to build your own thing or to “take over” by effectively being the one who writes all the plans and who everyone comes to for ideas. Creative people who create value are rarely rewarded in most medium or large sized organizations. I realized after seeing how larger organizations work: There is no winning. It is like the red queen problem. The more you run, the faster you are expected to run. You will very rarely if ever be able to convert this into upward motion. Your manager is very non incentivized for you to get ahead. I personally feel like startups are simply the way to go. There is a much much larger market, many more options, granted it pays less, but you will get seen and credit for your work. And startup skillsets are generalist skills that are often much more transferable. And you are valued more in general as more depends on you. Reading what you said here: You are maladapting to a corrupt environment.x I know exactly what you are saying: I spent my career having my ideas snatched, ignored, implemented with great results and no recognition or reward or worse. I think you should just go to smaller firms in general.
  • spacemadness 4y ago
    All management at big corps has taught me is that delivering the product you’re working on is not the focus but also super necessary at the same time. I’m surprised people aren’t having more meltdowns trying to live the impossible reality modern managers promote.
    • quickthrower2 4y ago
      Modern managers (maybe old fashioned ones too) have a funny arithmetic where the sum of any series is 180 (the hours you have this month)
      • brazzledazzle 4y ago
        Said out loud: "How can we squeeze this in without re-prioritizing or impacting other planned work? Are we sure it's all estimated correctly?" Silently implied: "Spend more hours working. Alter existing estimates enough to fit it in." You can ask them if they're asking for overtime/crunch and they'll say, "No, work/life balance is important to us at BigCorp. It's just that this is as important as our existing planned work and it would make our team/department look amazing if we can get this done too.". Yada, yada, yada. You can keep pushing back but how many times can you do that before you're no longer considered a team player?
        • quickthrower2 4y ago
          Or silently implied “It’ll definitely be late. Not allowed to state the obvious so let it fail”
  • jdkee 4y ago
    “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.” -Oscar Wilde
    • namaria 4y ago
      Uh I can enable a nice bonus in my capital city now. But seriously, I read that in Leonard Nimoy's voice!
      • dyno12345 4y ago
        https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Civil_Service_(Civ4) https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Civil_Service_(Civ4)
  • sli 4y ago
    I worked for a startup for a few years that near the end, started bleeding (and firing) employees while added six more C-levels. For a while, they stopped coming into the office because they were blowing company money on lunches and wooing the same investor over and over. It was awful overall and I'm glad to be gone, but just like you say, that stretch where it was just developers in the office was by far the most productive. A major reason why is that we didn't get pulled off work to do fiddly little pet projects for our bosses.
    • screwturner68 4y ago
      I worked for a start up and I was at the bottom of the food chain with 3 managers Me->Supervisor->Manager->Director. They all managed the person below them and nobody else. One day I was at the corporate office and I got a hold of the head of HR and told him this was bullshit because I was getting worked like a rented mule because my work had to support three layers of management. The HR guy told me not to pay attention that I was the only employee and that I just need to look at the X's and O's and in a company an employee can't exist without a supervisor, a supervisor cannot exist without a manager and a manager cannot exist without a director, forget the $500,000 in costs for all these managers it's about the org chart. When I quit I called everyone one of them to resign and none of them answered the phone, I had to resign to some manager I never met. Each one did follow up with an email asking if they were the reason why I quit and I told each of them yes.
  • SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
    “Productive” probably means something different to you than it does to the people writing the checks…
    • RC_ITR 4y ago
      This is a common thread in the current outside-in analysis of Twitter. Management exists to guide the priorities of those below them, so when management is gone, people feel liberated. But the point of managers was to keep them on the tasks deemed most important to the long-term wellbeing of the company, even if those tasks seem boring and unimportant.
      • bluGill 4y ago
        When it works it is great, but too often management is responsible for deferring maintenance which save money now but is long term a cost
        • RC_ITR 4y ago
          Sure, totally agree that not all management is good management, but it does exist for a reason (and often that reason will always be unappreciated by those being managed).
          • civilized 4y ago
            The function of management exists for a reason, but the question is who should do it. Many knowledge workers are self-managing and the "oversight" provided by the managerial class is superfluous at best. In the past 6 years of my working career, a manager has meaningfully intervened in my work exactly once, and the outcome was weeks of time wasted. Manager-originated assignments have tended to be of inferior quality and impact to the ones I generate myself. I have not done a manager-assigned task for the company for 3 years, and I have not done a worthwhile management-assigned task for 6 years. My personal example is probably extreme, but what I bet is not extreme is the lack of accountability. There was never a time where my choices were recognized as superior to the managerial choices, no matter how many times this was proven true. Instead, managers seemingly just lost interest in assigning me work and let me figure it out myself, which frees me to be one of the objectively most productive people in the organization.
  • drewcoo 4y ago
    > management was an active impediment of getting work done That's kind of the point of bureaucracy, isn't it? To slow the rate of change in a system? The trick is adding bureaucracy (management layers) once something is not only working now but working in a way you'd like it to X-many years in the future. Then you freeze-ray your process with bureaucracy. Side note: that's also why a large, bureaucratic government is supposed to be good - it means it will be stable and only accept small, slow change.
    • jopsen 4y ago
      Reminds me of some clips from "Yes Minister" (old comedy show) where the official assisting the minister declares that the purpose of government is continuity/stability, etc. While funny, it's extra funny because it's true. Slow gradual change is much safer than massive revolutions -- regardless of whether your talking product development or politics. Big change in complex systems are best done gradually.
  • bonestamp2 4y ago
    > Quality of work also suffered due to the artificial deadlines imposed by the managers Ugh, artificial deadlines are the worst. They hurt morale, productivity, and quality.
    • JimtheCoder 4y ago
      "Ugh, artificial deadlines are the worst. They hurt morale, productivity, and quality." But sometimes/often required to actually get things done and shipped. On the flipside, waiting around for an engineer to overoptimize something that matters only in their head, or doing something they believe is necessary when it totally isn't...not stellar for overall team performance either. (I am speaking in general, not referring to the parent comments...)
