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> Stewart Butterfield, former CEO of Slack, recently described a dynamic within tech companies behind much of the over-hiring. He noted on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots

> Stewart Butterfield, former CEO of Slack, recently described a dynamic within tech companies behind much of the over-hiring. He noted on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast in late May that when there’s no real constraint on hiring, “you hire someone, and the first thing that person wants to do is hire other people.” The reason is that “the more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in the organization…So every budgeting process is, ‘I really want to hire,’ and that to me is the root of all the excess.” I’ve seen this first hand. One place where I worked HR even had a table of team size vs manager compensation. When I pointed out that it may not be the best idea to directly incentivize managers to hire more people they were less than understanding. Of course it went totally out of control. But sadly there just is no counteracting force (except perhaps mr Musk). When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?”, and they won’t be impressed when you say “I managed to keep it down to four people”. It’s just something that resonates very strongly with the primitive side of our brains (“You say you were the chief, how big was your tribe?”).

bertmuthalaly 3y ago
This is the thesis of Bullshit Jobs!
- boznz 3y ago
  Bullshit jobs infect the whole stack from the board of management down, but "middle-managers" are probably the most over-represented.
jjav 3y ago
Yes, this is frustrating when one cares about efficiency (I do). Whether number of people or amount of budget overall, you're seen as better the more you have. When shopping for vendors to achieve something, my instinct is to try to find a way to do more with less. But I'm told that's dumb, I need to spend all the budget and ask for more, lest I be seen as a loser.
35mm 3y ago
Same with marketing and other budgets. The question is always ‘what ad budget did you manage?’. Not ‘what return on ad spend ratio did you achieve?’.
jareklupinski 3y ago
> “You say you were the chief, how big was your tribe?” "Big enough to hunt woolly mammoth"
- sargun 3y ago
  That will be my reply whenever the next person asks how big the team I used to run was.
paulddraper 3y ago
This is 100% the first question asked by any management interview.
- eitally 3y ago
  Yeah, no. Well, perhaps if the role is just to manage it becomes somewhat relevant, but I have personally never experienced this in any interview (and have been in people manager roles for the past twenty years, at companies including F500 industrial, FAANG, and consulting).
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    I have had management roles and been interviewed for management roles many times. There hasn't been single interview where "what is the largest headcount you've managed" wasn't conspicuously asked.
nine_zeros 3y ago
Management is an utter bullshit job that is all about headcount and promo documents at this point. Society and companies can live without this.
- AgentOrange1234 3y ago
  As a manager at $megacorp, hiring and promo docs are maybe 5% of my job.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
  I love Hacker News. So many people here strive to work for FAANG or some other bloated SV tech company with a free-money grow-or-die mindset, and proceed adopt this view of management as if it’s an immoveable, universal truth. Without me, my team would drown in less than a week. Say what you want about that implying a lack of resilience, or that I’m not teaching a man to fish, but it’s the current reality. I work insanely hard to ensure that they can do their best work, that their best work always gets better, and that they get the most out of their time in my team, distraction-free. I work insanely hard to smooth over organisational politics, communications failures, and so many other things that every day without fail so many people in this community bitch and moan about. This is an anonymous account, there’s no benefit to me self-promoting. I’d never be this confidently candid were my name attached, no matter who I was talking to. Maybe you should go find a better team to work for.
- xvilka 3y ago
  Managers are definitely needed. The problem is the amount and their tendency to accrue unnecessary "fat" in their teams. It's not an uncommon in big companies to see people who have multiple managers at once and have to report to the multiple people/teams. Or having ridiculously high manager/worker ratio.
7thaccount 3y ago
It's called "empire building" and is also part of the principal-agent problem where the manager is the agent and is assumed to have the firm's best interests in mind, but in reality doesn't. As a result, the principal (for example an owner) has to come up with methods to keep their management honest (example... tying most compensation to stock price - although I think this just makes management short sighted). I was once in a meeting where an IT manager was told his group would have to handle the install for a piece of software that like 2 engineers used. The guy asked for 3 additional head count and my jaw dropped. If someone has ever seen the Avatar Airbender show, I was like Prince Zuko speaking up at his father's meeting. You see I was there as a courtesy and tried to point out that even one headcount seemed like a lot for something that should take less than a week of work for a single employee. At the time I didn't understand that the manager understood this, but was playing for more staff to build their own importance. I didn't understand the games they play. As part of the game...you always say your people are swamped no matter what...or refer to a massive backlog of work even though that backlog is all super low priority and existing employees can be reprioritized.
- Rinzler89 3y ago
  > the manager is the agent and is assumed to have the firm's best interests in mind, but in reality doesn't. Every manager I had at every major multinational company only had the interest of their own career progression in mind, not the company's, not their team's. You as an employee under them were just a means to their goal, nothing more. I naively assumed that making them look good and doing the overtime when needed to achieve their idiotic deadlines would also guarantee my ascension later, but boy was I gullible and wrong. Going the extra mile for your boss might work out for you when everything goes smooth in the org in times of economic prosperity when there's room for everyone to move up, but when the org or economy went tits up, and things were being put on chopping block, those managers didn't hesitate to grab the only parachute for themselves and let their team sink or throw them under the bus to save themselves at the tune of "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish", so I learned the valuable lesson to not go the extra mile for any boss unless I have written guarantees of a reward. It's the way the reward system is set up in these companies. Climb the ladder and kick it under you after you dangle the carrot in front of naive idiots to push you up that ladder for rewards they might never see. I think someone called it "the GE way".
jmspring 3y ago
