18 ms·

First, Let's Fire All The Managers

118 points by vellum 13y ago

losethos 13y ago
I am in a reeducation camp, but God talks. I need to reverse captor/victim so I am ruler and they are slaves. God says... these_cans_are_defective just_lovely wife biggot it's_hopeless tiffanies as_a_matter_of_fact dude_such_a_scoffer surprise_surprise unsung_hero taxes economy huh I'm_tired_of_this mission_from_God well_I_never nasty you'll_see economy look_out I'm_done meek fun you_do_it vice
ryanbrunner 13y ago
It seems like this is becoming more and more of a trend, and is just starting to push into the realm of legitimacy, rather than "kooky company does something crazy". There's plenty of examples in tech of companies without traditional management structures (and mostly no management at all) - GitHub, Valve, Treehouse, etc. Now a food processor of all places pulls this off. I do think this is an approach that doesn't necessarily work well for large companies - building the sense of camaraderie necessary for this is impossible at 10,000 or even 1,000 employees IMO, but on the other hand - who says we need to have giant companies? Wouldn't things work a lot better with a whole lot of 150 person companies?
- moconnor 13y ago
  This article is from the December 2011 issue, it's 2 years old now. However, the self-management principle at Morning Star still seems to be in effect: http://morningstarco.com/index.cgi?Page=Self-Management http://morningstarco.com/index.cgi?Page=Self-Management
- hythloday 13y ago
  WL Gore & Associates has over 10 000 employees and operates on a similar structure (and has done for decades): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._Gore_and_Associates#Culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._Gore_and_Associates#Cultu...
- mathattack 13y ago
  I recall an interview with John Chambers of Cisco many years ago where he mentioned having 20 or 30 direct reports, to avoid too much meddling in people's affairs. This can work if you don't need to make drastic changes (we have had a massive disruption in our industry and need to let half the workforce go - which half?) and if there doesn't need to be any cross-functional tiebreakers. What's strange is in a more recent (2009) article [1] he claims to be more command and control, but shifting towards a more bottom-up organic method. [1] http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/mckinsey_conversations_with_global_leaders_john_chambers_of_cisco http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet...
  - Swannie 13y ago
    Today JC's direct report more or less == Cisco Board. He really only has three: COO and Co-President Gary Moore, Co-President Sales & Development Rob Lloyd, and CFO Frank Calderoni. Pretty much all other C-level and EVPs report to Gary and Rob. John talked about cutting, primarily, middle management during the recent 4000 job cuts announcement. You can guess how well that has worked. There is still plenty of scope to broaden the span of control in Cisco.
- molsongolden 13y ago
  A similar but more fringe structure that is regaining popularity is the worker collective/cooperative. Mondragon pulls it off to some degree with 10,000+ employees but their structure definitely involves more hierarchy than the smaller coops. 10,000 employees doesn't have to mean 10,000 employees all doing the same work in the same division, you can still have camaraderie within divisions or work groups and organize the entire company democratically. The worker collective gives ownership and influence to every worker and lessens the "us vs. them" dynamic by empowering workers and basically eliminating managers.
- nodata 13y ago
  I thought Valve didn't pull it off once it got to a certain size? http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/09/valve-management-jeri-ellsworth http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/09/valve-managem...
  - ryanbrunner 13y ago
    Yeah, stuff like that is what I was getting at about it not working for larger companies.
  - mattlutze 13y ago
    It seems Ellsworth's firing was hyped a lot around the tech news, and she definitely leveraged that to get her new AR goggle project off the ground. I'd like to see this story corroborated by other former Valve employees. Her interview there feels a lot like self-victimization.
- wsc981 13y ago
  The Brazilian Semco company has a similar structure, IIRC: http://www.schneede.se/assets/files/Ricardo_Semler.pdf http://www.schneede.se/assets/files/Ricardo_Semler.pdf
static_typed 13y ago
Boss has a problem, so he hires an MBA, now he has 300 problems, and he got fired as well.
Joeboy 13y ago
This really needs an NSFW tag...
- vanderZwan 13y ago
  I like how that can be interpreted in more than one way.
- gulbrandr 13y ago
  Why?
  - RankingMember 13y ago
    It's a joke. Normally NSFW tags are for porn-ish links, but this is unique in that it's not porn but could potentially make your manager equally upset.
yxhuvud 13y ago
Somehow, I doubt this will be an easy sell to the management hierarchy.
analog31 13y ago
Disclaimer: I work for a Fortune 500 company. I suspect the inefficiency added by managers is overblown, because most of them do not spend 100% of their time on traditional management activities such as supervision and decision making. A lot of their work is on tasks that would fall in somebody's lap within any organization. Some of those tasks are ones that I find to be dreadful.