      • juhanima 4y ago
        Well. If you treat adults like children, they will start behaving like children. If you treat them like adults, they will be more responsible. Or then they will rob you blind. Your mileage may vary and is very much dependent on other things like the general work culture. Anyway, failing to treat people like they would deserve to be treated is the most basic managerial failure. Any manager worth their salt should have an idea how their underlings need to be treated.
        • yowlingcat 4y ago
          > Or then they will rob you blind. Your mileage may vary and is very much dependent on other things like the general work culture. Seems like quite a wide variation -- so your proposed approach results in either the desired outcome or the worst case possible outcome? There's no middle ground? > Anyway, failing to treat people like they would deserve to be treated is the most basic managerial failure. Any manager worth their salt should have an idea how their underlings need to be treated. Have you managed a team before? I ask because the most basic managerial failure isn't "failing to treat people like they would deserve to be treated" but rather operating a team who delivers more value to the company than they cost, and ideally at or exceeding the level that leadership expects. That's it. That often requires the following: 1) Hiring high potential, high performance employees 2) Managing out low performance employees 3) Unlocking extra performance from employees where possible Of these three activities, it's only the third one that approaches what you've mentioned. Why haven't you mentioned the other two?
  • subharmonicon 4y ago
    First-level manager here. That’s after a very-long (nearly three decade) career as an IC in “big tech”. I think my take on this is not surprisingly different than yours. As a first-level manager my job is all about execution and getting things done. Being in 20+ hours of meetings a week gives me a lot more perspective on the big picture than the ICs on my team. They often think certain work is important because they have a very myopic view of what we do. I am always looking for the ICs to drive our work, and expect the more senior people to come to the table with ideas. Sometimes those ideas are great, and they have a low-level perspective that I am missing because my nose isn’t in the code as much as it once was (it still is, and I still commit code, but it’s opportunistic and not that frequent). But often they get stuck on fixing whatever the most recent thing that bothered them about our code rather than on what actually impacts customers in the long or short term. There is a lot of management above first-level that doesn’t seem to add a lot of value, but I’m not sure how much of that is inherent versus the specifics of who is in those roles. I expect my manager to be focused on strategy, long-term direction, team composition, building relationships with other orgs, etc. Up a level from that, again an even broader perspective. Depending on who is filling those roles I may or may not see those behaviors. It’s very common and convenient to focus on personal productivity as an IC, but if 25% or 50% or 90% of that effort is going towards things that ultimately don’t have impact for customers, it’s not very productive after all.
    • andrei_says_ 4y ago
      If I’m reading this correctly, you’re saying that there needs to be someone on a higher level to ensure that the correct work gets done. How do you balance the additional work needed to provide the necessary transparency to this decision-maker? Providing this additional reporting often becomes an unreasonably (I think) large part of the job, creates friction, and unexpected changes of direction interrupt flow. As a manager with experience and sensibility for both the importance of doing the right thing and productivity, satisfaction and flow - what are some ways you lower the cost of managing?
      • IMTDb 4y ago
        One way to lower the cost of managing is to promote transparency within the organisation: allow and encourage manager to read the PR and the discussion around them, this will give them some sense of the progress of the projects. Provide KPI/OKR about the state of the company on a very regular basis, allow and encourage IC to take a look at them. Announce good and bad news on dedicated channels, allow and encourage employees to read them. Because information is freely accessible, there is less need for dedicated "reporting" processes every time a manager is added into the system.
  • juhanima 4y ago
    It seems to me like a law of nature that every managerial function seeks to increase its influence and headcount by definition. Without a constant and vigilant effort to keep this tendency in check, every managerial organization will keep growing and adding bureaucracy just to justify its own existence and increase its reach and power. I think the root cause of this tendency is the law of the least resistance. Creating new things is hard, especially if they go against the conventional wisdom. Supervising and managing things is easy, especially if the people being supervised are professional enough not to need much supervision. Then the managers job is basically just to stay out of the way, which is quite easy. Of course even managers get eventually bored if they feel they have no impact. That's when the reorganizations start. That's also when the best time to actually create something new ends.
    • JimboOmega 4y ago
      There are many situations, especially as a middle manager, where you are incentivized to play organizational games more than actually deliver. We (I'm a middle manager myself) Aren't stupid, so we will. More headcount and influence means more (at least potential) business impact, and often promotions. If the organization encourages us to fight with other managers to get more of that, that's what we'll do instead of running our organizations better.
  • irrational 4y ago
    This has been my experience too. I work for a Fortune 100 company. For the first 15 years we (a team consisting of 2 full time programmers, a qa person, and a few contractors) were embedded within the sales organization. Since they were sales and we were IT, they pretty much left us to our own devices. We got so much done (and were invited to all the sales parties, sales has a LOT of parties). Eventually someone high enough up in the actual IT org got wind of us and made a stink until we were moved into IT. Holy Meetings Batman. I had no idea it was possible to schedule so many meetings. Our productivity over the past 5 years has basically ground to a halt. We get as much done in a year as we used to get done in a month.
  • NikolaNovak 4y ago
    >>"All of our deferred maintenance issues, some dating back over a decade, were addressed in the first 6 months of being freed of the managers" Right... So how many business goals got accomplished? The techie in me hundred percent empathizes with you. I want a Clean system based on best practices and modern technology stack. It took me a long time to understand that my technical OCD is irrelevant from business goals perspective. I don't know your full story but as presented, there's a possibility that while you enjoyed six months without management, business suffered for it. Or not - don't know the details. But it's important to understand that my techie perspective of what's important to accomplish, and business perspective, may differ. Management's job (amongst others) is to enact company strategy and prioritize business goals. To wit, a business may be more successful with certain percentage of outstanding maintenance issues (his ibportant was that decade old issue really?? :) while having important new features built.
