7 ms·

I’ve worked in an environment where there are no managers for 4 1/2 years and it’s been fantastic. Here’s to getting rid of them in most (but certainly not all!

I’ve worked in an environment where there are no managers for 4 1/2 years and it’s been fantastic. Here’s to getting rid of them in most (but certainly not all!) places.

huytersd 3y ago
Who checks on if you’ve completed your assigned work. This can only be possible in an academic/non profit environment where there are no deadlines or fixed client commitments.
- smcleod 3y ago
  My team meets every morning for 15 mins to discuss our progress and any blockers. Then we meet every week or two to pick up work. It works well.
- anon7725 3y ago
  There are multiple dimensions in the latent space that is contemporary white collar management. One is interfacing the work of a group of people with the needs and wants of others. Another is doing administrative things like who has done this compliance course or who needs a security authorization. A third is allocating credit and blame to group members (aka compensation). A fourth is ensuring that the work product itself is on track (aka technical leadership). A fifth is ensuring that schedule commitments to other stakeholders are honored. If you take out the third dimension (credit and blame), then even if a single person happens to do the other 4, they probably won’t feel much like what you’d call a “manager” today. This is a long-winded way of saying that the various things a manager does can be disaggregated and either spread around the team, eliminated or given to a different person.
- fourfun 3y ago
  Your stakeholders?
- csnover 3y ago
  By the time someone has entered the workforce it should not be necessary to be ‘checked on’ by some surrogate parental figure. In a functioning workplace, everyone agrees to do their work because it is part of the social contract of working on a team. They don’t need to be told what to do. If someone is falling behind, they’ll talk to other team members and work together to get back on track. You are there to help your coworkers, and they are there to help you. Someone doesn’t have to be your manager to make sure projects run smoothly; everyone can take turns in this role if they feel like it’s something they’re interested in doing and are competent in that role. It’s only through the distorted lens of corporate ladder climbing and backstabbing departmental politics that the idea arises that you’ll just hire untrustworthy people and then beat them into submission by making a workplace into a prison.
  - p1esk 3y ago
    And what about all the bs artists, slackers, divas, or assholes on the team? What if no one on the team wants to play “manager”, especially without the title? What if no one on the team has the skills to be an effective manager? What if my colleague Bob decides to play the role of a manager but I don’t like him? What if two people want to manage and disagree on things? Who exactly is supposed to have the authority to tell people what to do, and then hold them accountable? What you described smells like communism - might work on small scale in some isolated cases, but usually doesn’t.
  - mingusrude 3y ago
    > In a functional workplace... This is assuming a lot. Whose responsibility is it to get to a "functional workplace" and whose responsibility is it to fix it if it's not functional? And assuming that there is a "social contract" that everyone that's in the workplace buys into is also assuming a lot.
  - therealdrag0 3y ago
    Sounds disconnected from reality. And it’s not the workplaces fault, it’s human natures fault.
    - 3y ago
- yau8edq12i 3y ago
  No deadlines or fixed commitments in academia? Surely you're joking.
01100011 3y ago
It's no secret that small teams of experts do not need managers. But if the team grows, you will either have to sacrifice producer productivity to coordination and management tasks or hire someone to offload those responsibilities. Many orgs struggle as they undergo a "phase change" from one type of team to another, as it requires a different set of skills, strategies and expectations along with dramatically higher staffing requirements. There is probably a way to compartmentalize some larger projects so you are an aggregation of smaller teams but I personally haven't seen it so I can't comment on it.
- smcleod 3y ago
  I’d argue your team really shouldn’t grow too big if you want to remain effective. 4-8 people seems to be the sweet spot in my experience.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    The truly difficult bit is making an organization with 100 or 1000 different 4-8 people teams to build something more complex. There is a vast array of problems that need solving that just can't be tackled by one 4-8 person team.
    - randomdata 3y ago
      It turns out that nothing in life can be tackled by one 4-8 person team. We are all heavily dependent on each other to build the complex things we have. Our solution to make that work at the macroeconomic scale is to employ a service model. The solution to which you speak is microservices. No, not some misguided multi-process IPC technology model that seems to have tried to usurp the name, I mean real microservices. The people model. Where each 4-8 person team continues to act if they are an independent businesses, even if they legally work for a single organization. It's not particularly difficult. The macro economy, which operates at an unfathomably larger scale, shows how easy it is. But, indeed, it can be uncomfortable for some people to not feel like they have full control over an organization.
fabianholzer 3y ago
> I’ve worked in an environment where there are no managers I've opened your profile and then your website just to find out where is this magic place is. How fitting that it turned out to be on other side of the globe from my place... But good for you :-)
karaterobot 3y ago
I've gone the other way! I used to be strongly against managers. I drooled over that Valve manual describing the flat hierarchy, etc., and I would have honestly said that managers in general were a parasite that had latched on to the software industry. That's honestly what I felt. Now I work at a place with not enough managers to go around, and my team basically has 25% of a PM's time, and no dedicated department head (last guy quit, leadership has not decided whether to rehire). It's absolute chaos. No shit shield between us and leadership, nobody to soak up all the excess meetings required to understand what's going on throughout the company, nobody with political weight to throw around on our behalf, nobody to persist a long term vision for our department. We're working twice as hard to tread water, and creating a lot of technical debt while we only barely stay on top of our basic responsibilities. It may be that, at an organization that is set up not to have managers, it's better than just being the one group in an organization that doesn't have one. I admit that's a possibility. But, at another organization, I've actually had great experiences with managers, who cleared the road for me and made me feel like I was doing better work more easily than I was without them. So, on the whole I am pro manager, so long as they are very very very good at it.
- noisy_boy 3y ago
  > So, on the whole I am pro manager, so long as they are very very very good at it. That is a big "if" because most of the managers I have seen are on the spectrum of "ok" to "very bad"; the really good ones are rare and usually move up leaving spoiled employees that have to endure being managed by the norm of "ok" to "very bad".
  - RoyalHenOil 3y ago
    I wonder why that is. My experience has generally been the opposite. Every manager I have ever had has been, at worst, pretty OK — and most have been really fantastic. In nearly all of my workplaces, it's the upper echelon that has typically been painfully incompetent (poor financial strategy, too much micromanaging in areas they don't understand, etc.), and I've been mystified how they managed to hire and retain such talented middle managers. I'm sure it is survival bias, though, because a company can only scrape by with bad upper management if middle management is unusually good. Thankfully, my current and previous job were both at companies where the C-suite actually know how to do their jobs well. Even though I've some had fantastic managers at otherwise poorly-run companies, that's not enough to keep morale high. No matter how much your manager supports you and encourages you, it feels like you're wasting your life when you feed your most productive working years into a company you don't believe in.