- exodust 13y ago
  Most managers will instinctively delegate dreadful tasks. That's part of the fun of management. I wonder if there's any managers around who also code? Maybe 50% of their time could be management, 50% coding. Nothing like getting hands dirty with the company code to see where things are at. Shared management roles could also be an option. Or, manage by committee? There's enough design by committee happening, surely we can all jump in on management decisions?
  - weland 13y ago
    > I wonder if there's any managers around who also code? Maybe 50% of their time could be management, 50% coding. Nothing like getting hands dirty with the company code to see where things are at. An important part of the reason why so many technical people have an "overblown" idea about the inefficiency added by management is negative experience. I have met maybe a dozen people who were in management position and were not completely and utterly incompetent at what they were managing. More often than not, the managers I meet were people who started out as programmers, but quickly realized they don't stand a chance building a career out of it. This is an incredibly common career path.
    - MrBuddyCasino 13y ago
      This. I'm working as a consultant, and I see the same thing over and over again. There aren't many "IT Managers" that are competent at what they're doing. If you are good at what you are doing (which might be programming), go and look for an environment with like-minded individuals with a sense of craftsmanship and pride in their work. Everything else will suck the life out of you.
michaelochurch 13y ago
I've come to a realization that managers and programmers have something in common. The bad ones try to perpetuate job security by creating complexity (whether in code or interpersonal issues) that only they can navigate. The good ones want to do their jobs so well that they "program" (literally for engineers, figuratively for managers) themselves out of a job, so they can graduate to better things. You see this most strongly with consultants. The good engineer does the best work he can, assuming it will lead to more challenging and interesting projects in the future. He's not worried about job security, or at least not enough to do things that are unethical; he assumes that doing a good job and becoming better at his work is job security. The bad consultant obfuscates code, documents poorly, and tries to make it impossible to ever fire him. He's not trying to bigger, badder (and more lucrative) projects in the future; he's just aiming to keep whatever income stream he has in perpetuity. I think that managers exhibit the same dynamic, and I think that solving this problem requires recognizing it and watching for the warning signs early on. I'm strongly in favor of open allocation, but that's not quite the same thing as "no management", which I think might take the idea too far. Why? Because management is a fact of life; some people will have more power than others, and I'd rather it be dealt with in a fair and reasonable way than in an ad-hoc and unstable way. Having a permanent class of entitled (literally, not necessarily pejoratively) managers may not be the solution, and I support making people more self-managing-- actually, I'd use the term self-executive-- but acknowledging the basic fact of management, and encouraging the positive manifestations while avoiding the negative, is probably healthy as well.
- wdewind 13y ago
  Honest question: have you ever met someone who purposefully obfuscates code? I've met some shitty programmers, but I don't think I've ever met someone doing it on purpose.
  - gpcz 13y ago
    Purposefully? No, but I'll admit that during undergrad I mistakenly obfuscated code. We were competing in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (igvc.org), but I didn't really understand the "meat" of the problem very well. Instead of focusing on machine learning and simultaneous localization & mapping I got way too focused on the "multi-threaded architecture" of our robot and basically rewrote protobuf poorly rather than actually solving the problem. I've improved in those areas since then, but I slap my forehead whenever I think back to those days about how stupid I was. The worst was that the whole time I thought I was so smart, too.
exodust 13y ago
Mediation sounds good, and the 6 member panel idea also good. In online tech, it pays to keep the mood relaxed and the office comfortable and spacious. Regardless of how much "serious business" is happening online, the internet is still a chilled out place. The traditional hierarchy of managers is inherently unrelaxed. When you have multiple managers surrounding you, their presence might cause some to hold back on decisions, or pause that initiative. The managers will take care of all those nasty little details such as making decisions, you just keep doing the task you were delegated. Remember what it felt like when the teacher left the room? If the manager leaves the office for the day and you feel that same rush of freedom feeling, you know things might be better without managers (or just a new manager).
bane 13y ago