    • malinens 4y ago
      Quality of code is very relevant for business success for millions of reasons. * good and self-respecting developers will not work on bad quality code. Business will be left with bad/mediocre devs who will implement bussiness needs slowly and with bad quality * good code base and good dev practises make development much faster and with fewer errors, with easier new developer onboarding etc. How many of IT projects have had a rewrite a costly rewrite because it became unmanageable? 80% managers think only about business needs- even those who previously were developers themselves because it is convenient and they do not have sell that maintenance is also needed
      • KyeRussell 4y ago
        Do you really think that OP doesn’t understand tech debt? In my experience, both of others, and certainly of my own proclivities, if an IC is left to their own devices, the work they do will deviate further and further from business goals. Yes, that includes long term business goals like “not needing to do a big bang rewrite because everything goes to shit”. These threads tend to give the impression that maintenance is a completely unique need that you need to be a Big Brain Developer to understand. Truth be told this is the case in loads of other fields. “Long term thinking”, “short term thinking”, and prioritising appropriately, are well and truly within the remit for people and these positions, and improper execution of the above is one id the things that separates good and bad managers/executives. Barring a good pairing of a development team that always has the wider business context in mind, and a good management / executive team that understands the nuances of development, this back and forth over maintenance and housekeeping is always going to happen to an extent. And to be honest you don’t want a development team that has the wider business context in mind to the extent of whoever is “above” them. Past a point, it’s a distraction.
  • SergeAx 4y ago
    > Without managers, productivity soared. So, the revenue that year increased dramatically? How many new clients your company acquired?
    • karmelapple 4y ago
      This comment made me think of the book The Goal, by Goldratt. I wonder who at the company was tasked with clarifying what the ultimate goal was to every employee? And if everyone measured success in that way?
      • SergeAx 4y ago
        In another great, although fiction book "Cryptonomicon" I found a life-changing passage about the ultimate raison d'être of every commercial company in the world: "increasing the value of shareholders". That goal can be achieved by paying dividends or by increasing company's capitalization. Those are still too abstract metrics for most of ICs, so as a manager I am using proxy metrics of revenue and new clients.
    • bitcharmer 4y ago
      Such a bizarre comment to make. Not all work in an enterprise yields revenue. Security or compliance or HR are great examples of that. Also, very often work that you do doesn't bring immediate benefits. They are usually deferred by months or sometimes even years.
      • SergeAx 4y ago
        But we are talking about soared productivity. It cannot left key company metrics unaffected, otherwise what kind of productivity it is?
        • bitcharmer 4y ago
          Not sure how to respond to that. You just dismissed everything I said without addressing it.
• anonreeeeplor 4y ago
  The reward for success in most corporations is to be able to hire more people. I can’t think of many situations where being successful means you get to degrade the quality of what you are doing. The problem is peoples egos and signaling. I once worked at a company and did this huge set of projects on a shoe string using creativity and hard work. A manager was hired in another parallel group to mine and they got to immediately hire six people. It made me so annoyed because it felt like I had demonstrated results and not gotten resourced. It sets off these ego driven hiring wars. Once one manager starts staffing up, you immediately felt threatened and under siege and at war. If your competitor peers (they are never your friend) out hire you, then soon their people are coming into your area trying to take over work under you. The entire thing is super corrupt. Like I personally don’t like over hiring but if you have never felt what it is like to be put in that position - it is quite threatening. It also signals if you don’t hire the way other teams are hiring they you are a failure as a manager or as a team. After this experience I realized how compromised you are being middle management: you lose skill and value and you become at the mercy of impossible to control politics coming from all directions. And then what happens next? Well, many times the hiring manager who built their little empire leaves and dumps all the people they hired loose. They all end up in a sort of limbo. Original manager had an idea of what to do with them, now someone else ends up having to baby sit them, often without any vision for what to do. This process of hiring and leaving just degrades the talent and dead weight: it’s such a sort of baked in disease and hard to get rid of. I personally won’t be a middle manager ever again. At least not one that doesn’t report direct to a ceo.
  • WalterBright 4y ago
    > The reward for success in most corporations is to be able to hire more people. In business: 1. success => more budget 2. failure => budget gets cut In government: 1. success => budget gets cut 2. failure => more budget
    • rqtwteye 4y ago
      Not necessarily true. In my company the rule is: 10 offshore devs/testers get nothing done => hire 20, if that that doesn't work, hire 50. The actual work could probably be done by 2 or 3 competent people.
• neonate 4y ago
  http://web.archive.org/web/20230107180139/https://hbr.org/2016/09/excess-management-is-costing-the-us-3-trillion-per-year http://web.archive.org/web/20230107180139/https://hbr.org/20... https://archive.ph/HnGhE https://archive.ph/HnGhE
• AdilZtn 4y ago
  How did we go from 10 employees for 1 manager to 4.7:1?
  • readthenotes1 4y ago
    parkinson's law. no, really, this is fully laid out in his essays from the 1950s. If you have not read them, you should. They are easy and insightful.
    • AdilZtn 4y ago
      I've read the Wikipedia page, that's insightful! I'll read the book, thank you.
    • stainforth 4y ago
      Are there similar characteristics to be used or applied from the concept of induced demand (I suppose the traffic filling extra lanes example) with Parkinson's law?
      • readthenotes1 4y ago
        Not sure it's the same? Parkinson talks about purposefully (whether conscious or not) generating increased work whereas I thought induced demand was mostly harvesting latent demand. But I'm neither an economist nor traffic engineer --tell me more!
• sinenomine 4y ago
  A very underrated take. Consider how the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93managerial_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria... gets a very privileged treatment by the media and what this says about our society. There should be no sinecures if we strive for fairness.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• sircastor 4y ago
  At my work you have to go up 3 levels before we have someone who’s actual job is just managing. and that person was primarily brought in to sort out issues on another team. I’m fortunate that a lot of our org is very functional and doing the work.
  • therealdrag0 4y ago
    What do the first 2 levels do?
• analog31 4y ago
  For years I've struggled to come up with a "theory of the firm" that's intellectually satisfying but not cynical. Why do we have management? I've only been able to come up with a couple of hypotheses: 1. Principal-agent problem. Who do the employees work for? Self interest. The customers? Self interest. Suppliers? Self interest. The company has to figure out how to reconcile the self interest of individual participants with the interest of the company. If you let everybody do whatever they want with no repercussions, they will (figuratively speaking) walk away with anything that isn't nailed down. So far the only way we know how to prevent this is to assign humans to guard the interest of the business. 2. Failure mode. John Gall claimed that all sufficiently complex systems operate in failure mode 100% of the time. What he meant was that some or all of the controls have been bypassed, and the system is being operated manually. Humans are (at least for now) uniquely capable of functioning in systems that are in failure mode, e.g., by breaking the rules when necessary. This is why I doubt that management can be automated. Now, while managers are doing both of those things, perhaps even just instinctively, they can be doing good and productive things. I'm actually quite happy with my own boss.
