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Most companies requiring in-office work, at least for most tech and many other skills, are showing themselves as being poorly managed places that one should avo
by michaelteter 2y ago
Most companies requiring in-office work, at least for most tech and many other skills, are showing themselves as being poorly managed places that one should avoid working at.
Tech management is often bad, for any number of reasons (not the least of which is non-technical peoples' complete lack of understanding about what their people are doing). At least when these managers are beyond physical reach of their workers, the workers have a better chance of creating a productive environment and shielding themselves from distraction and nonsense interactions.
Many of these managers actually do very little beyond low-value talking and meeting. They are figureheads who are recognized by figureheads who likewise provide little actual value.
Meanwhile, a team of 1 product/project management skill + 2 devs + 1 designer, when all agreeing on the goal, can do what a corporate organization of 100 people cannot do.
This is why most new value is created by small independent teams who are then bought up by laggard giants that can no longer do anything beyond manipulating the system to maintain some form of monopolistic control.
Therefore, if your company is demanding you come back to the office, you can bet they are not a place you want to work at (unless your goal is _only_ money).
- rybosworld 2y agoIt's not a coincidence that flat organizations make more money. It's expensive to retain 7+ layers of management. Meta targeted middle managers in their recent layoffs, and by all indications it was a brilliant move. Netflix is famously flat. Amazon is much flatter than the majority of corporate America. Google as well. Bureaucracy continues to thrive in corporate America because of a bug (the politics of people). If you've ever worked in an org that is very hierarchal, you've probably experienced the following: - More meetings than heads down time - Answering to multiple bosses/managers - Answering the same question multiple times (a symptom of too many managers) - Competing projects - Everything is a priority one task I truly believe that companies start to die, when more than ~10-15% of the org is management.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 2y agoI mean Microsoft is pretty damn hierarchical, with monstrously thick layers of middle management, and they've been going strong for decades. And by all accounts, Netflix and Amazon are stressful to work for, at least partially because these employees are having to manage themselves in addition to performing their individual work. I actually agree with most of your points, but if you think of the market as an ecosystem and companies as lifeforms, you'll find many species employing completely different (successful) growth strategies. I've been on teams that were undermanaged, I've been on teams that were over-managed, organizations with incredibly effective management, and organizations where management was comprised of politicians and fools who actively harmed the effectiveness of the teams they were supposed to lead. It's relatively easy to hire great ICs. You ask them some questions to make sure their resume isn't bullshit, try to gage their enthusiasm, attitude, and friendliness, then pay them what they want. It's really, really hard to hire great managers, because even if they've succeeded in past positions, it has little bearing on whether they'll succeed in this particular position, working with these particular people. And it's even harder to build an organizational culture whereby the right people get promoted internally to management. Almost every company screws this up, and the big companies that get this less-wrong are much less stressful to work for and more effective than their peers.