Stuart describes one type of mentality. I’ve recently joined a small company as the senior person. My goal is to understand our deliverables, our timing, and can we do it? In enterprise companies like the one I recently left, management is incentivized to kiss up try and do more with less, but wants more people to buttress their role as well as help determine the role above them. My prior boss in this same organization had multiple teams but rather than have the teams talk about their work insisted on being the one to present upward and rarely invited his teams to join.
- stuzenz 3y ago
  I like your nuanced observation here. It reminds me of a quote I come back to often when I am seeing toxic behaviour in some organisations. > Dysfunctional behaviour is ubiquitous and systemic, not because people are wicked but because the requirement to serve the hierarchy competes with the requirements to serve customers. People's ingenuity is engaged in survival, not improvement. - Freedom from Command & Control, John Seddon
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Most companies will have a counter force, the 'cutter'. The 'cutter's compensation is tied to how much they cut. Of course, they will also need a team, to more efficiently cut other teams. And they in turn will also be incentivized to grow their team, the manager of the cutting team isn't immune to wanting to grow their team. But then it gets up to CEO, who has someone reporting to them who's only goal is cutting. The cutter has a team, with some managers of teams of cutters. It's turtles all the way up, but it does end at CEO. Generally every big company I've worked for, yes, had empire building. But then also had people to cut empires. So every few years there were layoffs to trim it up.
- thechao 3y ago
  When I was at Intel 10+ years ago, they had this down to an art. They had a name for it, like, "the pool"; they'd reorg all the time. Everyone went into the pool, then the mgrs would pick teams. Your actual progress through your career was loosely tied to how quickly you were chosen. Especially bad IC's never got out of the pool; if you didn't have a req (or title) then you were let go after a year. This had the nice effect that mgrs rarely had to terminate employees: just wait for the reorg & don't pick out the bad ICs.
  - WWLink 3y ago
    That sounds like google's 'team matching' process lol.
  - andyjohnson0 3y ago
    > Everyone went into the pool, then the mgrs would pick teams. Your actual progress through your career was loosely tied to how quickly you were chosen. Reminiscent of choosing teams in PE/sports lessons at school. The sporty kids who were good at the teacher's favourite sport get to pick, and kids like I was get left to the end. Nice way to get familiar with the pecking order at an early stage.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      It's a good way of getting the best team(s), which is what you want in a company. Maybe not so great for the emotional development of children, of course, but it's hard to say.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> But sadly there just is no counteracting force (except perhaps mr Musk). When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?”, and they won’t be impressed when you say “I managed to keep it down to four people”. I honestly would strongly prefer 4 people who are highly smart (think prodigy- or genius-level) below me than 20 "somewhat intelligent" employees (i.e. what at least 95 % of employees are).
- FLT8 3y ago
  In general I agree, but Prodigy-level people can come with their own challenges too. Eg. They're going to be coming up with a million ideas for how to improve things, so you'd better be prepared to listen and support them, which often will require changing the way the organisation works. If you don't (or can't) support them, be prepared for them to get demotivated quickly and move on. The other 90% are generally a little less high maintenance, but I agree that they will never achieve as much. IMO your best bet is to pick and choose who you need based on the situation. Your already-in-production CRUD app may benefit from a few extra 50th percentile coders to help with the workload, but if you're building a ground breaking product from scratch, then a deliberately small team of top echelon nerds may make the difference between success and hard fail.
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    First: > so you'd better be prepared to listen and support them ... is in my opinion basic management 101. --- Concerning your other points: I do believe that I at least somewhat know how to work with such people (though I never managed such people). For example, at a former job, I worked under such people; they really liked me, because I was one of the few people who were actually capable of "understanding" their visions and make them understandable to less intelligent (but still smart) colleagues. I really have a tendency to be liked by frustrated highly-smart people, both because I really love to learn from them and I think I am a decent person to talk to if you are really frustrated (on the other hand, much more "ordinary" people often reproach me for being "unapproachable", "having my head in the clouds", "always being so negative", "complicated to work with", ... :-) ).
neilv 3y ago
> When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?”, and they won’t be impressed when you say “I managed to keep it down to four people” I had this same interaction when applying for Staff+ software engineer (not manager) at two FAANGs. One of the recruiters sniffed, or maybe negged, and said they expected X number people under you for that role. Highly effective small teams was considered small-time, not a selling point. Also not-OK was leading engineering for an early startup. Nor was a cross-company Principal role interfacing with everyone. (However, both companies were still open to me doing their new-grad Leetcode hazing battery or Python grunting automated screening test. Which isn't a sign that their culture is otherwise good, other than the team size fixation.)
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  Same for technology used. You won’t get much credit for keeping costs down and keeping things simple. The real money is in developing super complex systems. That will give you respect.
  - jurschreuder 3y ago
    Yes, this is my mantra. Senior Only-Developers are attracted to complex problems and try to make things using as many language from the "advanced" book as possible. That's why I like all-round developers better, they have a bit less to prove by making "smart and complicated" code.
    - matrix87 3y ago
      the benefit of complicated is that it filters out the people who suck so they can't fuck up the code
      - lukan 3y ago
        That would only work, if people had more accurate self assessment.
    - 3y ago
api 3y ago