  • namaria 4y ago
    Why are you melding agency theory with pop science systems theory to replace sound economics (transaction cost theory of the firm)? I think you'd like to read Coase (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm)
    • ttyprintk 4y ago
      Benkler has also been posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5723395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5723395
  • kqr 4y ago
    1 is not a particularly good explanation in my mind for two reasons: (a) people are great at working not in their own interest, together, on something greater than themselves. In fact, I've observed a negative correlation between this and management, in that the spirit of being "in it together for the greater good" seems to be weakened in organisations with more management. (b) if people inherently only work out of self interest, then so would managers and the whole thing would break down anyway.
• kqr 4y ago
  There is a good way to do "lots of management": it's when a small amount of bureaucracy is distributed over management with plenty of autonomy so that managers get to spend 80 % of their time with technical work and only do a small amount of clerical work. That creates skilled managers that can step in and substitute for individual contributors. It also teaches them what the day-to-day work actually looks like, what the culture of the company actually is, what the obstacles actually are, and so on. Technically active management is super powerful, and the only way to achieve it is with a large group of managers, because a small group won't have time to regularly dive into technical details. The problem is that's never what happens. Any time managers have excess time on their hands, they don't find something valuable to do -- instead they invent more bureaucracy and administration to fill their time, and make the organisation less effective. Why is that? I genuinely want to know because if I ever get the opportunity to help shape an organisation, I would want technically active management. I think it's critical for success.
  • beezlebroxxxxxx 4y ago
    My workplace has a lot of managers, many of which I find to be rather redundant; however, my manager is the first one that I have ever had in my career that is particularly "good". He's less technical than some of the people on the team, but what he is very good at is limiting the ability for other departments to interfere with my team's work. He's almost like a border guard and diplomat for our team. Any sort of potential project involving co-operation between departments always goes to him first to figure out whether it fits our team. He also has our team's back in saying, "no, that is not my team's fault" --- in other words, he won't throw us under the bus. He lets us get our work done, and also provides us with clear higher level direction by managing how other departments interact with us. When a big project involving multiple departments develops, he is the one responsible for scheduling and...leading, for lack of a better word. I think some people bristle at the idea of being led, but a good leader is worth their weight in gold. A lot of bad managers are ultimately simply bad leaders. Now, can every department have what my team has? I don't know. But, I can say that his work as a manager has actively improved team productivity and task completion. It's very refreshing once you have a good manager. You're free to just work while he manages the teams bureaucracy, that is other departments pushing the team in a thousand directions at once.
• lr4444lr 4y ago
  This figure includes both the public and private sectors but does not include individuals in IT-related functions Huh? Why exclude IT?
• Devasta 4y ago
  There are very very few companies that cannot be improved by randomly firing half the folks with MBAs.
  • nlitened 4y ago
    The hard part is finding out which half to fire.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • ornornor 4y ago
      Well, the unlucky part of course; those that get fired. You wouldn’t want unlucky people managing your company.
    • Devasta 4y ago
      Honestly, a cointoss is probably fine.
      • easterncalculus 4y ago
        It’s about as much thought as they’re putting into their own layoffs.
        • nlitened 4y ago
          How would you approach layoffs?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• nimbius 4y ago
  the most tangible leech-vichy of the capitalist ranks cost capitalists three trillion a year you say? surely theyve some organ meats that could be salvaged!
• LaserToy 4y ago
  Every control/alignment system has overhead. That is exactly why distributes systems are both hard and slow, just look and Spanner/Cockroach and compare them so single node PSQL. To get rid of managers, you will need to solve comms problem.
• tmsh 4y ago
  The irony coming from an HBS publication. The opposite argument is that we should make managers more effective at unlocking their team and org’s potential. And that the number is just about right (when you consider two pizza teams and the managers of managers in larger orgs). Good managers help organize the most effective thing known to humans: humans.
• qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
  You mean the VP of Equity Diversity and climate relations and 1000 people under them are costing companies but not contributing to actual productivity and products ?
  • therealdrag0 4y ago
    Of course not having a direct connection to products and productivity doesn’t mean there is no value provided. Things like private campuses, private buses, chefs, ping ping etc. may or may not improve product productivity but they provide value. Sorta akin to “home makers”, it would be easy to infer a lack of economic productivity as having no value.
  • refurb 4y ago
    No, because that VP and their team means the companies stock is ESG approved which means raising funding just got easier.
• birdymcbird 4y ago
  > “we believe a concerted effort to reverse the rising tide of bureaucracy offers a more immediate and less speculative route to enhanced economic performance” David sacks was on episode of show “UnHeard”. Hit nail on head. ‘professional elite’ or ‘surplus elites’ he called them. sacks came at it from politic angle. we know what happening but media and everyone quiet. this manager class say right politically correct thing. in two big tech company me saw anti pattern where so many managers who give no real output. directors.. product and engineering management.. all involved in increasing headcount fight territory battles. product manager and managers of product managers who just have meetings. product same thing as it existed 2 year ago..3 year ago.. 5 year ago. no innovation. maybe find way to show more ad. me immigrant in this country. what me saw is h1b and other visa farm. entire industry of importing from other country. people sit idle. if stock price $100 a share this organization not contributing even 1$ to that price. revenue is from legacy ad business. managers just bureaucratic up charge and organization so slow and resistant to change they contribution maybe -5$ or lower negative number.
  • sinenomine 4y ago
    Overproduction of elites is a very real phenomenon.
• scottcodie 4y ago
  What is the role of an engineering manager exactly? I've been thinking about this question for awhile and I get wildly different answers depending on who I ask. It seems to me that an engineering manager contributes to the intellectual product, attempts to solve communication issues between teams, and fills in gaps for what the team needs. It is amazing to me that there is so much variance for something that should be a well defined role.
  • troupe 4y ago
    The best engineering managers I've seen help remove unhelpful friction for the team. This includes helping the team make decisions quickly, facilitating interactions with other teams, shielding them from unnecessary meetings, etc.
  • tick_tock_tick 4y ago
    It's because most companies agree an EM and PM are different roles but since most teams are setup up per project with an EM&PM per team they tend to have huge overlap.