I’ve worked in an environment where there are no managers for 4 1/2 years and it’s been fantastic. Here’s to getting rid of them in most (but certainly not all!) places.

huytersd 3y ago

Who checks on if you’ve completed your assigned work. This can only be possible in an academic/non profit environment where there are no deadlines or fixed client commitments.

smcleod 3y ago
My team meets every morning for 15 mins to discuss our progress and any blockers. Then we meet every week or two to pick up work. It works well.
anon7725 3y ago
There are multiple dimensions in the latent space that is contemporary white collar management. One is interfacing the work of a group of people with the needs and wants of others. Another is doing administrative things like who has done this compliance course or who needs a security authorization. A third is allocating credit and blame to group members (aka compensation). A fourth is ensuring that the work product itself is on track (aka technical leadership). A fifth is ensuring that schedule commitments to other stakeholders are honored. If you take out the third dimension (credit and blame), then even if a single person happens to do the other 4, they probably won’t feel much like what you’d call a “manager” today. This is a long-winded way of saying that the various things a manager does can be disaggregated and either spread around the team, eliminated or given to a different person.
fourfun 3y ago
Your stakeholders?
csnover 3y ago
By the time someone has entered the workforce it should not be necessary to be ‘checked on’ by some surrogate parental figure. In a functioning workplace, everyone agrees to do their work because it is part of the social contract of working on a team. They don’t need to be told what to do. If someone is falling behind, they’ll talk to other team members and work together to get back on track. You are there to help your coworkers, and they are there to help you. Someone doesn’t have to be your manager to make sure projects run smoothly; everyone can take turns in this role if they feel like it’s something they’re interested in doing and are competent in that role. It’s only through the distorted lens of corporate ladder climbing and backstabbing departmental politics that the idea arises that you’ll just hire untrustworthy people and then beat them into submission by making a workplace into a prison.
- p1esk 3y ago
  And what about all the bs artists, slackers, divas, or assholes on the team? What if no one on the team wants to play “manager”, especially without the title? What if no one on the team has the skills to be an effective manager? What if my colleague Bob decides to play the role of a manager but I don’t like him? What if two people want to manage and disagree on things? Who exactly is supposed to have the authority to tell people what to do, and then hold them accountable? What you described smells like communism - might work on small scale in some isolated cases, but usually doesn’t.
- mingusrude 3y ago
  > In a functional workplace... This is assuming a lot. Whose responsibility is it to get to a "functional workplace" and whose responsibility is it to fix it if it's not functional? And assuming that there is a "social contract" that everyone that's in the workplace buys into is also assuming a lot.
- therealdrag0 3y ago
  Sounds disconnected from reality. And it’s not the workplaces fault, it’s human natures fault.
  - 3y ago
yau8edq12i 3y ago
No deadlines or fixed commitments in academia? Surely you're joking.