I've seen lots of these "x-role free" companies: no managers, no sales department, etc. Inevitably the function that those roles take on end up on somebody. Companies will sit in denial about it for a very long time, even making up weird titles to pretend like they still don't have managers, but ultimately they'll end up with them in the end because that's how they have to interface with the rest of the world and many of these roles exist because it's how work naturally breaks down and how people naturally specialize.
- hythloday 13y ago
  I'm extremely suspicious of the word "naturally" there. What nature are they conforming to?
  - bane 13y ago
    For example, there's a natural split between people who need to spend their days quietly writing software and the constant interactions and distractions of sales. It's almost mentally impossible to do both, not because either job is hard, but the context switching means software never gets developed and when writing software, possible customers never get called and deals never get closed.
- lmm 13y ago
  The point I took from the article was that it's better for managerial tasks to be distributed across the team than reside with specific individuals. Of course there's no free lunch - an self-managed coder can get less coding done than a managed one, because they have to spend some of their time on managerial tasks. But it's possible they'll be more effective at it than an external manager.
  - bane 13y ago
    I think in some organizations this should happen anyway by giving the individual wide degrees of autonomy. Micromanagers are the bane of everybody's existence.
kfk 13y ago
Completely OT. What's with these articles that look like traditional magazines on the web? I get this is a PDF, but it makes reading on screen painful. I think something like the medium layout is the best way to present writings and you can still build fancy edits on top.
- krmmalik 13y ago
  Yes, that really annoyed me about the article too. It made it much harder to read on a mobile device for one, plus I wanted to copy some text and share it as a quote with a link to the pdf but that was harder due to it being a pdf.
juanuys 13y ago
The file name -- [B@58aa11eb.pdf -- seems like it was created by something written in Java: instead of printing the real file name, they printed the signature of the Byte array holding the file name data. See here [1] for a better-than-Oracle explanation: [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1040868/java-syntax-and-meaning-behind-b1ef9157-binary-address http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1040868/java-syntax-and-m...
VLM 13y ago
I'll try a pitiful attempt at a TLDR, feel free to try an improve it (if you can): The IRS has extremely strong opinions on what it means legally to be a contractor. However you can easily avoid the legal issues and run a company as if it were full of contractors, if you want, by merely treating them legally as employees but treat them managerially (sorta) as contractors. And at least anecdotally sometimes this works really well. Or a really short TLDR is contemplate the building trades and the role of a general contractor, and run your (probably) non construction company that way.
cygwin98 13y ago
Umm, my take is that developers are taking over the world, in term of duties. We don't need BA, since we do agile development and talk directly to customers. We don't need DBA now that we have ORM and NOSQL. We don't need sys-admin/sysops because we are devops now. Now, no managers. Next, no VC or no boss?
squozzer 13y ago
Interesting idea, but it seems to have a trade-off -- instead of negotiating a single (or perhaps a few) relationships, you have to negotiate about 20. It sounds a lot like a n*(n-1) problem.
- fiatjaf 13y ago
  The world is not a computer (or else AI would be easy).
PaulRobinson 13y ago
cf. "Maverick" by Ricardo Semler, the CEO of Semco. I think you'd all enjoy reading it. It changed my attitude to work and management considerably. I am still a manager, but I give a lot more responsibility to my team than most.
api 13y ago
Horray! Stick it to the man! Wait... This is a double-edged sword. Management tracks are typically the next step up in terms of career advancement for regular workers. Eliminate those and what do you have? A couple mega-rich owners, and then a flat field of "peasant" laborers. It starts looking a lot more like a feudal fief. What will take the place of middle management for career advancement?
peterhunt 13y ago
I'm somewhat surprised that everyone is so anti-management here. First of all, Morning Star seems like a pretty well-run place, but the whole system works because they have the luxury of hiring the right people. This is, of course, the single most important factor in any effective organization. If you don't hire the right people or play to their strengths you won't be able to pull this off. Anyway, a lot of the reasons listed in this piece look like they're sourced from companies with crappy management and I don't think they represent the reality of management, at least in a lot of places. At Facebook (the only company where I have experience as both an IC and manager) there are three important things to know about management: * It's a parallel track to IC (individual contributor aka hacker). You aren't "promoted" to manager. It's a lateral move. There are plenty of ICs making more money than managers. * All managers go through "bootcamp" (6-week engineering onboarding) and commit code. * The role of the manager is to basically do all the shitty