The same kind of perverse incentive exists in other forms in other places, like what drives complexity growth in engineering. With people it’s called empire building. With systems I’ve heard it called “resume oriented programming.” “I built a massively complex system to manage our cloud deployment” looks superficially more impressive than “I eliminated the need for a complex deployment by rearchitecting a bit and consolidating systems, so then I only had to manage a few things.” The first person will have more code they can cite and more expertise wrangling more systems. They’ll be able to talk about all the big sexy “hyperscale” stuff they have managed with lots of terabytes and Kubernetes and terraform and helm charts. Most people would probably hire this person. I’d hire the second person. It’s basically the midwit meme, which is so popular because it illustrates something real. There seems to be a core conflict in society between systems as things we build to do things vs systems as ends in themselves. Morons just do things. Geniuses just do things. Midwits get mixed up into the process of doing things and forget the point.
- starky 3y ago
  >“I eliminated the need for a complex deployment by rearchitecting a bit and consolidating systems, so then I only had to manage a few things.” That is more of a marketing issue, write something like, "Improved efficiency of deployment by x% by re-architecting systems x, y, and z which saved $xxM/year."
doctorpangloss 3y ago
> When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?” Just lie. Then you will see it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not sure how to recruit for managers in a huge corporation, I don’t think even huge corporations necessarily know. One thing’s for sure: a big difference between some ICs and Managers, at least the managers you actually want to work for, is that those most non-manager ICs seem to be really fucking bought into some very reductive points of view.
- neilv 3y ago
  > Just lie. Yes, the liars should consolidate with the idiots at the dysfunctional companies, and leave the rest of us alone. :)
- newsclues 3y ago
  Be honest and communicate a superior vision. “My core team is always small but is capable of networking and scaling with other expert teams, in order to manage large projects”
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Don’t hate the player, hate the game
mcmoor 3y ago
The other side of the point is that having manager with small team means those manager need managers, which means another layer. Big team manager means flatter hierarchy which may be desired by everyone. But yeah following Goodhart's law it's bad if it makes managers hire new people instead of vanquishing other managers and taking other employees under their direct command.
op00to 3y ago
Managers want to hire more people because teams are way under-staffed. I’ve never worked on a team that had enough people to do the important things with leeway for sickness vacation and turnover. Maybe there is empire building going on, but I think it’s deeper than that.
- qznc 3y ago
  At least a contributing factor is that it’s easier (emotionally and politically) to hire additional mediocre people than firing bad ones.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  Well managed BigCorps are overstaffed 2x. Badly managed BigCorps are overstaffed 3x (or more). If there is insufficient manpower, it is often because they are building things they shouldn't. At least this was my experience.
  - matwood 3y ago
    Bingo. I find that limiting headcount is a great forcing function for only doing what's important. The classic example is Google making X different chat apps. That doesn't happen unless a company is severely overstaffed.
    - stuff4ben 3y ago
      To me that really just screams lazy and incompetent management. Being overstaffed is just a coincidence. A good mgmt structure would have prioritized that roadmap and gotten the cats herded to work towards a singular goal/chat app. I say this as a "cat" myself who has to be reminded to not get distracted by the next shiny thing.
      - marcosdumay 3y ago
        > Being overstaffed is just a coincidence. I'd say it's not. But causality is the reverse of the GP's. Being overstaffed is a consequence of not prioritizing the work. Either the staff grows until the important things get done, or the organization shrinks because the important stuff doesn't get done.
duped 3y ago
> When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?” My father used to tell me he preferred to ask 'what did you build' or 'what did your team accomplish' instead.
- bjornsing 3y ago
  You do get those questions on occasion. But more in the Bay Area than where I live in Sweden.
bottle_roket 3y ago
FYI using the words “chief” and “tribe” to emphasize “primitiveness” is pretty cringe.
aorloff 3y ago
The counteracting force is to align business ownership with headcount So if you handle $$$ worth of book, you get $$$ worth of headcount to keep that going
- georgeecollins 3y ago
  That's a great idea. Or just keep your people / sales < then your comps in your industry. Coming at this problem from the manager / owner point of view: If your company is bootstrapped or hasn't raised a lot of money headcount can be a first guess at valuation. Or how seriously another partner in business takes you. Companies that balloon in size tend to be taken very seriously while small profitable ones get less attention. So the pressure can go both ways.
_heimdall 3y ago
I'm not sure why this article bothers attributing this insight to the former Slack CEO, this dynamic is nothing new and was a problem well before Slack or the current round of tech companies were around.
- OJFord 3y ago
  If they'd picked some older quote from someone else saying similar, someone still would complain that the idea predates them, right back to Socrates. I don't see it claiming it's some deep novel insight, it's just someone prominent who said something recently that's salient to the point.
  - _heimdall 3y ago
    I may just being nitpicky here. With such a commonly understood, and old, concept it doesn't need ant attribution. Name dropping a random CEO just feels like a cheap addition to get eyes on an article.
    - OJFord 3y ago
      I suppose it kind of is, or an 'appeal to authority', I just don't see that as necessarily bad, it's just like 'don't take my word for it, someone you might actually have heard of or in an important position said blah'. Proper journalists and newspapers spend plenty of time quoting politicians and senior employees making obvious or previously said remarks too.
      - _heimdall 3y ago
        Yeah that's totally fair. I'm fine chalking this one up to me being too picky on a random Sunday night.
- mattgreenrocks 3y ago
  If a successful CEO says it, it is definitely insightful.
jbirer 3y ago
Well said. There's a Turkish proverb "You are a lord, I am a lord, then who's going to plow this land?"
ano-ther 3y ago
Here’s the real culprit that a CEO could do something about: > when there’s no real constraint on hiring Of course there’s empire building because of prestige. And even more, the enthusiasm of people who joined your growth company to make an impact, who then see all the possibilities if they just hired a little. Keeping all those bad and good instincts balanced with the actual company needs is the task of management.
alfiedotwtf 3y ago
Lol… reminds me of a place I worked at where there were 2 developers on the project but 4 project managers. When the project was running late -> they hired 2 more managers!!
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  This is my current workplace. Projects have 1 developer and 2 project managers. The project managers are in meetings all day every day, doing what? And the developer is constantly being demanded to work impossibly tight deadlines, and deal with the project managers backtracking on the requirements. :/
