41 ms·

I feel like "making choices" and "making decisions" isn't really a full time job. Maybe just see what a group of seniorish people think? I don't sort of "hate

I feel like "making choices" and "making decisions" isn't really a full time job. Maybe just see what a group of seniorish people think? I don't sort of "hate managers" or anything. Just curious about why businesses always seem to think they have to have them.

taormina 1y ago
The people who decide that managers are mandatory, are, the managers.
Jemaclus 1y ago
I think you should ask yourself that last question again, and this time really think about it. Why /do/ all companies seem to have managers? (Tone clarification: I'm not approaching this in a condescending manner, but more of a "let's talk through this problem out loud and see where it gets us." So please don't take this as condescension.) One way to think about "obvious" solutions to problems, such as a "no manager" solutuon, is this: if it's so obvious, why is no one doing it? For example, I worked for a grocery delivery startup for a while. Every single new hire, without fail, would show up at the end of the first week and say "I have a great idea, why don't we let users shop by recipe?" On its face, it sounds like a brilliant idea! One intuition-based shortcut to find the answer is: if that's such an obvious thing, why doesn't Amazon or Kroger or Safeway or HEB or any of the major grocery chains let you do that? And of course, the answer is: that's not how users shop. If it worked, the big players would be doing it. They're not. Are you smarter than Amazon? Probably not. That's not to say a smaller group can't innovate past Amazon, but Amazon has some /really fucking smart people/ working for them, and the odds are fantastically small that you'll out-think them. (You can certainly out-_pivot_ them by doing something faster than they can, but if it turns out to be valuable, in the long run, they'll do it too.) So when you approach a conversation like this and say, "Maybe just see what a group of seniorish people think?", one way to do a quick sanity check on it is: can you think of successful companies that are run that way? You probably can't. I certainly can't. There's a similar problem in the theatre world. It is universally understood that someone doing a 60 second monologue for an audition is _the worst way to evaluate theatrical performance_... except for everything else. And similarly, it appears, based on scanning the successful companies, that having managers is possibly also the worst way to ensure performance... except for everything else. So... managers it is. It's unlikely that there's a better way to do this at scale. Many people have tried. Management chains always win.
- taormina 1y ago
  I agree with your broader consensus, but, for that example you give, HEB absolutely lets you shop by recipe on their website.
  - Jemaclus 1y ago
    But the larger point is still true: For every "why don't they just do X? It's so obvious!" you can look around and note that [almost] /nobody/ is doing that, and that should be a pretty big signal about the idea. My original post is about the intuition behind how to approach questions like that. Whenever anyone says "Why don't they just do $OBVIOUS_THING?" the answer is "because nobody is doing it." Now, with respect to that particular feature, I can provide some personal experience to explain /why/ [almost] nobody has that feature. As a disclaimer, I don't know HEB's website. They were just someone we dealt with, and I don't live in their service area, so it's interesting that they have the feature. What I can tell you from experience is that it would not be a significant driver of revenue, certainly not enough to be a majorly supported feature by a major company that has other value props out there. By far the biggest revenue driver for a grocery company are the staples that people buy every single week: the same milk, the same bread, the same cereal, the same ground beef, the same mac 'n cheese. People, as a general population, are not adventurous at home When you want something new and interesting, you go out to a restaurant. When you want something familiar and comfortable and, most importantly, easy, you make it at home. I would hazard that the number of times that the average American family of four would cook a brand new recipe they've never had before is probably less than a dozen times /per year/. So if you're a company that gets >90% of its revenue from weekly recurring users and staples, and <1% of its revenue from recipe-driven results, and you have limited resources, which of those do you think you should focus on? Obviously, you focus on the former. A 10% increase in staples sales is worth millions and millions of dollars, whereas a 10% increase in recipe sales is worth, maybe, a few hundred thousand dollars. It's not nothing, but it's not really worth it from an ROI perspective. Maybe if it's a set-it-and-forget-it kind of feature, it might work? But over the long run you'll have to come back and upgrade dependencies and migrate to the newest framework du jour, and blah blah blah, and the next thing you know you have a team of four full-time engineers working on a feature that brings in half their salary. HEB doing it is, well, it's interesting. I am supremely confident it is not a significant revenue driver. It might be something that increases NPS scores or something to that effect, but it's not going to move the needle on revenue very much. So it's interesting that they have the feature. So if you take all of that into account -- you'll just have to trust me that I know what I'm talking about, I'm sorry about that -- then you can see that someone saying "What if we just got senior people in a room to see what they think?" is a question that doesn't deserve much attention. Not because it's a dumb idea, but because it's actually an interesting idea that has no merits when you dig down and look at it. If it worked, as the intuition goes, the industry at-large would be doing it. And the evidence bears that out.

taormina 1y ago

The people who decide that managers are mandatory, are, the managers.

