I'm honestly wondering why we value management so much. It might be my lack of corporate experience but I have a lot of trouble seeing most management positions as important (in fact, my general feeling is that they're a hindrance most often than not).
Do companies really go down in flames if no one is there to try and measure, through various ineffective ways, the quality of other people's work (often in a field they don't even understand)?
Would a bunch of engineers really sit there doing nothing if they didn't have a manager to report to? Is said manager more apt at taking decisions than they are?
I'm curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management. At least to try.
pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management.
Valve does that:
How could a 300-person company not have any formal
management? My observation is that it takes new hires
about six months before they fully accept that no one is
going to tell them what to do, that no manager is going
to give them a review, that there is no such thing as a
promotion or a job title or even a fixed role (although
there are generous raises and bonuses based on value to
the company, as assessed by peers). That it is their
responsibility, and theirs alone, to allocate the most
valuable resource in the company – their time – by
figuring out what it is that they can do that is most
valuable for the company, and then to go do it. That if
they decide that they should be doing something
different, there’s no manager to convince to let them
go; they just move their desk to the new group (the
desks are on wheels, with computers attached) and start
in on the new thing. (Obviously they should choose a
good point at which to do this, and coordinate with both
groups, but that’s common sense, not a rule, and isn’t
enforced in any way.) That everyone on a project team is
an individual contributor, doing coding, artwork, level
design, music, and so on, including the leads; there is
no such thing as a pure management or architect or
designer role. That any part of the company can change
direction instantly at any time, because there are no
managers to cling to their people and their territory,
no reorgs to plan, no budgets to work around. That there
are things that Gabe badly wants the company to do that
aren’t happening, because no one has signed up to do
them.
It's hilarious to see the exact opposite happen: an 80 person company with a multi-page visio org chart, six departments, seven VPs, five pages of expense report rules and regulations, meetings scheduled to plan when to schedule other meetings, and nobody listens to the people who know what to do next because the visionary VC-installed-CEO is Touched By God and can't be questioned even as the company nose dives into obsolescence.
Yup, I worked somewhere like that. All the top folks had come from the finance world and were so eager to duplicate the perfect organizational structure of a multinational financial corporation.
Valve has an amazing culture, but I'm not sure it would scale to a 50,000 person company. Valve seems to operate as a tribe and there's a limit on how huge those can get.
> Valve has an amazing culture, but I'm not sure it would scale to a 50,000 person company
This reminds me of just a few years ago when I was arguing with someone about this, when 37signals was in their infancy and were kinda trucking along with the same 'bossless' philosophy. I was trying to show that it could be successful and the person hacked me off at the knees by saying "come talk to me when they get to 100 employees" ... well Github and Valve seems to be doing just fine with that philosophy ... but now the goalposts have suddenly shifted.
I wonder if they get to 50,000 people (how many companies even have this many people anyway?) if somebody isn't going to pop up and go "50k people? pffffft ... come get me when they have 200,000 employees!"
I think if you're very picky about having just the right people at the "bottom", and just the right people/person at the "top" (because even in Valve's supposedly flat hierarchy there's still someone on top: Gabe) then it can go up quite aways. But yes, it's probably inevitable that it eventually fails and devolves into department, fiefdoms, politics, etc. You can push it out but can't put if off forever. But you know what? That's not necessarily a bad thing. There are plenty of companies that can be viable and successful with 5-100 employees. Not everything has to be a megacorp.
> I'm not sure it would scale to a 50,000 person company.
Split the company into a bunch of mini-companies, don't get beyond "the limit".
Microsoft used to be a pretty flat organization back in the days, depth of the management layer is one of the things MS employees mocked at IBM in the 80s and 90s. It was already a pretty big company back then.
BTW, MS's headcount is closer to 90k than 50k these days.
"Among many 'radical' policies, Semler let his employees set their own hours, design their workplace, choose their own IT, share all information and have no secrets. Every six months bosses are evaluated by their subordinates and the results are posted. Semco has a policy of complete internal financial openness, even teaching factory workers how to read accounts so they can understand the company's books. Salaries are public information unless the employee requests they not be published. In addition, all employees can set their own salary."
As of 2003, they had 3000 employees and was growing at 40% a year. No idea how they're doing now.
I've often thought this was a good idea. The "interfaces" between the smaller companies would be far more strict and simple then interfaces between departments in a single large company. It's like the difference between buying a hamburger from a fast food chain which is extremely easy and asking a co-worker to sell you a burger which gets complicated very quickly.
Overhead in terms of office space etc would increase. However the simplicity of the necessary interactions between the smaller companies could turn the entire arrangement into a net gain for the parent company.
Yeah, they are already bouncing around above their Dunbar number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number). Methinks changes are afoot (either no longer growing or no longer operating the same way).