  - consp 3y ago
    This is the classic one guy digging the hole and ten observing him doing it. I've had this discussion a few days ago and it's simply the problem of pay. As soon as you want to make more money you have 'to be in management and act like one' which is utter cow manure since adding managers is not going to make you any product and only delay it or make it worse but the end result is endless managers and not enough actual horses to carry the load.
gadders 3y ago
This is called Parkinson's Law: https://www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law https://www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law "To comprehend Factor I, we must picture a civil servant called A who finds himself overworked. Whether this overwork is real or imaginary is immaterial; but we should observe, in passing, that A’s sensation (or illusion) might easily result from his own decreasing energy—a normal symptom of middle-age. For this real or imagined overwork there are, broadly speaking, three possible remedies (1) He may resign. (2) He may ask to halve the work with a colleague called B. (3) He may demand the assistance of two subordinates, to be called C and D. There is probably no instance in civil service history of A choosing any but the third alternative. By resignation he would lose his pension rights. By having B appointed, on his own level in the hierarchy, he would merely bring in a rival for promotion to W’s vacancy when W (at long last) retires. So A would rather have C and D, junior men, below him. They will add to his consequence; and, by dividing the work into two categories, as between C and D, he will have the merit of being the only man who comprehends them both."
- User23 3y ago
  One of my pet peeves is how few people read past the first line of the essay and think Parkinson’s Law is the opening quip about work expanding to fill the time available. Thanks for the proper write up.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    C. Northcote Parkinson is a great and very under-appreciated economist. His books are easy reads and well worth it. He made many astute observations about human behavior, not just Parkinson's Law.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  > There is probably no instance in civil service history I’m not sure that private firms are much better. Especially if the work they are doing has been contracted out to them.
  - 3y ago
Spooky23 3y ago
It’s because companies are fat and happy and don’t have enough to do. There’s not alot of hunger for more comp or accomplishment because the org works and people are paid well. Thats the same dynamic in civil service environments. Some people are motivated by dick measuring contests, and life will find a way to give those folks a metric. When I was a director at a large agency, one of my peers came into my office, proud as a peacock, to let me know that a re-org meant that he now had 113 employees. It smashed his soul when he realized I had more. It’s all huff and puff.
lordnacho 3y ago
> But sadly there just is no counteracting force Does nobody get tired of managing a huge army? Or do they just all assume they can delegate it, like an HR pyramid scheme?
- greatpostman 3y ago
  The big secret is managing a bunch of people is easier than doing grunt work
  - rybosworld 3y ago
    Depends on the company a bit. The older a company is, the more it accumulates the sorts of people who equate management with cracking a whip. This is the laziest form of management and also the least effective. It's incredibly common, though. There are some really talented managers out there. The sort of folks you want to work for. You'll find more of these at younger companies. But the harsh/unfortunate reality is corporate culture generously rewards managers in spite of their effectiveness (lack thereof). Empire building is probably the single biggest drain on the global economy. The good news is it seems to be getting more attention and companies (Bayer, Meta for example) are taking action to combat it.
jeffwask 3y ago
It also dovetails nicely with the old, "If you don't spend all your budget, you lose it next year" management strategy. I can't count the number of times over my career where I heard a boss say, "we need to spend the rest of this before end of year."
mountainriver 3y ago
Wanting to grow isn’t a bad thing, the excess falls on the execs who approve the budgets. If your team has good economics then you should grow, if it doesn’t then the execs shouldn’t be funding it. Lot of companies have terrible exec teams that are out of touch with the company
deleted 3y ago
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treespace8 3y ago
Has any company ever tried having a bonus pool divided equally between all employees? Ie 5% of gross revenue / employees. So every time you add someone you reduce the bonus unless that person adds more to gross revenue?
- frellus 3y ago
  Worked at a large global financial company 10 years ago in tech. It was well known that the bonus pool was finite per division, but it was also allocated on ratios based on performance reviews and retention. Everyone knew the more people, the smaller the pool -- but then again, tech was a "cost center" so it wasn't like adding technology people (with the exception of quants) earn the bank more money. I suspect if you incentivized managers to keep their teams small, through a bonus pool, it would definitely result in smaller teams, but also with the danger of overworked ones. That seems self-fulfilling though, if you're overworked but you know there's a reward with it. That all being said, most places don't have bonus pools so it's a mute point.
- lazide 3y ago
  Did you ever do a school project where yourself and maybe one other person did all the work, and everyone else (2-3 folks) mostly just tagged along on the ride because they were assigned? Or maybe even made it worse? And everyone got the same grade? That happens in corp land all the time too, and it’s extremely demotivating.
- mech422 3y ago
  thats usually called a 'profit share' (though I've only seen it based on net profit and not gross revenue). It was quite nice on Wall Street back in the 80s...Especially since everyone got an equal share rather then the managers favorites getting the bulk of 'discretionary' bonuses. Paired with a nice xmas bonus and year end review/raises, it basically meant no-one quit because you were never more then 6 months from a fat check.
tootie 3y ago
My wife observed that in large orgs, headcount is currency. People constantly looking to justify headcount so they can say they have a 10-person org, a 50-person org, a 100-person org. I've seen managers get buy-in to spin up a new department to build a tool they could buy off the shelf for the price of 2 or 3 people. I'm constantly reminded of Mitt Romney's old saw, "corporations are people". Just an admixture of irrational, vain, fallible people. The successful ones make fewer mistakes than the rest.
dfxm12 3y ago
The large corporations I've worked for also scored you on "leadership" at the end of the year. This score usually contributes to your bonus and annual pay raise. It is hard to get a high leadership score if you don't have some formal subordinates, so this is another reason people are always looking to get someone working under them, even if they aren't ready for it or maybe don't even need it.