work so ICs don't have to. I want to stress that third point. If you're anything like me, as a hacker you want to be given a well-defined problem (unless the problem is defining the problem) and go off and hack on it for a while with minimal distraction. There are a lot of crappy distractions that come with working in the real world. Here are a few: * Dealing with interpersonal issues * Onboarding new hires * Coordinating engineering efforts and priorities (aka: going to meetings so ICs don't have to) * Telling that guy in sales or that gal in product management that we can't work on their tasks right now * Dealing with medium-priority bugs during crunch time If I'm shipping a product I don't want to deal with any of this stuff as long as I'm not being micromanaged or feel like a second-class citizen to management. So what managers end up doing is being responsible for all of the shit work so their team can go do what they do best. I'm actually concerned that this whole "no management" movement is going to lead to less motivated and less coordinated teams as these companies grow.
- rch 13y ago
  > as a hacker you want to be given a well-defined problem I think identifying and solving open problems is more of a hacker mindset.
- protonfish 13y ago
  The problem is that menial work (arranging meetings, organizing schedules, handling communications with colleagues and clients by phone and mail) used to be handled by secretaries. If Mad Men is to be believed, at a certain employment level you would get a personal secretary and below that you could draw from a common pool. Where did all these secretarial jobs go? Their title was changed to "manager" and they were put in charge. God help us all.
crazygringo 13y ago
From what I recall, there's a big counter-argument to this, which is that management is necessary because organization is fundamentally necessary, and that when there are no formal "managers", certain people wind up being informal managers, but because this is "hidden", it winds up being less accountable, more open to cliquishness and/or discrimination, and having a host of problems of its own. I've been trying to find an article I remember which describes how this is particularly bad for women, who can easily be "informally" excluded, but I can't find it... All I can find is this, on Valve: http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/07/08/valves-flat-structure-contains-hidden-layer-of-powerful-management-claims-ex-employee/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/07/08/valves-flat-structure-cont...
- amirmc 13y ago
  I think the article you're referring to is called The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Article: http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessnes...
  - ep103 13y ago
    This is a wonderful article, and details quite nicely why you can't simply throw managerial theory out the window and pretend everything will be okay. It goes into depth about the problems one encounters if an organization attempts to eschew all management, and then goes into depth about how to fix these issues while maintaining a flat organization (in short, just because you acknowledge that a managerial position exists does not mean that that position needs to hold asymmetric power over the people who are managed, as occurs in the traditional hierarchical model).
    - amirmc 13y ago
      Indeed. Doing away with the 'formal' structure doesn't mean the function of that structure also goes away (if that makes sense). This is true for many things e.g even if you don't have a sales team in your company you still have a sales function. Superficially getting rid of something (say, 'management') instead of dealing with the specific problems (e.g. miscommunication, poor incentives, opaque decision-making etc) doesn't seem like a long term solution, though it may be very satisfying for a couple of years. Something I found ironic when I read that article is that it (very nicely) articulated things I've known since school, just by observing social interactions. I suspect most people also know these things but they get forgotten as we grow up.
wil421 13y ago
HA! This might work for smaller companies. Try doing this we a 25,000+ FTE plus 5,000 or so temps and contractors in a company with a presence in around 100 countries. Although our managers dont supervise us constantly they have their own work to do. They usually give us tasks or projects and then we give them updates.
at-fates-hands 13y ago
For all of the companies who are successful without a management structure, their are exponentially more with a standard or modified structure that do quite well. Any of those, "Let's get rid of management structure" companies on this list?? http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2013/full_list/index.html?iid=F500_sp_full http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2013/full_... You might want to ask yourself why then. . .
jbgreer 13y ago
A counter-example from HBR Magazine's December 2013 issue http://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-management/ http://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-mana...
ioesf 13y ago
A Technology Freelancer's Guide to Starting a Worker Cooperative http://techworker.coop/resources/technology-freelancers-guide-starting-worker-cooperative http://techworker.coop/resources/technology-freelancers-guid...