  • icedchai 4y ago
    Most are "facilitators", working out communication and coordination issues. Very rarely do they contribute to the actual product. Often they simply don't have time, because there are too many meetings. Earlier in my career, the engineering managers were more hands on, more of a tech lead + people manager hybrid. They would work on the spec, understand the product, and do some coding that was out of the critical path. You still find those types in some companies, but it's become rarer (at least for me.)
  • astrange 4y ago
    Remove friction and annoyance from the team, help with scheduling, ensure you're pointed at useful work rather than what you personally want to do, hire new people, write performance reviews, politely stack rank you. Especially good lower level managers also hang onto some of their tasks from when they were an IC.
• dimitar 4y ago
  I spent some time as a middle manager, talked way too much with friends in similar situations at other places and I learned the following: * It is very easy to be both very busy and do nothing useful at all. Just accept and schedule a bunch of meetings. * Your potential of improving things depends mostly on the C-level suite. Trying to get buy-in from other levels of management is a waste of time. * Middle managers are quite often recreating other orgs they aspire to without any thought if their prescriptions are suitable for their orgs. * The C-level are actually behaving more like individual contributors than managers. The CEO is typically working mostly on closing deals and attracting investors. * Lower level managers are often created from senior or valuable employees because a title change is the only way of rewarding them and using their experience * Some of the best managers are HR professionals, but they are completely sidelined. HR is working to protect the companies which for good and evil can clash with your goals. * No one is a prophet in their own village, not matter how loyal you are climbing the ladder, and how much you learn along the way chances are they are still going to hire someone from the outside to be your boss that knows less than you. It's better to switch orgs when making big jumps in your career. * There are certain pure management skills (everything with budgets) which are quite valuable, and managers are either undertrained So, if I ever run my own company of over a 100 people this is what I'm going to do: - make sure executives / senior managers are doing as much decision making as possible, while accepting input from every senior person in the company, manager or not. - Promote only experts in their fields, preferably from your own ranks as managers. - Instead of introducing hierarchy, consider instead providing managers with experts in management as deputies. Recruit fresh MBAs or experienced HR professionals. This way they help instead of hindering. - Make sure every role has ways to grow while remaining individual contributors. Just give them levels, like Software Engineer lvl 12. Make sure they have free capacity to get delegated tasks or for their own initiatives.
  • JustSomeNobody 4y ago
    > * Lower level managers are often created from senior or valuable employees because a title change is the only way of rewarding them and using their experience Ah, yes, because there's some made up BS chart in HR that shows how much each job pays. "Oh, we can't pay you more than $X." BS, you can - you just won't for some stupid made up reason.
• deterministic 4y ago
  I am pretty sure that you can improve the productivity of almost all companies by firing half of middle management and using the money saved to hire skilled people who do the actual work. The most productive and successful company I worked for have zero middle management (150+ staff). The worst most dysfunctional company I have worked for had more middle managers than software developers (50+ staff).
  • sinenomine 4y ago
    This might even work, but see how much poison Elon Musk got out of his attempt? For this guild these careers are their lifeblood, and the process of minting these (I.e. ensuring the pathway for leeching from fortune500 profits exists for eternity) is a sacred, maybe even inherited, secret. Any interruption of this dynamic is sacrilege and they will fight tooth and nail to discourage anyone who tries. There needs something to be done here, but it won't be easy. Those who will approach this lightly will perish.
  • therealdrag0 4y ago
    Those are pretty small companies. Imo discussions at that scale should be separate than mega corps; though people leverage the same criticism at both. It seems like bureaucracy is at worst inevitable and at best actually provides a lot of competitive value. For example has there ever been a successful empire without a strong bureaucracy? And aren’t mega corps just modern empires?
    • deterministic 4y ago
      I think it works the same whether it is a small company or an empire. The key is the bureaucracy to worker ratio. You need just enough bureaucracy to glue things together. But anything more than that starts being counter productive. In my examples the productive company had a bureaucracy/staff ratio of close to 0. The dysfunctional company had a bureaucracy/staff ratio of more than 2. Enough said.
• FpUser 4y ago
  >"Managers and administrators tend to be better educated than the workforce" I'd say in many modern industries, science, r&d this would not be the case in average.
• abetusk 4y ago
  I think this dovetails nicely with Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" [0] thesis. From the Wikipedia entry, it looks like 37% of Britons polled thought their jobs were "bullshit", with the HVB article talking about an excess management of around 17%. I wonder how much overhead is "natural/health" and whether the amount of "bullshit" jobs is related to a "full employment" mentality, maybe even subsidized by the government. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
  • myshpa 4y ago
    > 37% of Britons polled thought their jobs were "bullshit" I've seen numbers as high as 70%+. Not everybody is ready to acknowledge that his/her work is meaningless. If that's true, nothing would change if 3/4 of the workforce stopped working tomorrow. And iff that's true (and I strongly suspect it is), than the basic income is the only logical outcome (imho).
  • astrange 4y ago
    Polling doesn't necessarily find you the truth here. It's like when you poll business owners in California and they say it's a bad environment for business, by which they mean they want lower taxes, not that somewhere else would actually get them more customers.
• Animats 4y ago
  That's from the Harvard Business School. Perhaps they can start by reducing Harvard's count of 7,024 full time administrators. [1] https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2022/12/02/harvard-employs-7024-total-full-time-administrators-only-slightly-fewer-than-the-undergraduate-population https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2022/12/02/harvard-employs-...
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • no_butterscotch 4y ago
    Steve Bannon, the old Trump goon, I forget his actual position, had talked about the growth of the "administrative state" when referring to government. I don't agree with his politics over all, but on this front I do and see similar trends in other institutions, the education system being one of the most obvious. We see the growth of the "administrator class/caste" in education at the cost of rising tuition while seeing no improvement in student/teacher ratios, etc. At the same time teachers who rightly spend their time doing their job, which is teaching, are often in a place where they then have to fight the shit rolling downhill from the expanded administrative caste. They could fight the administrator class, but the administrators do this all day every day as their actual job, it's fun to them. The teacher's actual job is teaching, the time and energy needed to fight these battles mean the administrator class wins. I think this dynamic plays out at our tech companies with the expansion of various non-product roles like HR that impose more trainings or "re-education"/box-checking. Or ERGs, employee resource groups for every different employee because our current times are ones of sensitivities. Or the new DEI orgs, agree or disagree, they didn't exist a decade or two ago but are now prevalent in all spaces and DEI consultants are one of the most widely growing positions inside Fortune 500. I think these things will continue to compound.