bertmuthalaly 3y ago

This is the thesis of Bullshit Jobs!

boznz 3y ago
Bullshit jobs infect the whole stack from the board of management down, but "middle-managers" are probably the most over-represented.

jjav 3y ago

Yes, this is frustrating when one cares about efficiency (I do). Whether number of people or amount of budget overall, you're seen as better the more you have. When shopping for vendors to achieve something, my instinct is to try to find a way to do more with less. But I'm told that's dumb, I need to spend all the budget and ask for more, lest I be seen as a loser.

35mm 3y ago

Same with marketing and other budgets. The question is always ‘what ad budget did you manage?’. Not ‘what return on ad spend ratio did you achieve?’.

jareklupinski 3y ago

> “You say you were the chief, how big was your tribe?” "Big enough to hunt woolly mammoth"

sargun 3y ago
That will be my reply whenever the next person asks how big the team I used to run was.

paulddraper 3y ago

This is 100% the first question asked by any management interview.

eitally 3y ago
Yeah, no. Well, perhaps if the role is just to manage it becomes somewhat relevant, but I have personally never experienced this in any interview (and have been in people manager roles for the past twenty years, at companies including F500 industrial, FAANG, and consulting).
- paulddraper 3y ago
  I have had management roles and been interviewed for management roles many times. There hasn't been single interview where "what is the largest headcount you've managed" wasn't conspicuously asked.

nine_zeros 3y ago

Management is an utter bullshit job that is all about headcount and promo documents at this point. Society and companies can live without this.

AgentOrange1234 3y ago
As a manager at $megacorp, hiring and promo docs are maybe 5% of my job.
cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
I love Hacker News. So many people here strive to work for FAANG or some other bloated SV tech company with a free-money grow-or-die mindset, and proceed adopt this view of management as if it’s an immoveable, universal truth. Without me, my team would drown in less than a week. Say what you want about that implying a lack of resilience, or that I’m not teaching a man to fish, but it’s the current reality. I work insanely hard to ensure that they can do their best work, that their best work always gets better, and that they get the most out of their time in my team, distraction-free. I work insanely hard to smooth over organisational politics, communications failures, and so many other things that every day without fail so many people in this community bitch and moan about. This is an anonymous account, there’s no benefit to me self-promoting. I’d never be this confidently candid were my name attached, no matter who I was talking to. Maybe you should go find a better team to work for.
xvilka 3y ago
Managers are definitely needed. The problem is the amount and their tendency to accrue unnecessary "fat" in their teams. It's not an uncommon in big companies to see people who have multiple managers at once and have to report to the multiple people/teams. Or having ridiculously high manager/worker ratio.

7thaccount 3y ago

It's called "empire building" and is also part of the principal-agent problem where the manager is the agent and is assumed to have the firm's best interests in mind, but in reality doesn't. As a result, the principal (for example an owner) has to come up with methods to keep their management honest (example... tying most compensation to stock price - although I think this just makes management short sighted). I was once in a meeting where an IT manager was told his group would have to handle the install for a piece of software that like 2 engineers used. The guy asked for 3 additional head count and my jaw dropped. If someone has ever seen the Avatar Airbender show, I was like Prince Zuko speaking up at his father's meeting. You see I was there as a courtesy and tried to point out that even one headcount seemed like a lot for something that should take less than a week of work for a single employee. At the time I didn't understand that the manager understood this, but was playing for more staff to build their own importance. I didn't understand the games they play. As part of the game...you always say your people are swamped no matter what...or refer to a massive backlog of work even though that backlog is all super low priority and existing employees can be reprioritized.

Rinzler89 3y ago
> the manager is the agent and is assumed to have the firm's best interests in mind, but in reality doesn't. Every manager I had at every major multinational company only had the interest of their own career progression in mind, not the company's, not their team's. You as an employee under them were just a means to their goal, nothing more. I naively assumed that making them look good and doing the overtime when needed to achieve their idiotic deadlines would also guarantee my ascension later, but boy was I gullible and wrong. Going the extra mile for your boss might work out for you when everything goes smooth in the org in times of economic prosperity when there's room for everyone to move up, but when the org or economy went tits up, and things were being put on chopping block, those managers didn't hesitate to grab the only parachute for themselves and let their team sink or throw them under the bus to save themselves at the tune of "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish", so I learned the valuable lesson to not go the extra mile for any boss unless I have written guarantees of a reward. It's the way the reward system is set up in these companies. Climb the ladder and kick it under you after you dangle the carrot in front of naive idiots to push you up that ladder for rewards they might never see. I think someone called it "the GE way".

jmspring 3y ago

Stuart describes one type of mentality. I’ve recently joined a small company as the senior person. My goal is to understand our deliverables, our timing, and can we do it? In enterprise companies like the one I recently left, management is incentivized to kiss up try and do more with less, but wants more people to buttress their role as well as help determine the role above them. My prior boss in this same organization had multiple teams but rather than have the teams talk about their work insisted on being the one to present upward and rarely invited his teams to join.

