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So they finally figured out most managers are not just useless, but literally a drag to the company and progress?
by justmarc 2y ago
So they finally figured out most managers are not just useless, but literally a drag to the company and progress?
- DesiLurker 2y agoNo now just senior managers are supposed to pickup the slack and drag the company behind on there own. and also program managers & useless product managers. jokes apart, long ago when I was there, once somebody did the internal org site scraping and found out in our org there were almost 6 workers (status givers) to 1 status takers. and sr. engineers are supposed to 'manage themselves', so really full of political BSers.
- coliveira 2y agoDon't forget principals. Most of them do nothing the whole day and are compensated to create BS projects that go nowhere.
- viccis 2y agoIn my experience, the worst of them are lodged in there tighter than trichinella larvae.
- wkat4242 2y agoYeah because the good ones already left the shitshow to get a job somewhere better. Because they can.
- anacrolix 2y agoThe best are always the first to leave
- FirmwareBurner 2y agoTheir upper managers don't want "best", they want loyal, they want yes men that will make perfect henchmen, that's what best is for them so they get exactly what they're looking for. People who rock the boat aren't gonna cut it.
- viccis 2y agoThis is true. I've also found that there are perverse incentives when it comes to (especially upper) management. Building up enough political clout in your organization that aren't answerable to many people, and managing your image among the few you are answerable to, is the best skill one can have if the outcome is steady long term employment. Providing value to your company and coworkers doesn't correlate as much with surviving corporate haircuts like these.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y agoYou realize alot of these managers are making seven figures? The "good ones" arent leaving. They are clinging to that money
- hibikir 2y agoA manager decides to spend their energy managing their relationships up, down or sideways. The very worst will focus solely on managing the upwards relationship, but that's precisely what makes them hard to dislodge: Every second of their day is spent on efforts that helped their job security by relationship building. So it's not just that the best manager is also the best at finding a new job, but that every second they spend improving their org's performance is a second they don't spend trying to fool a typically not-so-good middle manager into thinking they are indispensable. This is also why, every time I've seen manager culls, I have found that it was rare for upper management's idea of who was easier to replace was to match that of peers and reports. The ability of the bad manager to hide the truth from the exec is much stronger than people realize.
- googlehater 2y agowhat was the purpose of that analogy?
- wubrr 2y agoThe managers are just following the (fairly absurd imo), amazon internal processes for the most part. If the processes don't change, there are just going to be a bunch of overloaded managers. The current processes, culture, and 'principles'/dogmas are inefficient, contradictory and toxic af.
- hsbauauvhabzb 2y agoWho created the policies and procedures?
- dboreham 2y agoBezos.
- eMPee584 2y ago(Bezos all the way down)
- lolinder 2y agoIf the answer you were looking for was "managers", then you have no concept of just how big Amazon is. According to TFA they have about 106000 managers before this layoff. You don't give 106k people any meaningful control over the company's policies and procedures, that has to come from the layers above the managers, probably several layers up.
- hsbauauvhabzb 2y agoSo, the people that manage the managers?
- lolinder 2y agoTry the people that manage the people that manage the people that manage the managers. Maybe. Definitely not the people being laid off.
- joshstrange 2y agoI'm interested to hear what type of structure you prefer over one that has managers overseeing developers. Or are you saying you just need to find the good managers? I might have misunderstood. I'm honestly interested in alternatives.
- dyauspitr 2y agoWell come back around. We will retry the flat structure again, realize that just leads to terrible throughput, team wise political battles and defacto leaders and start hiring the managers again. Just look at older industries that have reached a steady state because they’ve been around longer. No one is constructing a large building without a project manager, foremen or architects.