118 points by vellum 13y ago

I am in a reeducation camp, but God talks. I need to reverse captor/victim so I am ruler and they are slaves. God says... these_cans_are_defective just_lovely wife biggot it's_hopeless tiffanies as_a_matter_of_fact dude_such_a_scoffer surprise_surprise unsung_hero taxes economy huh I'm_tired_of_this mission_from_God well_I_never nasty you'll_see economy look_out I'm_done meek fun you_do_it vice

ryanbrunner 13y ago

It seems like this is becoming more and more of a trend, and is just starting to push into the realm of legitimacy, rather than "kooky company does something crazy". There's plenty of examples in tech of companies without traditional management structures (and mostly no management at all) - GitHub, Valve, Treehouse, etc. Now a food processor of all places pulls this off. I do think this is an approach that doesn't necessarily work well for large companies - building the sense of camaraderie necessary for this is impossible at 10,000 or even 1,000 employees IMO, but on the other hand - who says we need to have giant companies? Wouldn't things work a lot better with a whole lot of 150 person companies?

moconnor 13y ago
This article is from the December 2011 issue, it's 2 years old now. However, the self-management principle at Morning Star still seems to be in effect: http://morningstarco.com/index.cgi?Page=Self-Management http://morningstarco.com/index.cgi?Page=Self-Management
hythloday 13y ago
WL Gore & Associates has over 10 000 employees and operates on a similar structure (and has done for decades): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._Gore_and_Associates#Culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._L._Gore_and_Associates#Cultu...
mathattack 13y ago
I recall an interview with John Chambers of Cisco many years ago where he mentioned having 20 or 30 direct reports, to avoid too much meddling in people's affairs. This can work if you don't need to make drastic changes (we have had a massive disruption in our industry and need to let half the workforce go - which half?) and if there doesn't need to be any cross-functional tiebreakers. What's strange is in a more recent (2009) article [1] he claims to be more command and control, but shifting towards a more bottom-up organic method. [1] http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/mckinsey_conversations_with_global_leaders_john_chambers_of_cisco http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet...
- Swannie 13y ago
  Today JC's direct report more or less == Cisco Board. He really only has three: COO and Co-President Gary Moore, Co-President Sales & Development Rob Lloyd, and CFO Frank Calderoni. Pretty much all other C-level and EVPs report to Gary and Rob. John talked about cutting, primarily, middle management during the recent 4000 job cuts announcement. You can guess how well that has worked. There is still plenty of scope to broaden the span of control in Cisco.
molsongolden 13y ago
A similar but more fringe structure that is regaining popularity is the worker collective/cooperative. Mondragon pulls it off to some degree with 10,000+ employees but their structure definitely involves more hierarchy than the smaller coops. 10,000 employees doesn't have to mean 10,000 employees all doing the same work in the same division, you can still have camaraderie within divisions or work groups and organize the entire company democratically. The worker collective gives ownership and influence to every worker and lessens the "us vs. them" dynamic by empowering workers and basically eliminating managers.
nodata 13y ago
I thought Valve didn't pull it off once it got to a certain size? http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/09/valve-management-jeri-ellsworth http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/09/valve-managem...
- ryanbrunner 13y ago
  Yeah, stuff like that is what I was getting at about it not working for larger companies.
- mattlutze 13y ago
  It seems Ellsworth's firing was hyped a lot around the tech news, and she definitely leveraged that to get her new AR goggle project off the ground. I'd like to see this story corroborated by other former Valve employees. Her interview there feels a lot like self-victimization.
wsc981 13y ago
The Brazilian Semco company has a similar structure, IIRC: http://www.schneede.se/assets/files/Ricardo_Semler.pdf http://www.schneede.se/assets/files/Ricardo_Semler.pdf

static_typed 13y ago

Boss has a problem, so he hires an MBA, now he has 300 problems, and he got fired as well.

