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Now I know little about kitchens, but I’m under the impression that the entry level job is pretty much just following instructions, chopping things up, etc. And

by User23 2y ago

Now I know little about kitchens, but I’m under the impression that the entry level job is pretty much just following instructions, chopping things up, etc. And as you rise from there, yes you get responsibility for those beneath you doing their jobs. The sous chef is responsible for seeing that whatever you call the choppers are doing their job, and the head chef is basically boss of the kitchen (and often also an owner). Viewing “people management” as some kind of job is an org smell. Every job involves working with and coordinating with other people. The difference is fundamentally one of relative authority. Thanks to Conway’s law, among other reasons, even a “non-technical” CEO is acting in at least some kind of an engineering capacity.

tsimionescu 2y ago
Having a single person do both a technical job and people and project management only scales up to size of company. There's only so much time in a 40h week, and dealing with certain problems means you can't deal with others, and as the size of the project and the size of the team increases, it will rapidly become impossible to do all of these if it's not your 100% full-time job.
- User23 2y ago
  This is pretty much exactly the mindset that I’m criticizing, yeah. In reality, in a well structured organization, someone leading a pizza team is analogous to a developer running five highly advanced AIs to help him build something. Sure sometimes he’ll choose to replace or upgrade one or more of the models, but that’s incidental to the real job, which is delivering.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    First of all, leading five people is not analogous to running five AIs. The needs of people are very very different from the needs of AIs. Secondly, a five person team is not going to deliver, say, an OS. So a company or community building an OS needs way more than five people, and needs to coordinate between five person teams, and to coordinate problems that appear between the employees/members, which will not be uncommon once your project has a few dozens of people working on it.
    - User23 2y ago
      Yes that’s how analogies work, they’re not exact equivalents. The point was to illustrate that the actual value creating job of every employee from the bottom up to the CEO is fundamentally delivering products or services. An organization that takes its eye off that ball and hires people specialized in “people management” is well on its way to the remarkably common decline and fall of large corporations. If you hire people whose specialty is interpersonal drama then guess what you’re liable to get.

by User23 2y ago

tsimionescu 2y ago

Having a single person do both a technical job and people and project management only scales up to size of company. There's only so much time in a 40h week, and dealing with certain problems means you can't deal with others, and as the size of the project and the size of the team increases, it will rapidly become impossible to do all of these if it's not your 100% full-time job.

User23 2y ago
This is pretty much exactly the mindset that I’m criticizing, yeah. In reality, in a well structured organization, someone leading a pizza team is analogous to a developer running five highly advanced AIs to help him build something. Sure sometimes he’ll choose to replace or upgrade one or more of the models, but that’s incidental to the real job, which is delivering.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  First of all, leading five people is not analogous to running five AIs. The needs of people are very very different from the needs of AIs. Secondly, a five person team is not going to deliver, say, an OS. So a company or community building an OS needs way more than five people, and needs to coordinate between five person teams, and to coordinate problems that appear between the employees/members, which will not be uncommon once your project has a few dozens of people working on it.
  - User23 2y ago
    Yes that’s how analogies work, they’re not exact equivalents. The point was to illustrate that the actual value creating job of every employee from the bottom up to the CEO is fundamentally delivering products or services. An organization that takes its eye off that ball and hires people specialized in “people management” is well on its way to the remarkably common decline and fall of large corporations. If you hire people whose specialty is interpersonal drama then guess what you’re liable to get.