Even ignoring that there just are going to be a lot more 300 person companies than 50,000 person companies, I'm not sure we actually need that many 50,000 person companies.
I personally think we're better off if businesses are large enough to operate reasonably efficiently at a single or small set of tasks/products, and no bigger. For one, you begin having weird things happen like a product being canceled or retired not because it was unprofitable to make, but because the company thought there were more profitable products they could be making. (Anyone remember HP's decision to stop making desktop computers?)
For another, you end up with a single point of failure with respect to management. With a hundred companies with a hundred CEOs, some of them of them will prosper and some of them will fail. If those hundred companies merge into a single company with a single CEO, the consequences of terrible management are now a hundred times worse.
Yep, I knew about Valve and they are an inspiration, truly.
I think Gabe and the other people in charge realized a quite important fact: it's not because they're in charge that their opinions and beliefs are automatically worth more than those of the people who work for them.
A good manager will get you what you need (computers, the right chair, a good desk, etc.) An engineer (or admin, etc.) who has everything required is a powerful thing.
A good manager will act as an umbrella and abstraction layer protecting you from metaphorical objects falling from above and give you time and space to work without interruption. It's hard to overstate what this can do for both your work and mental health.
A good manager will be looking out for your interests /as well as/ their own. That means compensation, vacations, work rules, etc. Some companies make this impossible, but where it is possible it is amazingly helpful.
A good manager will make sure you stay focused, provide useful feedback (both positive and negative), and make sure you are staying on target without getting in your way or hurting your morale.
A bad manager, of course, can ruin your day, week, and possibly year.
> "act as an umbrella", really means protect you from other managers
Eh, not only. Other non-management employees can mess up your time quite effectively, as can people you're working with outside your company (clients, vendors). Sure you can shield yourself from it if you try... or you could exploit division of labour and get someone to do it for you so you can concentrate on what you do best.
Experienced well-rounded employees can mostly take care of themselves (and know when to say "no"). It's the new-hires and rough-around-the-edges people that require more hand holding and can benefit more greatly from a manager.
Yes, they can. But that distracts us from our core job: writing code.
A good manager can get others off your back much quicker and shield you from the political fallout that can occur - essentially being the bad guy for you.
Yeah. There are numerous quotes on differentials in programmer productivity being an order of magnitude or more between a bad one and a good one, but the reality is — at least in software — it often seems the same holds true for managers, except they can sink or save their whole sub-tree.
A good manager is a powerful thing, especially a good manager who knows his limits, but too often (especially in continental Europe) "management" seems to be a "reward and natural evolution", to the exclusion of other evolutionary paths and hinging as much (if not more) on the ability to brown-nose and play politics as management skills.
I'm curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management. At least to try.
I'm pretty sure almost every big contemporary tech company tries this when the big company is small and growing, but it almost never works. Joel Spolsky wrote it about the management problem here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper....
Actually, politics happen everywhere that more than two people congregate. It’s just natural. By “no politics” I really mean “no dysfunctional politics.”
Funnily enough, he uses an example from Microsoft—but the Microsoft of the early 1990s.
No formal management doesn't appear to scale above some number of employees / workers. I can't tell what that number is, but I would guess that it's somewhere around 125 – 150 people—that is, the Dunbar number.[1] Maybe it could be as high as 1,000, but I'm pretty damn skeptical it could be higher than 2,000.
Managers are "meta-employees". Their job is not to do any particular work exactly, but to coordinate the work of others and to get the actual employees focused on doing the boring dreck work that nobody really would do by choice.
Think about it this way, there are long standing issues in many leaderless Open Source projects because people more or less just work on what they want and boring crap like writing drivers, or making button graphics or whatever. That's why the ones that tend to be successful tend to be the ones that have strong leadership structures.
Problems crop up in a couple different cases:
1) The size of the group the manager has to coordinate is larger than the manager can actually handle. This results in all kinds of obvious problems I don't think I need to get into.
2) More subtly, and this is where large corporations end up stagnating and dying. It's when the "meta" aspect gets out of control and there are managers of managers of managers.
In this case what happens is that in order to communicate information up the managerial structure, the data necessarily has to become more and more abstract until it often loses so much meaning as to be almost entirely divorced from reality. The side effect of this is that somebody has to produce the abstractions which ends up being the lower levels of the management hierarchy...which of course means that they're no longer functioning in a coordination role as their data reporting role ends up consuming more and more of their time.
3) In large management chains, decision and vision authority tends to move up the hierarchy towards the top, which of course is the part of the hierarchy operating with the least amount (most abstract) of data...and the issues highly abstract "vision statements" that then must be resolved down through the management chain and end up turning in unmotivated "orders" that the lower level coordinators have no real buy in on -- ending up with unmotivated and uncreative solutions to ensure that the "boxes are checked" and satisfy their fraction of the "vision statement". Success in this area is then reported back up the chain as more and more abstract data.