Joeboy 13y ago

This really needs an NSFW tag...

vanderZwan 13y ago
I like how that can be interpreted in more than one way.
gulbrandr 13y ago
Why?
- RankingMember 13y ago
  It's a joke. Normally NSFW tags are for porn-ish links, but this is unique in that it's not porn but could potentially make your manager equally upset.

yxhuvud 13y ago

Somehow, I doubt this will be an easy sell to the management hierarchy.

analog31 13y ago

Disclaimer: I work for a Fortune 500 company. I suspect the inefficiency added by managers is overblown, because most of them do not spend 100% of their time on traditional management activities such as supervision and decision making. A lot of their work is on tasks that would fall in somebody's lap within any organization. Some of those tasks are ones that I find to be dreadful.

exodust 13y ago
Most managers will instinctively delegate dreadful tasks. That's part of the fun of management. I wonder if there's any managers around who also code? Maybe 50% of their time could be management, 50% coding. Nothing like getting hands dirty with the company code to see where things are at. Shared management roles could also be an option. Or, manage by committee? There's enough design by committee happening, surely we can all jump in on management decisions?
- weland 13y ago
  > I wonder if there's any managers around who also code? Maybe 50% of their time could be management, 50% coding. Nothing like getting hands dirty with the company code to see where things are at. An important part of the reason why so many technical people have an "overblown" idea about the inefficiency added by management is negative experience. I have met maybe a dozen people who were in management position and were not completely and utterly incompetent at what they were managing. More often than not, the managers I meet were people who started out as programmers, but quickly realized they don't stand a chance building a career out of it. This is an incredibly common career path.
  - MrBuddyCasino 13y ago
    This. I'm working as a consultant, and I see the same thing over and over again. There aren't many "IT Managers" that are competent at what they're doing. If you are good at what you are doing (which might be programming), go and look for an environment with like-minded individuals with a sense of craftsmanship and pride in their work. Everything else will suck the life out of you.

michaelochurch 13y ago

I've come to a realization that managers and programmers have something in common. The bad ones try to perpetuate job security by creating complexity (whether in code or interpersonal issues) that only they can navigate. The good ones want to do their jobs so well that they "program" (literally for engineers, figuratively for managers) themselves out of a job, so they can graduate to better things. You see this most strongly with consultants. The good engineer does the best work he can, assuming it will lead to more challenging and interesting projects in the future. He's not worried about job security, or at least not enough to do things that are unethical; he assumes that doing a good job and becoming better at his work is job security. The bad consultant obfuscates code, documents poorly, and tries to make it impossible to ever fire him. He's not trying to bigger, badder (and more lucrative) projects in the future; he's just aiming to keep whatever income stream he has in perpetuity. I think that managers exhibit the same dynamic, and I think that solving this problem requires recognizing it and watching for the warning signs early on. I'm strongly in favor of open allocation, but that's not quite the same thing as "no management", which I think might take the idea too far. Why? Because management is a fact of life; some people will have more power than others, and I'd rather it be dealt with in a fair and reasonable way than in an ad-hoc and unstable way. Having a permanent class of entitled (literally, not necessarily pejoratively) managers may not be the solution, and I support making people more self-managing-- actually, I'd use the term self-executive-- but acknowledging the basic fact of management, and encouraging the positive manifestations while avoiding the negative, is probably healthy as well.

wdewind 13y ago
Honest question: have you ever met someone who purposefully obfuscates code? I've met some shitty programmers, but I don't think I've ever met someone doing it on purpose.
- gpcz 13y ago
  Purposefully? No, but I'll admit that during undergrad I mistakenly obfuscated code. We were competing in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (igvc.org), but I didn't really understand the "meat" of the problem very well. Instead of focusing on machine learning and simultaneous localization & mapping I got way too focused on the "multi-threaded architecture" of our robot and basically rewrote protobuf poorly rather than actually solving the problem. I've improved in those areas since then, but I slap my forehead whenever I think back to those days about how stupid I was. The worst was that the whole time I thought I was so smart, too.

exodust 13y ago

Mediation sounds good, and the 6 member panel idea also good. In online tech, it pays to keep the mood relaxed and the office comfortable and spacious. Regardless of how much "serious business" is happening online, the internet is still a chilled out place. The traditional hierarchy of managers is inherently unrelaxed. When you have multiple managers surrounding you, their presence might cause some to hold back on decisions, or pause that initiative. The managers will take care of all those nasty little details such as making decisions, you just keep doing the task you were delegated. Remember what it felt like when the teacher left the room? If the manager leaves the office for the day and you feel that same rush of freedom feeling, you know things might be better without managers (or just a new manager).

