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> He told me that he had worked to develop a tool that would replace effectively all of the middle management function that he was responsible for: gathering in
by Aurornis 10mo ago
> He told me that he had worked to develop a tool that would replace effectively all of the middle management function that he was responsible for: gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and reporting that to people above him.
Any manager whose job was this simple was on borrowed time anyway.
I think the person was feeding you a story around the campfire to impress you. Real management work doesn't operate like this.
- retinaros 10mo agolol. it does. its a good description of about 90% of the mgrs
- simianparrot 10mo agoSeems like Amazon is doing the right thing cutting down its corporate workforce then.
- complianceowl 10mo ago[dead]
- jdmg94 10mo agoyou would be amazed at the amount of middle managers who keep failing upwards in organizations like Amazon
- ganoushoreilly 10mo agoHappens in the Govt too. I think it's pretty common that if you can "sell a story" you're in a better spot than simply doing well at the job.
- NicoJuicy 10mo agoThat's literally the current president
- api 10mo agoI think he might be the greatest person at failing up who has ever lived. It has to be some kind of savant-like skill. After this he’ll probably become the literal king of the world.
- reaperducer 10mo agoI think he might be the greatest person at failing up who has ever lived. Went bankrupt six times and is still hailed by his followers as an economic genius. Few people can pull that off.
- nick49488171 10mo agoHe's going for number 7 it seems
- hvb2 10mo agoMarried 4 times, still seen as a saint
- NicoJuicy 10mo agoBuried his wife on his property alone to get tax breaks as a cemetery for mar a lago
- waldarbeiter 10mo agoThat was not mar a Lago but in New Jersey
- auggierose 10mo agoI think what is hard to understand for people is how you can go bankrupt six times and still have loads of assets and money. How does that work?
- reaperducer 10mo ago
- jasondigitized 10mo agoFake management is far more common than real management. Most of management is centered around hyper-realistic work like activities.
- pydry 10mo agoMy experience with ex Amazon managers is that they brought a toxic culture and destroyed more value than they created. Some people are so focused on whether they could automate their work output with an LLM to ask themselves if they even should.
- lazide 10mo agoAn extremely common problem in the wider world too.
- betty_staples 10mo ago[dead]
- moralestapia 10mo ago>they brought a toxic culture and destroyed more value than they created Yeah, I've been in one of such places.
- paradox460 10mo agoYup Why did you leave Amazon? > I couldn't stand the management culture Sooo... Why are you trying to bring it with you
- suzzer99 10mo agoI got the brunt of this when Amazon banned me from KDP for life over a complete nonsense hallucination by a fraud detection bot. I thought at some point I'd get to talk to a human who would immediately say "Oh this is ridiculous, sorry." Nope. I just got passed around between either more bots or offshore customer support employees, with I assume a gigantic incentive to not go against the fraud detection bot, until I ran out of appeals. One of the most soul-sucking experiences I've ever gone through. I can't imagine the toxic culture that produced that system.
- nmfisher 10mo ago> Real management work doesn't operate like this. Don't know about Amazon but my experience with middle management is that it's exactly like that.
- spiritplumber 10mo agoAlso, if you bite them after telling them five times "please don't touch me", it's somehow your fault.
- woooooo 10mo agoAmazon in particular has a highly formalized ritual for reporting up and down that consumes managers entirely. If you don't play, youll be humiliated and fired. The engineers self-organize while the managers are working in their own, different universe.
- booleandilemma 10mo agoActually I've worked at companies where management is exactly like this. Literally just status updates and asking when things are going to be finished. I have no respect for middle managers whatsoever. These people are a parasite on the industry.
- hattmall 10mo agoOk, Ok, I get the disdain for middle management. It's basically exactly like you described, but middle management didn't come about for no reason. There really is a value and the idea of automating it away with AI is extremely dubious. One could even argue that middle management is THE most critical role in corporations over a certain size. In that it is the glue that allows them to get to that size. But it's also what gave rise to things like Dilbert and the idea of rising to the level of your own incompetence. Middle management is like the lug nuts on a wheel. If you start with 5, you can take one away and be OK, even two and no issues with normal driving. You can go down to two and as long as you aren't hitting large bumps and they aren't adjacent you mostly likely will be fine for a short trip. You could even remove ALL of the lug nuts and if you travel in straight line over a smooth road you can still drive. After all they mostly just sit there, the tire, the transmission, all the other parts of the car are doing the work. But it's not fair to say that any of the removed lug nuts were doing nothing. The point of middle management isn't really to do anything spectacular on a daily basis. If the company is working well, middle management effectively has no function. It's when things get out of line. Even then though, it's not really middle management that's calling the shots or fixing the problem, but they are critical in noticing the problems and directing resources. Middle management's role is in reducing the time that things are out of line. At least that's the idea, and much like any position, the bulk of the group benefits are overwhelmingly produced by the groups most effective producers. Middle management is the hardest role to hire while simultaneously being the hardest to gauge employee effectiveness.
- ethbr1 10mo agoWell said! I'd also add that a critical function of middle management in healthy companies is bidirectional information communication: sharing what their teams are doing up and sharing leadership priorities down. Having worked at some dysfunctional companies where that didn't happen (and a few companies that were amazing at it), it makes a difference at scale. Nothing is more disheartening than working your ass off as an IC, shipping, then finding out that your VP pivoted approach and your project won't be used.
- coreyoconnor 10mo agoI left amazon, in part, because of this realization: Much of management was exactly doing that. That was back in the BERT days and even then writing was on the wall.
- dialogbox 10mo ago>> gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and reporting that to people above him. > Real management work doesn't operate like this. I agree but in the opposite direction. So many managers not only doing that but doctoring, filtering and tainting it as well. So AI would be more effective for the most of bad managers.
- khazhoux 10mo ago> I think the person was feeding you a story around the campfire to impress you. Yeah, this sounds like the guy was just exaggerating for effect. Haven't we all joked before, "I'm writing a tool to automate my own job away."
- aiisjustanif 10mo agoI’m more surprised that it’s not believable for some of management depending on how process driven there job is. I’ve definitely had roles where I sadly realized I’m automating the QA person next to me well before LLMs were mainstream. In my experience I think, you would automate enough of a mid manager role that upper management doesn’t care for, and whatever left over responsibilities that couldn’t be automated is split between a high level IC and the next above. Then the bureaucracy sells is as a success.
- RansomStark 10mo agoNo, this is exactly how Amazon management works. Members of a team creates a report explaining the state of their small section of the business, usually a 2x2 grid of boxes to fill. This is then reviewed, usually in an in person meeting that requires full team participation. These are joined together to create a weekly business review, that will require another meeting to review. Each month the WBRs are combined to created the monthly business review, with a massive meeting requiring participation by multiple teams. The pyramid of documents and meetings continues all the way up to the CEO. I should probably point out, none of this information is unavailable at any level, its copied and pasted from system to 2x2 then copied from doc to doc. It's a spectacle that needs to be seen to be believed. And that just the reporting, planning is another exercise in multiple report writing that I'll save for another day. But, hopefully you get the idea. Amazon is 90% internal document writing and 70% work (9-5 does not really exist, it could, it just doesnt). It's essentially a massive jobs program for middle management that aren't capable enough to join the TSA and that's being unfair to the TSA. The only reason I can think for the existence of the reporting is to give managers something to do between pipping staff.
- deanCommie 9mo agoi'm curious, how do you think other large companies operate with regards to reporting progress/status/results up the management chain? At least at companies where the upper management is aware enough of the details to make good judgements, and the business is critical enough for some reason that low level management can't just be entrusted to yeet/yolo-things into production?