stuzenz 3y ago
I like your nuanced observation here. It reminds me of a quote I come back to often when I am seeing toxic behaviour in some organisations. > Dysfunctional behaviour is ubiquitous and systemic, not because people are wicked but because the requirement to serve the hierarchy competes with the requirements to serve customers. People's ingenuity is engaged in survival, not improvement. - Freedom from Command & Control, John Seddon

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Most companies will have a counter force, the 'cutter'. The 'cutter's compensation is tied to how much they cut. Of course, they will also need a team, to more efficiently cut other teams. And they in turn will also be incentivized to grow their team, the manager of the cutting team isn't immune to wanting to grow their team. But then it gets up to CEO, who has someone reporting to them who's only goal is cutting. The cutter has a team, with some managers of teams of cutters. It's turtles all the way up, but it does end at CEO. Generally every big company I've worked for, yes, had empire building. But then also had people to cut empires. So every few years there were layoffs to trim it up.

thechao 3y ago
When I was at Intel 10+ years ago, they had this down to an art. They had a name for it, like, "the pool"; they'd reorg all the time. Everyone went into the pool, then the mgrs would pick teams. Your actual progress through your career was loosely tied to how quickly you were chosen. Especially bad IC's never got out of the pool; if you didn't have a req (or title) then you were let go after a year. This had the nice effect that mgrs rarely had to terminate employees: just wait for the reorg & don't pick out the bad ICs.
- WWLink 3y ago
  That sounds like google's 'team matching' process lol.
- andyjohnson0 3y ago
  > Everyone went into the pool, then the mgrs would pick teams. Your actual progress through your career was loosely tied to how quickly you were chosen. Reminiscent of choosing teams in PE/sports lessons at school. The sporty kids who were good at the teacher's favourite sport get to pick, and kids like I was get left to the end. Nice way to get familiar with the pecking order at an early stage.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    It's a good way of getting the best team(s), which is what you want in a company. Maybe not so great for the emotional development of children, of course, but it's hard to say.

aleph_minus_one 3y ago

> But sadly there just is no counteracting force (except perhaps mr Musk). When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?”, and they won’t be impressed when you say “I managed to keep it down to four people”. I honestly would strongly prefer 4 people who are highly smart (think prodigy- or genius-level) below me than 20 "somewhat intelligent" employees (i.e. what at least 95 % of employees are).

FLT8 3y ago
In general I agree, but Prodigy-level people can come with their own challenges too. Eg. They're going to be coming up with a million ideas for how to improve things, so you'd better be prepared to listen and support them, which often will require changing the way the organisation works. If you don't (or can't) support them, be prepared for them to get demotivated quickly and move on. The other 90% are generally a little less high maintenance, but I agree that they will never achieve as much. IMO your best bet is to pick and choose who you need based on the situation. Your already-in-production CRUD app may benefit from a few extra 50th percentile coders to help with the workload, but if you're building a ground breaking product from scratch, then a deliberately small team of top echelon nerds may make the difference between success and hard fail.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  First: > so you'd better be prepared to listen and support them ... is in my opinion basic management 101. --- Concerning your other points: I do believe that I at least somewhat know how to work with such people (though I never managed such people). For example, at a former job, I worked under such people; they really liked me, because I was one of the few people who were actually capable of "understanding" their visions and make them understandable to less intelligent (but still smart) colleagues. I really have a tendency to be liked by frustrated highly-smart people, both because I really love to learn from them and I think I am a decent person to talk to if you are really frustrated (on the other hand, much more "ordinary" people often reproach me for being "unapproachable", "having my head in the clouds", "always being so negative", "complicated to work with", ... :-) ).

neilv 3y ago

> When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?”, and they won’t be impressed when you say “I managed to keep it down to four people” I had this same interaction when applying for Staff+ software engineer (not manager) at two FAANGs. One of the recruiters sniffed, or maybe negged, and said they expected X number people under you for that role. Highly effective small teams was considered small-time, not a selling point. Also not-OK was leading engineering for an early startup. Nor was a cross-company Principal role interfacing with everyone. (However, both companies were still open to me doing their new-grad Leetcode hazing battery or Python grunting automated screening test. Which isn't a sign that their culture is otherwise good, other than the team size fixation.)

rqtwteye 3y ago
Same for technology used. You won’t get much credit for keeping costs down and keeping things simple. The real money is in developing super complex systems. That will give you respect.
- jurschreuder 3y ago
  Yes, this is my mantra. Senior Only-Developers are attracted to complex problems and try to make things using as many language from the "advanced" book as possible. That's why I like all-round developers better, they have a bit less to prove by making "smart and complicated" code.
  - matrix87 3y ago
    the benefit of complicated is that it filters out the people who suck so they can't fuck up the code
    - lukan 3y ago
      That would only work, if people had more accurate self assessment.
  - 3y ago

api 3y ago

The same kind of perverse incentive exists in other forms in other places, like what drives complexity growth in engineering. With people it’s called empire building. With systems I’ve heard it called “resume oriented programming.” “I built a massively complex system to manage our cloud deployment” looks superficially more impressive than “I eliminated the need for a complex deployment by rearchitecting a bit and consolidating systems, so then I only had to manage a few things.” The first person will have more code they can cite and more expertise wrangling more systems. They’ll be able to talk about all the big sexy “hyperscale” stuff they have managed with lots of terabytes and Kubernetes and terraform and helm charts. Most people would probably hire this person. I’d hire the second person. It’s basically the midwit meme, which is so popular because it illustrates something real. There seems to be a core conflict in society between systems as things we build to do things vs systems as ends in themselves. Morons just do things. Geniuses just do things. Midwits get mixed up into the process of doing things and forget the point.