bane 13y ago

I've seen lots of these "x-role free" companies: no managers, no sales department, etc. Inevitably the function that those roles take on end up on somebody. Companies will sit in denial about it for a very long time, even making up weird titles to pretend like they still don't have managers, but ultimately they'll end up with them in the end because that's how they have to interface with the rest of the world and many of these roles exist because it's how work naturally breaks down and how people naturally specialize.

hythloday 13y ago
I'm extremely suspicious of the word "naturally" there. What nature are they conforming to?
- bane 13y ago
  For example, there's a natural split between people who need to spend their days quietly writing software and the constant interactions and distractions of sales. It's almost mentally impossible to do both, not because either job is hard, but the context switching means software never gets developed and when writing software, possible customers never get called and deals never get closed.
lmm 13y ago
The point I took from the article was that it's better for managerial tasks to be distributed across the team than reside with specific individuals. Of course there's no free lunch - an self-managed coder can get less coding done than a managed one, because they have to spend some of their time on managerial tasks. But it's possible they'll be more effective at it than an external manager.
- bane 13y ago
  I think in some organizations this should happen anyway by giving the individual wide degrees of autonomy. Micromanagers are the bane of everybody's existence.

kfk 13y ago

Completely OT. What's with these articles that look like traditional magazines on the web? I get this is a PDF, but it makes reading on screen painful. I think something like the medium layout is the best way to present writings and you can still build fancy edits on top.

krmmalik 13y ago
Yes, that really annoyed me about the article too. It made it much harder to read on a mobile device for one, plus I wanted to copy some text and share it as a quote with a link to the pdf but that was harder due to it being a pdf.

juanuys 13y ago

The file name -- [B@58aa11eb.pdf -- seems like it was created by something written in Java: instead of printing the real file name, they printed the signature of the Byte array holding the file name data. See here [1] for a better-than-Oracle explanation: [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1040868/java-syntax-and-meaning-behind-b1ef9157-binary-address http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1040868/java-syntax-and-m...

VLM 13y ago

I'll try a pitiful attempt at a TLDR, feel free to try an improve it (if you can): The IRS has extremely strong opinions on what it means legally to be a contractor. However you can easily avoid the legal issues and run a company as if it were full of contractors, if you want, by merely treating them legally as employees but treat them managerially (sorta) as contractors. And at least anecdotally sometimes this works really well. Or a really short TLDR is contemplate the building trades and the role of a general contractor, and run your (probably) non construction company that way.

cygwin98 13y ago

Umm, my take is that developers are taking over the world, in term of duties. We don't need BA, since we do agile development and talk directly to customers. We don't need DBA now that we have ORM and NOSQL. We don't need sys-admin/sysops because we are devops now. Now, no managers. Next, no VC or no boss?

squozzer 13y ago

Interesting idea, but it seems to have a trade-off -- instead of negotiating a single (or perhaps a few) relationships, you have to negotiate about 20. It sounds a lot like a n*(n-1) problem.

fiatjaf 13y ago
The world is not a computer (or else AI would be easy).

PaulRobinson 13y ago

cf. "Maverick" by Ricardo Semler, the CEO of Semco. I think you'd all enjoy reading it. It changed my attitude to work and management considerably. I am still a manager, but I give a lot more responsibility to my team than most.

api 13y ago

Horray! Stick it to the man! Wait... This is a double-edged sword. Management tracks are typically the next step up in terms of career advancement for regular workers. Eliminate those and what do you have? A couple mega-rich owners, and then a flat field of "peasant" laborers. It starts looking a lot more like a feudal fief. What will take the place of middle management for career advancement?

