> By the end of my tenure at Stripe in 2021 this had done a total 180. I had managers who by design had no function in the R&D org at all – they didn’t do produ

> By the end of my tenure at Stripe in 2021 this had done a total 180. I had managers who by design had no function in the R&D org at all – they didn’t do product work, they didn’t do operations or hold a pager, they didn’t help with incoming cross-team asks, they didn’t manage the JIRA board, and a lot of the time they didn’t even run our meetings (deferring that to ICs); and the prevailing wisdom became that this was a good thing. I stumbled into a job like this recently. The startup hired an upper management team from some well-known tech companies. They had several people who claimed that “organization design” was their passion, wrote “thought leader” blogs or substacks, and presented themselves as experts in all things agile. I thought I was joining a lean startup team focused on efficient execution (as they pitched themselves) but they operated in the most bloated, inefficient, and bureaucratic manner I’ve ever seen. Roles and processes were so artificially segmented that I wasn’t allowed to use Jira without waiting for the next scheduled meeting so everyone could tell the project manager what buttons to click in Jira during long shared meetings. If you started to make any comments that sounded like they might be a product-related idea, they’d scold you for daring to think about anything other than code and demand that only product managers be allowed to talk about product things. Several managers seemed to do nothing other than police process among teams, dropping into your team’s meetings unannounced to observe and take notes about who was, and was not, following the extensive process documents they prepared for everyone. Their solution to every problem was always to hire more people. If a new requirement came up, they’d stop teams from working on it and try to find a way to spin the new requirement into more headcount. This created absurd situations where, for example, the design lead had convinced the company to hire a new designer for every new initiative while the designers for past projects sat mostly idle all day. It didn’t matter, though, because the only goal was to increase headcount. People were praised for the amount of hiring they did and the number of people they managed. This company was an extreme version of the dysfunction described in the article. I felt so relieved when I left and rejoined a company that didn’t create elaborate self-serving management structures as their primary goal. So many people at the dysfunctional company just thrived on shuffling from meeting to meeting every day, creating the appearance of doing a lot of work while actively interfering with everyone just trying to execute efficiently.