Jemaclus 1y ago

I think you should ask yourself that last question again, and this time really think about it. Why /do/ all companies seem to have managers? (Tone clarification: I'm not approaching this in a condescending manner, but more of a "let's talk through this problem out loud and see where it gets us." So please don't take this as condescension.) One way to think about "obvious" solutions to problems, such as a "no manager" solutuon, is this: if it's so obvious, why is no one doing it? For example, I worked for a grocery delivery startup for a while. Every single new hire, without fail, would show up at the end of the first week and say "I have a great idea, why don't we let users shop by recipe?" On its face, it sounds like a brilliant idea! One intuition-based shortcut to find the answer is: if that's such an obvious thing, why doesn't Amazon or Kroger or Safeway or HEB or any of the major grocery chains let you do that? And of course, the answer is: that's not how users shop. If it worked, the big players would be doing it. They're not. Are you smarter than Amazon? Probably not. That's not to say a smaller group can't innovate past Amazon, but Amazon has some /really fucking smart people/ working for them, and the odds are fantastically small that you'll out-think them. (You can certainly out-_pivot_ them by doing something faster than they can, but if it turns out to be valuable, in the long run, they'll do it too.) So when you approach a conversation like this and say, "Maybe just see what a group of seniorish people think?", one way to do a quick sanity check on it is: can you think of successful companies that are run that way? You probably can't. I certainly can't. There's a similar problem in the theatre world. It is universally understood that someone doing a 60 second monologue for an audition is _the worst way to evaluate theatrical performance_... except for everything else. And similarly, it appears, based on scanning the successful companies, that having managers is possibly also the worst way to ensure performance... except for everything else. So... managers it is. It's unlikely that there's a better way to do this at scale. Many people have tried. Management chains always win.

taormina 1y ago
I agree with your broader consensus, but, for that example you give, HEB absolutely lets you shop by recipe on their website.
- Jemaclus 1y ago
  But the larger point is still true: For every "why don't they just do X? It's so obvious!" you can look around and note that [almost] /nobody/ is doing that, and that should be a pretty big signal about the idea. My original post is about the intuition behind how to approach questions like that. Whenever anyone says "Why don't they just do $OBVIOUS_THING?" the answer is "because nobody is doing it." Now, with respect to that particular feature, I can provide some personal experience to explain /why/ [almost] nobody has that feature. As a disclaimer, I don't know HEB's website. They were just someone we dealt with, and I don't live in their service area, so it's interesting that they have the feature. What I can tell you from experience is that it would not be a significant driver of revenue, certainly not enough to be a majorly supported feature by a major company that has other value props out there. By far the biggest revenue driver for a grocery company are the staples that people buy every single week: the same milk, the same bread, the same cereal, the same ground beef, the same mac 'n cheese. People, as a general population, are not adventurous at home When you want something new and interesting, you go out to a restaurant. When you want something familiar and comfortable and, most importantly, easy, you make it at home. I would hazard that the number of times that the average American family of four would cook a brand new recipe they've never had before is probably less than a dozen times /per year/. So if you're a company that gets >90% of its revenue from weekly recurring users and staples, and <1% of its revenue from recipe-driven results, and you have limited resources, which of those do you think you should focus on? Obviously, you focus on the former. A 10% increase in staples sales is worth millions and millions of dollars, whereas a 10% increase in recipe sales is worth, maybe, a few hundred thousand dollars. It's not nothing, but it's not really worth it from an ROI perspective. Maybe if it's a set-it-and-forget-it kind of feature, it might work? But over the long run you'll have to come back and upgrade dependencies and migrate to the newest framework du jour, and blah blah blah, and the next thing you know you have a team of four full-time engineers working on a feature that brings in half their salary. HEB doing it is, well, it's interesting. I am supremely confident it is not a significant revenue driver. It might be something that increases NPS scores or something to that effect, but it's not going to move the needle on revenue very much. So it's interesting that they have the feature. So if you take all of that into account -- you'll just have to trust me that I know what I'm talking about, I'm sorry about that -- then you can see that someone saying "What if we just got senior people in a room to see what they think?" is a question that doesn't deserve much attention. Not because it's a dumb idea, but because it's actually an interesting idea that has no merits when you dig down and look at it. If it worked, as the intuition goes, the industry at-large would be doing it. And the evidence bears that out.