#3 is why large companies usually end up stagnating and ending up uncreative.
Yup, Management IS of utmost importance to a working company. What most managers, companies and universities don't get though is that management isn't really about controlling and reviewing work, but about enabling people and giving them a vision. That's only possible in an atmosphere of humility, gratitude and a total refusal to play the blame game though. It's where companies don't get "managers" from Ivy League but give responsibilities to the best natural leaders and coaches from the team, so they've got their full respect. It's rare to get to this state, but if you've got a company that really gets "management", try to stay. You don't have to work at Trademob (shameless self-plug), there are a lot of meritoctratic startups like this out there - but this spirit usually fades with size. I'm still trying to understand why...
All in all, look at these signs:
- Bosses have no different equipment or attitude than you do
- Your Interview is done by the most senior personnel available and not some clueless HR guy
- People don't take themselves too serious but their competitors should ;-)
- high freedom, high responsibility atmosphere
- You get responsibility for outcomes, not for implementation details.
As for me, I'm still trying to find out how to be a better team leader every day - I'll tell you how when I find out ;-)
It might be my lack of corporate experience but I have a lot of trouble seeing most management positions as important (in fact, my general feeling is that they're a hindrance most often than not).
It is your lack of experience. Historically no company has ever gotten to be the size of MSFT, or AAPL or any other multibillion dollar company without management. I don't know for sure the reason, but would guess that someone has to answer to shareholders and they must organize various people with conflicting opinions, ideas and motivations to accomplish a single goal.
Do companies really go down in flames if no one is there to try and measure, through various ineffective ways, the quality of other people's work (often in a field they don't even understand)?
I don’t think so, but I would guess that much of the effort to measure etc. is put in place by HR consultants in at least some part to avoid discrimination lawsuits and to make sure employees are being treated at least somewhat fairly.
Would a bunch of engineers really sit there doing nothing if they didn't have a manager to report to? Is said manager more apt at taking decisions than they are?
I can confidently say yes to this. Not just engineers, but everyone. If there was no structure, but you had to get a lot done, people would avoid work, work on their own side projects etc. (side projects are not good for the company if they are a new startup that won’t include the company).
[] Someone mentioned valve below, they have a system, it just looks flat. []
I'm curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management. At least to try.
It would probably work for a while, except you would have to answer to shareholders (investors) and you would have to organize your team. Eventually you would either become a full time manager or you would hire professional management so that you could work on coding.
Don't confuse human management with project management. In my opinion, you should have two separate people doing those jobs. Your manager should be managing interpersonal issues, team communication, and making sure that tasks don't get dropped, but deciding what direction to go in should be up to someone else - perhaps the team as a whole deciding through consensus, perhaps an outside editor.
Management isn't the only approach to solving that problem. F.ex Simco or Valve have self-organising teams with high degrees of democracy, which cause roughly the same effect.
But in the end (shareholders aside, which if you have any I guess you have to please), a company without management would only have engineers to please, making this kind of a circular problem.
Once you have a large enough boat, good management becomes one of the most significant ways you can distinguish yourself from your competitors.
If you think about it, once you get past a certain size, what is remarkable about your company is that you are past that size and it still operates as a single entity. Individual differences matter a lot less than anything you can accomplish across the entire organization.
We over-value management because we over-emphasize approval seeking behavior. I find that people who reject the "do your work and get a treat" mentality place a lower value on management and a higher value on cooperation, creativity and so on.
A good manager can make a big difference in productivity. Most software shops, though, don't have good managers - it's too easy to get promoted into it without any experience, or to just flit from company to company without ever learning how to do it well.
If I had my own company, I'd work a lot harder to get the best managers possible.
I agree with you, I think engineers should also take care of the trash, watch out for the car park and the accounting, check the budget, talk to customers and handle paper work for taxes.
I think it's important to note that management is a human creation - it is more like a television set - than an element of nature, like a tree. We could live without television sets. Trees, we need to breathe.
What's your evidence for that? And what do you mean by management? Groups of apes form themselves into hierarchies, and if you read Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, you'll find that his romantic notions of a life of poverty free of hierarchy was disabused pretty rapidly.
> I think it's important to note that management is a human creation - it is more like a television set - than an element of nature, like a tree.
Yes, management is much the same as engineers, teachers, masons, textile workers, etc. in this regard... Nature mostly creates consumers, hunters, and possibly prostitutes....
Do companies really go down in flames if no one is there to try and measure, through various ineffective ways, the quality of other people's work (often in a field they don't even understand)?
Would a bunch of engineers really sit there doing nothing if they didn't have a manager to report to? Is said manager more apt at taking decisions than they are?
I'm curious and also pretty sure that if I ever started a company, I'd at least try to do it without any sort of formal management. At least to try.