starky 3y ago
>“I eliminated the need for a complex deployment by rearchitecting a bit and consolidating systems, so then I only had to manage a few things.” That is more of a marketing issue, write something like, "Improved efficiency of deployment by x% by re-architecting systems x, y, and z which saved $xxM/year."

doctorpangloss 3y ago

> When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?” Just lie. Then you will see it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not sure how to recruit for managers in a huge corporation, I don’t think even huge corporations necessarily know. One thing’s for sure: a big difference between some ICs and Managers, at least the managers you actually want to work for, is that those most non-manager ICs seem to be really fucking bought into some very reductive points of view.

neilv 3y ago
> Just lie. Yes, the liars should consolidate with the idiots at the dysfunctional companies, and leave the rest of us alone. :)
newsclues 3y ago
Be honest and communicate a superior vision. “My core team is always small but is capable of networking and scaling with other expert teams, in order to manage large projects”
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Don’t hate the player, hate the game

mcmoor 3y ago

The other side of the point is that having manager with small team means those manager need managers, which means another layer. Big team manager means flatter hierarchy which may be desired by everyone. But yeah following Goodhart's law it's bad if it makes managers hire new people instead of vanquishing other managers and taking other employees under their direct command.

op00to 3y ago

Managers want to hire more people because teams are way under-staffed. I’ve never worked on a team that had enough people to do the important things with leeway for sickness vacation and turnover. Maybe there is empire building going on, but I think it’s deeper than that.

qznc 3y ago
At least a contributing factor is that it’s easier (emotionally and politically) to hire additional mediocre people than firing bad ones.
MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
Well managed BigCorps are overstaffed 2x. Badly managed BigCorps are overstaffed 3x (or more). If there is insufficient manpower, it is often because they are building things they shouldn't. At least this was my experience.
- matwood 3y ago
  Bingo. I find that limiting headcount is a great forcing function for only doing what's important. The classic example is Google making X different chat apps. That doesn't happen unless a company is severely overstaffed.
  - stuff4ben 3y ago
    To me that really just screams lazy and incompetent management. Being overstaffed is just a coincidence. A good mgmt structure would have prioritized that roadmap and gotten the cats herded to work towards a singular goal/chat app. I say this as a "cat" myself who has to be reminded to not get distracted by the next shiny thing.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      > Being overstaffed is just a coincidence. I'd say it's not. But causality is the reverse of the GP's. Being overstaffed is a consequence of not prioritizing the work. Either the staff grows until the important things get done, or the organization shrinks because the important stuff doesn't get done.

duped 3y ago

> When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?” My father used to tell me he preferred to ask 'what did you build' or 'what did your team accomplish' instead.

bjornsing 3y ago
You do get those questions on occasion. But more in the Bay Area than where I live in Sweden.

bottle_roket 3y ago

FYI using the words “chief” and “tribe” to emphasize “primitiveness” is pretty cringe.

aorloff 3y ago

The counteracting force is to align business ownership with headcount So if you handle $$$ worth of book, you get $$$ worth of headcount to keep that going

georgeecollins 3y ago
That's a great idea. Or just keep your people / sales < then your comps in your industry. Coming at this problem from the manager / owner point of view: If your company is bootstrapped or hasn't raised a lot of money headcount can be a first guess at valuation. Or how seriously another partner in business takes you. Companies that balloon in size tend to be taken very seriously while small profitable ones get less attention. So the pressure can go both ways.

_heimdall 3y ago

I'm not sure why this article bothers attributing this insight to the former Slack CEO, this dynamic is nothing new and was a problem well before Slack or the current round of tech companies were around.

OJFord 3y ago
If they'd picked some older quote from someone else saying similar, someone still would complain that the idea predates them, right back to Socrates. I don't see it claiming it's some deep novel insight, it's just someone prominent who said something recently that's salient to the point.
- _heimdall 3y ago
  I may just being nitpicky here. With such a commonly understood, and old, concept it doesn't need ant attribution. Name dropping a random CEO just feels like a cheap addition to get eyes on an article.
  - OJFord 3y ago
    I suppose it kind of is, or an 'appeal to authority', I just don't see that as necessarily bad, it's just like 'don't take my word for it, someone you might actually have heard of or in an important position said blah'. Proper journalists and newspapers spend plenty of time quoting politicians and senior employees making obvious or previously said remarks too.
    - _heimdall 3y ago
      Yeah that's totally fair. I'm fine chalking this one up to me being too picky on a random Sunday night.
mattgreenrocks 3y ago
If a successful CEO says it, it is definitely insightful.

jbirer 3y ago

Well said. There's a Turkish proverb "You are a lord, I am a lord, then who's going to plow this land?"

ano-ther 3y ago

Here’s the real culprit that a CEO could do something about: > when there’s no real constraint on hiring Of course there’s empire building because of prestige. And even more, the enthusiasm of people who joined your growth company to make an impact, who then see all the possibilities if they just hired a little. Keeping all those bad and good instincts balanced with the actual company needs is the task of management.

alfiedotwtf 3y ago

Lol… reminds me of a place I worked at where there were 2 developers on the project but 4 project managers. When the project was running late -> they hired 2 more managers!!

wildrhythms 3y ago
This is my current workplace. Projects have 1 developer and 2 project managers. The project managers are in meetings all day every day, doing what? And the developer is constantly being demanded to work impossibly tight deadlines, and deal with the project managers backtracking on the requirements. :/
- consp 3y ago
  This is the classic one guy digging the hole and ten observing him doing it. I've had this discussion a few days ago and it's simply the problem of pay. As soon as you want to make more money you have 'to be in management and act like one' which is utter cow manure since adding managers is not going to make you any product and only delay it or make it worse but the end result is endless managers and not enough actual horses to carry the load.