    • javiramos 4y ago
      https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Jerry_Pournelle%27s_Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Jerry_Pournelle%27s_Iron_Law_...
    • 4y ago
• mike503 4y ago
  Maybe they can get rid of SAFe and save half of that?
• PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  When I worked at efficient tech companies, I had a hard time understanding these articles. If anything, it felt like we had too few managers to handle typical management things and the engineers were often losing time to dealing with things that could have been more efficiently handled by a responsible manager. Then I took a job at a management-heavy company. They had people with different manager titles for absolutely everything. I ended up on a small group where we somehow ended up with more managers than engineers. Some of the excess managers used the situation to do very little. They'd join a couple meetings, maybe respond to a couple e-mails, then basically disappear. Others started inventing work to fill the time. It wasn't uncommon for us to be scheduled for 4-5 hours of meetings in a single day because different managers felt like they needed to make themselves visible and point to things on the calendar to show that they were working. The weirdest part was how everyone sort of acknowledged that the situation wasn't good, but refused to do anything about it. When I tried to push back on some of the meetings, our CTO recommended that our team should join the meetings but continue to code during the meetings. It turned into this weird circus where we were spending most of our days in virtual meetings, trying to do work while managers would pepper us with questions. When we had layoffs, they laid off mostly engineers. The ratio of managers to engineers went up. More meetings ensued. When the CEO got angry that engineering wasn't producing enough, management's first reaction was to request more headcount for more managers. They insisted that with more managers they could more effectively manage the engineers. So they hired more managers, who scheduled more meetings... The lesson I learned was that once a company becomes infected with managerial excess, your situation is only going to get worse. Get out and move to a company that understands how to operate and how to manage their managers.
  • csomar 4y ago
    It's not humorous but been through exactly that. When the CEO sees degrading performance in the engineering team (and he has little technical knowledge or little knowledge of what's going on in the engineering department), his first intuition is to hire either managers or consultants to understand what's going on and improve the situation. Of course, for him, it would be crazy to just go down and ask a couple engineers what's exactly going wrong. None of the managers is going to admit that the problem is theirs. They fully know that and they know that it being uncovered is the end of their jobs. So they'll keep at it until the whole thing burn down to the ground. The only savior here is a new CEO/CTO.
• alfor 4y ago
  Go for mob programming. Zero manager, zero meeting, zero standup. True team work. Project owner work with the programers (when needed) https://youtu.be/28S4CVkYhWA https://youtu.be/28S4CVkYhWA
• diogenescynic 4y ago
  This is why US infrastructure is so much more expensive--it sure isn't the labor costs. Germany and Denmark just built an 11 mile under-sea tunnel connecting the two countries that cost $7B. Meanwhile, San Francisco built a 1.7 mile subway that cost $2B--more than the Singapore airport. The institutionalized grift has become endemic in the US. We can't build houses, infrastructure, get healthcare, or any of the things other developed democracies have because bribery/corruption have become legalized as lobbying.
• BirAdam 4y ago
  Ultimately, how much management is required is a result of team culture, the number of departments in the organization, and how many products are being produced. If you have too many departments or products, you should split the company into more companies. If the culture is wrong, you need to fire the toxic elements or those who do not fit well. In general, organizations grow as needs arise and there isn’t too much actual strategic thought put into “organizational design.” A top heavy organizational structure is a rather obvious result as people when generally hire to solve issues rather than rethinking the entire organization.
• psadri 4y ago
  Are things so simple? Jobs have income which feeds back into the economy. The $3T figure is the expense burden, but much of spent back into the economy (and also taxed).
• anon223345 4y ago
  I’m in management consulting One of the most successful trends we’re seeing lately is something only brave companies are willing to do… They get rid of managers entirely Instead, for performance (instead of one on one’s for example) employees get a “counselor” The caveat is that the counselors findings have weight This is working very well and a few brave companies are trying it. Also employees are encouraged to say to their counselors “this project or team sucks move me to another one” and they are. They are also free to just switch counselors If someone is constantly bouncing around, that’s a better indicator of who to get rid of than some random manager beefing with an employee
  • nlitened 4y ago
    I am not sure I understood what counselors do. Where could I read more about this?
• JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  The best managers I have had are the ones I've rarely seen. Don't misunderstand, I see them all the time, I just don't have to interact with them all the time. They aren't in every meeting, every SCRUM, every this or that. They check in routinely and ask if I'm okay, then step back out of the way. We have scheduled 1:1s once per month so that come reviews there are no surprises. They also step in when a team member is struggling and rehome that person. If you're a manager, you absolutely suck at your job if, come reviews, the person you review is shocked about their review. Some people are dense, I get that, but you don't get a pass for that.
  • brazzledazzle 4y ago
    The worst manager I've ever had let her ego and control issues spiral to the point that she demanded that every member of the team invite her to every call, forward every meeting and (I kid you not) add her to every direct message we had in ms teams. She would join two calls simultaneously instead of rescheduling or delegating and thought telling the other participants as much made her look important instead of someone with poor time management skills. She would quietly work with other teams on projects right up until the point that real implementation work needed to be done–committing to designs, tasks and technologies without consulting anyone on the team. This would inevitably lead to mistakes due to outdated information or lack of knowledge and we'd essentially need to redo discovery and planning with the added bonus of getting it done fast enough that it wouldn't interfere with her committed deadline that no longer matched the original scope she based it on. If we somehow got invited to any of these early meetings she would ask for us to be removed. She had to have involvement in nearly every decision and if she had an opinion/interest/idea she would make the call no matter how low level or inconsequential it was. She clearly wanted us to function as programmable robotic automatons that followed her exact specifications instead of engineers to trust with building solutions or achieving goals. She would even tell us how many points to assign to our stories. But I think the most egregious thing was her need to control us even in company hackathons and other empowerment initiatives where we were supposed to be given complete autonomy. If we wanted to participate in a hackathon we had to join under her team and work on her idea. Keep in mind that this person was our manager and had the power to have us work her ideas every other day of the year. The idea of us building what we wanted or working outside of her control for even a few days was intolerable. She was intensely concerned with the perception of others but failed to realize that joining or taking control of every little thing reflected poorly on her ability to delegate and manage her team. Her enormous ego stopped her from trusting her team's decision making and she had such an overinflated sense of self-importance she didn't pick up on the fact that the bottleneck she made of herself had earned her a reputation for never delivering.
