14 ms·

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 impe

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.

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.