peterhunt 13y ago

I'm somewhat surprised that everyone is so anti-management here. First of all, Morning Star seems like a pretty well-run place, but the whole system works because they have the luxury of hiring the right people. This is, of course, the single most important factor in any effective organization. If you don't hire the right people or play to their strengths you won't be able to pull this off. Anyway, a lot of the reasons listed in this piece look like they're sourced from companies with crappy management and I don't think they represent the reality of management, at least in a lot of places. At Facebook (the only company where I have experience as both an IC and manager) there are three important things to know about management: * It's a parallel track to IC (individual contributor aka hacker). You aren't "promoted" to manager. It's a lateral move. There are plenty of ICs making more money than managers. * All managers go through "bootcamp" (6-week engineering onboarding) and commit code. * The role of the manager is to basically do all the shitty work so ICs don't have to. I want to stress that third point. If you're anything like me, as a hacker you want to be given a well-defined problem (unless the problem is defining the problem) and go off and hack on it for a while with minimal distraction. There are a lot of crappy distractions that come with working in the real world. Here are a few: * Dealing with interpersonal issues * Onboarding new hires * Coordinating engineering efforts and priorities (aka: going to meetings so ICs don't have to) * Telling that guy in sales or that gal in product management that we can't work on their tasks right now * Dealing with medium-priority bugs during crunch time If I'm shipping a product I don't want to deal with any of this stuff as long as I'm not being micromanaged or feel like a second-class citizen to management. So what managers end up doing is being responsible for all of the shit work so their team can go do what they do best. I'm actually concerned that this whole "no management" movement is going to lead to less motivated and less coordinated teams as these companies grow.

rch 13y ago
> as a hacker you want to be given a well-defined problem I think identifying and solving open problems is more of a hacker mindset.
protonfish 13y ago
The problem is that menial work (arranging meetings, organizing schedules, handling communications with colleagues and clients by phone and mail) used to be handled by secretaries. If Mad Men is to be believed, at a certain employment level you would get a personal secretary and below that you could draw from a common pool. Where did all these secretarial jobs go? Their title was changed to "manager" and they were put in charge. God help us all.

crazygringo 13y ago

From what I recall, there's a big counter-argument to this, which is that management is necessary because organization is fundamentally necessary, and that when there are no formal "managers", certain people wind up being informal managers, but because this is "hidden", it winds up being less accountable, more open to cliquishness and/or discrimination, and having a host of problems of its own. I've been trying to find an article I remember which describes how this is particularly bad for women, who can easily be "informally" excluded, but I can't find it... All I can find is this, on Valve: http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/07/08/valves-flat-structure-contains-hidden-layer-of-powerful-management-claims-ex-employee/ http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/07/08/valves-flat-structure-cont...

amirmc 13y ago
I think the article you're referring to is called The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Article: http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessnes...
- ep103 13y ago
  This is a wonderful article, and details quite nicely why you can't simply throw managerial theory out the window and pretend everything will be okay. It goes into depth about the problems one encounters if an organization attempts to eschew all management, and then goes into depth about how to fix these issues while maintaining a flat organization (in short, just because you acknowledge that a managerial position exists does not mean that that position needs to hold asymmetric power over the people who are managed, as occurs in the traditional hierarchical model).
  - amirmc 13y ago
    Indeed. Doing away with the 'formal' structure doesn't mean the function of that structure also goes away (if that makes sense). This is true for many things e.g even if you don't have a sales team in your company you still have a sales function. Superficially getting rid of something (say, 'management') instead of dealing with the specific problems (e.g. miscommunication, poor incentives, opaque decision-making etc) doesn't seem like a long term solution, though it may be very satisfying for a couple of years. Something I found ironic when I read that article is that it (very nicely) articulated things I've known since school, just by observing social interactions. I suspect most people also know these things but they get forgotten as we grow up.

wil421 13y ago

HA! This might work for smaller companies. Try doing this we a 25,000+ FTE plus 5,000 or so temps and contractors in a company with a presence in around 100 countries. Although our managers dont supervise us constantly they have their own work to do. They usually give us tasks or projects and then we give them updates.

at-fates-hands 13y ago

For all of the companies who are successful without a management structure, their are exponentially more with a standard or modified structure that do quite well. Any of those, "Let's get rid of management structure" companies on this list?? http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2013/full_list/index.html?iid=F500_sp_full http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2013/full_... You might want to ask yourself why then. . .

jbgreer 13y ago

A counter-example from HBR Magazine's December 2013 issue http://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-management/ http://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-mana...

ioesf 13y ago

A Technology Freelancer's Guide to Starting a Worker Cooperative http://techworker.coop/resources/technology-freelancers-guide-starting-worker-cooperative http://techworker.coop/resources/technology-freelancers-guid...