• Gustomaximus 4y ago
  I wonder what is generally the best way is to trim excess in the correct way. How do you seperate doers and value add from dead weight. Maybe some kind of 360 review where you try to find out who people go to when there is a problem. I suspect you'd find a small percentage of people that are known for sorting issues and these are the managers you want to keep. For example, a couple months ago a company I consult to had an email get pushed through 5 people in a team that needed something simple to be done. It wasn't my job but when it came via me I did it, was like a 5 min task any one of the previous people could have done. If I was the manager of that team I would ask each person on that thread to explain why they added someone else to the email vs just getting it done as you end up with 6 people on an email chain for no good reason. This kind of behaviour is common in this company and its quite amazing to me. Full of people shuffling work vs doing it.
• slt2021 4y ago
  It is because corporate America is filled with MBA graduates who study based on Harvard Business Review's and Harvard Business Schools' case studies and learn best practices from the best administrators - Harvard itself.
• JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Line management can be good. A good executive suite can deal with finance, market development etc. But middle managers? Motivated to get the biggest budget and deliver the smallest increment (to reduce risk), they are actively working against the interests of everybody. Which makes sense; they have no contact with customers or investors. Just their little myopic budget-meetings and miniscule deliverable promises. Line them all up in the parking lot, and shoot them with one bullet. To save money on bullets.
• a_d 4y ago
  Serious Question: Why are managers needed? What is the steelman argument for managers and for not having managers?
  • presentation 4y ago
    ICs are looking at problems through a magnifying glass, colored by the nature of their specialization. Managers are supposed to be looking at the state of their team/company i more broadly, making sure that ICs are motivated to do good work, and direct their effort towards the most high-impact things, which is hard to do if you don’t have full context or an overly specialized mindset. Once a business gets large enough then it’s impossible for any one person to fully understand everything across the entire business and to have the mindset to make the best decisions. Focusing on the wrong things can waste up to 100% of the effort the IC expends, even if that IC thinks they’re being efficient. Make effective decisions is valuable. Good corporate management can make a company many orders of magnitude more effective. Bad corporate management can do the opposite.
  • refurb 4y ago
    A good example… You work on a payments team for a online retailer. You want to fix the tech debt because spending 6 months would let you roll out a new payment system that would reduce manual processing by 50%. The CEO looks at the business challenges and realizes that warehouse bottlenecks are limiting volume and sales. If you fix the payments, it fucks up inventory tracking, meaning they can’t increase volume and that’ll put next year’s growth at risk. So your manager says “no, just keep doing the manual processing, I can hire more people if needed” and you think he’s an idiot because it’s so obvious a better payment system would “fix everything”
• college_physics 4y ago
  Its not "costing" $3T, its creating it. The managerial class will spend $3T in the economy and some of it will surely trickle down to somebody actually working. Jokes aside, while the concept of bullshit jobs is instantly relatable by anybody who ever worked in a non-trivial organisation, determing what fraction of that is completely bogus is not so obvious. Maybe the incentives generated by a corporate structure are broken even by its own narrowly defined monetary optimisation objectives. Maybe we underestimate what it takes to herd humans at scale.
  • physPop 4y ago
    It's a cost from the perspective of shareholder value and business productivity.
• nazgulnarsil 4y ago
  Realized revenue and profit are not the job of the layers of indirection. Liability laundering is.
• amitamit 4y ago
  I was more interesting in learning about the $3T/year number. Turns out that it is eye-catching but the math here is very dubious. They have several factors - the primary being their taking a few very specific instances of companies, declaring these companies' manager-employee ratio be the ideal, and then computing how much other companies would save if they had similar manager-employee ratio. This is just wrong. By the same argument, given that Apple's retail revenue is $5,500 per sq feet while Target is only $300, we should conclude that Target is wasting retail space and it should save money by shutting down 94% of its locations. That is of course completely incorrect - these are two very different businesses. The same problem exists with the original analysis.
  • tome 4y ago
    Yes, $3T/y is 10% of US GDP, so this doesn’t pass the smell test.
• hnarn 4y ago
  http://archive.today/HnGhE http://archive.today/HnGhE
• kqr 4y ago
  I sense a recurring theme in these discussions: Thesis: "Here are all sorts of ways to run a good organisation with fewer managers." Antithesis: "That sounds nice for a little startup but it would never work in a big organisation." Is the antithesis valid? It rarely comes with any citation beyond gut feeling. If yes, what's the synthesis?
  • nlitened 4y ago
    I’d like to go with wider interpretation of Conway’s law[0], and think as if people organizations and code bases develop under similar laws of nature. Then I’d rephrase the theses: “Here are all sorts of ways to write good code with fewer helper classes and less boilerplate code”. “That sounds nice for a small code base but it would never work for a large code base”. I don’t have a proper synthesis for these, but I’d say that large code bases must be split into smaller ones, so that each sub-project is more focused and has better code quality. But also all those things matter only while the code is your product that makes you money. If you write the code as a contractor for sale (or you prepare a company for an IPO), you’re not incentivized to improve code quality, you just need to cram enough features in order to close the project and forget about it (or do absolute minimum to maintain it while your maintenance contract or vesting schedule lasts). [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
• naqeeb 4y ago
  I do think there is ambiguity in the value of a Director/VP of Eng in an Engineering organization. It's definitely harder to quantify. From my experience, it's important to see your role as enabling people in the organization to be more effective rather than just you and your team. That can take the shape of: - Streamlining the hiring process - Spend time on reducing build time / decreasing the time to run tests / focusing on local environment setup - Reviewing how teams plan and interact with each other
• smcleod 4y ago
  I think realistically the true figure would be a lot higher. In my 17 years working in tech - most (but not all) managers mostly serve to promote their own existence. The more sociopathic ones seem to try to buzzword their way to C-suite roles, while the majority end up living out their working lives booking "important" meetings with far too many attendees and "fixing" problems by purchasing new "enterprise" software/tools. The upper floors of many companies become a vast sea of Madogiwa Zoku[1]. [^1] https://japanesequizzes.com/portfolio/madogiwa-zoku/ https://japanesequizzes.com/portfolio/madogiwa-zoku/
• profhamel 4y ago
  Gary Hamel here. I co-wrote this piece for HBR a few years ago. Since then, the problem of bureaucratic drag has only gotten worse. Our most recent estimate is that an excess of bureaucracy and lack of empowerment reduces economic output by $18 trillion dollars per year across the OECD. The average Fortune 500 company has 8 layers of management, and few truly new ideas survive the journey up the chain of command. As per Gallup, only 1 in 5 employees believe their ideas matter at work, and only 1 in 11 are free to experiment with new methods, tools and products. If you want some practical ideas on how to bust bureaucracy, whatever your role or title, check out my book “Humanocracy” (available at Amazon), or “The New Human Movement” video series on YouTube. Love all your comments.