01100011 3y ago

It's no secret that small teams of experts do not need managers. But if the team grows, you will either have to sacrifice producer productivity to coordination and management tasks or hire someone to offload those responsibilities. Many orgs struggle as they undergo a "phase change" from one type of team to another, as it requires a different set of skills, strategies and expectations along with dramatically higher staffing requirements. There is probably a way to compartmentalize some larger projects so you are an aggregation of smaller teams but I personally haven't seen it so I can't comment on it.

smcleod 3y ago
I’d argue your team really shouldn’t grow too big if you want to remain effective. 4-8 people seems to be the sweet spot in my experience.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  The truly difficult bit is making an organization with 100 or 1000 different 4-8 people teams to build something more complex. There is a vast array of problems that need solving that just can't be tackled by one 4-8 person team.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    It turns out that nothing in life can be tackled by one 4-8 person team. We are all heavily dependent on each other to build the complex things we have. Our solution to make that work at the macroeconomic scale is to employ a service model. The solution to which you speak is microservices. No, not some misguided multi-process IPC technology model that seems to have tried to usurp the name, I mean real microservices. The people model. Where each 4-8 person team continues to act if they are an independent businesses, even if they legally work for a single organization. It's not particularly difficult. The macro economy, which operates at an unfathomably larger scale, shows how easy it is. But, indeed, it can be uncomfortable for some people to not feel like they have full control over an organization.

fabianholzer 3y ago

> I’ve worked in an environment where there are no managers I've opened your profile and then your website just to find out where is this magic place is. How fitting that it turned out to be on other side of the globe from my place... But good for you :-)

karaterobot 3y ago

I've gone the other way! I used to be strongly against managers. I drooled over that Valve manual describing the flat hierarchy, etc., and I would have honestly said that managers in general were a parasite that had latched on to the software industry. That's honestly what I felt. Now I work at a place with not enough managers to go around, and my team basically has 25% of a PM's time, and no dedicated department head (last guy quit, leadership has not decided whether to rehire). It's absolute chaos. No shit shield between us and leadership, nobody to soak up all the excess meetings required to understand what's going on throughout the company, nobody with political weight to throw around on our behalf, nobody to persist a long term vision for our department. We're working twice as hard to tread water, and creating a lot of technical debt while we only barely stay on top of our basic responsibilities. It may be that, at an organization that is set up not to have managers, it's better than just being the one group in an organization that doesn't have one. I admit that's a possibility. But, at another organization, I've actually had great experiences with managers, who cleared the road for me and made me feel like I was doing better work more easily than I was without them. So, on the whole I am pro manager, so long as they are very very very good at it.

noisy_boy 3y ago
> So, on the whole I am pro manager, so long as they are very very very good at it. That is a big "if" because most of the managers I have seen are on the spectrum of "ok" to "very bad"; the really good ones are rare and usually move up leaving spoiled employees that have to endure being managed by the norm of "ok" to "very bad".
- RoyalHenOil 3y ago
  I wonder why that is. My experience has generally been the opposite. Every manager I have ever had has been, at worst, pretty OK — and most have been really fantastic. In nearly all of my workplaces, it's the upper echelon that has typically been painfully incompetent (poor financial strategy, too much micromanaging in areas they don't understand, etc.), and I've been mystified how they managed to hire and retain such talented middle managers. I'm sure it is survival bias, though, because a company can only scrape by with bad upper management if middle management is unusually good. Thankfully, my current and previous job were both at companies where the C-suite actually know how to do their jobs well. Even though I've some had fantastic managers at otherwise poorly-run companies, that's not enough to keep morale high. No matter how much your manager supports you and encourages you, it feels like you're wasting your life when you feed your most productive working years into a company you don't believe in.