gadders 3y ago

This is called Parkinson's Law: https://www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law https://www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law "To comprehend Factor I, we must picture a civil servant called A who finds himself overworked. Whether this overwork is real or imaginary is immaterial; but we should observe, in passing, that A’s sensation (or illusion) might easily result from his own decreasing energy—a normal symptom of middle-age. For this real or imagined overwork there are, broadly speaking, three possible remedies (1) He may resign. (2) He may ask to halve the work with a colleague called B. (3) He may demand the assistance of two subordinates, to be called C and D. There is probably no instance in civil service history of A choosing any but the third alternative. By resignation he would lose his pension rights. By having B appointed, on his own level in the hierarchy, he would merely bring in a rival for promotion to W’s vacancy when W (at long last) retires. So A would rather have C and D, junior men, below him. They will add to his consequence; and, by dividing the work into two categories, as between C and D, he will have the merit of being the only man who comprehends them both."

User23 3y ago
One of my pet peeves is how few people read past the first line of the essay and think Parkinson’s Law is the opening quip about work expanding to fill the time available. Thanks for the proper write up.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  C. Northcote Parkinson is a great and very under-appreciated economist. His books are easy reads and well worth it. He made many astute observations about human behavior, not just Parkinson's Law.
lostlogin 3y ago
> There is probably no instance in civil service history I’m not sure that private firms are much better. Especially if the work they are doing has been contracted out to them.
- 3y ago

Spooky23 3y ago

It’s because companies are fat and happy and don’t have enough to do. There’s not alot of hunger for more comp or accomplishment because the org works and people are paid well. Thats the same dynamic in civil service environments. Some people are motivated by dick measuring contests, and life will find a way to give those folks a metric. When I was a director at a large agency, one of my peers came into my office, proud as a peacock, to let me know that a re-org meant that he now had 113 employees. It smashed his soul when he realized I had more. It’s all huff and puff.

lordnacho 3y ago

> But sadly there just is no counteracting force Does nobody get tired of managing a huge army? Or do they just all assume they can delegate it, like an HR pyramid scheme?

greatpostman 3y ago
The big secret is managing a bunch of people is easier than doing grunt work
- rybosworld 3y ago
  Depends on the company a bit. The older a company is, the more it accumulates the sorts of people who equate management with cracking a whip. This is the laziest form of management and also the least effective. It's incredibly common, though. There are some really talented managers out there. The sort of folks you want to work for. You'll find more of these at younger companies. But the harsh/unfortunate reality is corporate culture generously rewards managers in spite of their effectiveness (lack thereof). Empire building is probably the single biggest drain on the global economy. The good news is it seems to be getting more attention and companies (Bayer, Meta for example) are taking action to combat it.

jeffwask 3y ago

It also dovetails nicely with the old, "If you don't spend all your budget, you lose it next year" management strategy. I can't count the number of times over my career where I heard a boss say, "we need to spend the rest of this before end of year."

mountainriver 3y ago

Wanting to grow isn’t a bad thing, the excess falls on the execs who approve the budgets. If your team has good economics then you should grow, if it doesn’t then the execs shouldn’t be funding it. Lot of companies have terrible exec teams that are out of touch with the company

deleted 3y ago

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treespace8 3y ago

Has any company ever tried having a bonus pool divided equally between all employees? Ie 5% of gross revenue / employees. So every time you add someone you reduce the bonus unless that person adds more to gross revenue?

frellus 3y ago
Worked at a large global financial company 10 years ago in tech. It was well known that the bonus pool was finite per division, but it was also allocated on ratios based on performance reviews and retention. Everyone knew the more people, the smaller the pool -- but then again, tech was a "cost center" so it wasn't like adding technology people (with the exception of quants) earn the bank more money. I suspect if you incentivized managers to keep their teams small, through a bonus pool, it would definitely result in smaller teams, but also with the danger of overworked ones. That seems self-fulfilling though, if you're overworked but you know there's a reward with it. That all being said, most places don't have bonus pools so it's a mute point.
lazide 3y ago
Did you ever do a school project where yourself and maybe one other person did all the work, and everyone else (2-3 folks) mostly just tagged along on the ride because they were assigned? Or maybe even made it worse? And everyone got the same grade? That happens in corp land all the time too, and it’s extremely demotivating.
mech422 3y ago
thats usually called a 'profit share' (though I've only seen it based on net profit and not gross revenue). It was quite nice on Wall Street back in the 80s...Especially since everyone got an equal share rather then the managers favorites getting the bulk of 'discretionary' bonuses. Paired with a nice xmas bonus and year end review/raises, it basically meant no-one quit because you were never more then 6 months from a fat check.

tootie 3y ago

My wife observed that in large orgs, headcount is currency. People constantly looking to justify headcount so they can say they have a 10-person org, a 50-person org, a 100-person org. I've seen managers get buy-in to spin up a new department to build a tool they could buy off the shelf for the price of 2 or 3 people. I'm constantly reminded of Mitt Romney's old saw, "corporations are people". Just an admixture of irrational, vain, fallible people. The successful ones make fewer mistakes than the rest.

dfxm12 3y ago

The large corporations I've worked for also scored you on "leadership" at the end of the year. This score usually contributes to your bonus and annual pay raise. It is hard to get a high leadership score if you don't have some formal subordinates, so this is another reason people are always looking to get someone working under them, even if they aren't ready for it or maybe don't even need it.