  • ornornor 4y ago
    > If you want some practical ideas on how to bust bureaucracy, whatever your role or title, check out my book “Humanocracy” (available at Amazon), or “The New Human Movement” video series on YouTube. Didn’t know about your book/YT and haven’t read/watched them. That said, isn’t it a very fast road to nowhere and burnout? I’ve tried many times to fix bad management and its impact on software quality/customers (can’t help it, i hate avoidable toil). Every single time it achieved nothing whatsoever in the long term (the minuscule improvements I managed to make over 12–18 months were undone a few weeks after I left). But I had expanded large amount of energy and political capital resulting in having to leave the companies to protect my sanity followed by months to recover from the burnout. Is there a point in fixing companies that don’t want to be helped (which seems to be the vast majority)? It’s their cash to set on fire after all and changing jobs regularly to keep it fresh (every company has a slightly different twist on dysfunctional) seems to be a better strategy for the individual cog.
    • cutemonster 4y ago
      > Is there a point in fixing companies that don’t want to be helped It depends? One way of thinking could be, that if a company's business idea isn't useful for society, then, don't bother fixing the company? Examples might be online poker games, or high frequency trading. How is it helpful for society, if traders make a bit more money, or if the poker gaming company manages to tie people to their laptops some more hours each week? In the second example, more managers could be better (since the business idea is slightly negative to society?). What did the companies you tried to fix, do, if I can ask? > fixing companies that don’t want to be helped Hmm, I wonder if it can be helpful to think about individuals rather than companies. Then the question becomes more similar to: "Is there a point in explaining to a manager that it's better for the company if s/he fires him- / herself?"
• faangiq 4y ago
  50%+ of the US workforce are salespeople who are useless middlemen.
• mjfl 4y ago
  What this says is that investors in these companies, the ownership in general, are lax and inactive - passive that is. Because every dollar an 'excess' management person puts in their pocket technically should have gone into an investor's pocket. It's kind of interesting because this is exactly the kind of management that 'passive' investing would seem to encourage. No one is putting money in their Vanguard IRA and then demanding that Vanguard harass CEOs to trim down their bloated management, but perhaps this is what the numbers would suggest should be happening. Perhaps passive investing eventually goes away, due to the costs associated with these bloated, tumorous corporate structures, and then only people who are actually getting returns on their money are those that pay attention.
• throwawayxy1 4y ago
  Because of a lot of meaninless meetings i left my previous job. As a developer i love to get paid for developing widgets not for talking shit on calls
  • wildrhythms 4y ago
    I always think about how electricians, plumbers, janitors, other such roles don't do this bullshit. Why is it that businesspeople can force software engineers to engage in their pointless warring corporate factions? Something's gotta give.
• Iv 4y ago
  About 30% of workers are in "bullshit jobs". https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullsh... Here is a dystopia we don't hear about too often: instead of robotic overlords, infinite inequality or labor-less utopia, automation could instead be met with an increase of bullshit jobs validating each others. (Iain Banks' Walking On Glass is the closest I found)
• gerash 4y ago
  People managers in tech are overpaid for what they bring to the table. I've seen many whose whole job is: * 1:1 with members of the team * Judge others (during perf review) based one noisy signals * Play politics with other parts of the org to ensure the survival and growth of your own team * Plan team building events (sometimes done by their assistants) They rarely care about the end user, the product, technical decisions, etc. So even though people management is needed the money shouldn't be in the management track.
  • wahnfrieden 4y ago
    I think the uncomfortable reality is that managers deal with a workforce who are not actually aligned to business outcome incentives (no meaningful ownership stake, usual reward of harder work is more work, etc) which ends up taking a lot of “work” to manage (finding quick fix issues and cheap rewards for workers, mythologizing the work, intimidating performance outcomes, getting workers to talk with them about issues instead of with their peers, etc)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• lkrubner 4y ago
  How can we reconcile this with the relative death of small business: "More people are working in big, bureaucratic organizations than ever before. Yet there’s compelling evidence that bureaucracy creates a significant drag on productivity and organizational resilience and innovation." And yet small businesses have been dying and more and more economic activity is being taken over by large businesses. But these large businesses then waste $3 trillion on management? If that is true, what exactly is it that makes small business so inefficient that they cannot compete against an enemy who sabotages itself with a self-inflicted $3 trillion penalty?
• bmitc 4y ago
  Does anyone have any resources that discuss managing in holistic and productive ways? I have The Fractal Organization: Creating sustainable organizations with the Viable System Model by Patrick Hoverstadt, Administrative Behavior by Herbert Simon, and Designing Freedom and Brain of the Firm by Stafford Beer on my docket. Another one is Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone. But I am curious if people have other suggestions, including atypical ones, that approach management almost from a first principles ideal.
• rolenthedeep 4y ago
  I once met an angry drunk Czech who went on - at great length - about how their government is absolutely paralyzed because most positions are "management". Apparently, the communists wanted to employ everyone, so they set up thousands and thousands of pointless governmental middle-management jobs that never did anything. I wonder how he's doing? I bet he's on a corner somewhere, screaming about Russia.