
Ask HN: What do middle-level managers do? - vagab0nd
I&#x27;m an individual contributor at one of the big software companies (FANG). I&#x27;m curious about what middle level managers do in these companies. Specifically, my manager&#x27;s manager, the ones between the CEO and first level management. They seem busy all the time (they are usually not at their desks). But they are never in any meetings. They never send any emails. And they don&#x27;t <i>seem</i> to affect the direction of projects in any way. And I&#x27;m just too scared to talk to them. So asking here: what do they do everyday?
======
wjossey
> I’m just too scared to talk to them.

No reason to be! They’re just another human being trying to do their best for
your company and team. Assume best intentions!

If you’re nervous because you have no idea what to say to broach the topic,
here’s something you could try.

“Hi, I’m Charlie. I work for Susan over on the infrastructure team. As part of
my own professional development, I’m trying to build out an understanding of
how all of the people at our company move towards our common goal, as it’s not
always obvious to me at my level. Do you have time for a quick one on one
where you can share with me your roles and responsibilities, and what some of
your challenges are here at our company?”

Basically, you don’t need to say something as blunt as “What exactly is it
that you do here?” Instead, just come at it from a position of positive
inquiry where you’re just genuinely trying to learn and grow.

I say all this because no answer here is going to really tell you what that
person does. Everyone’s roles and responsibilities vary, regardless of their
title. You won’t learn unless you learn how to ask!

~~~
solarkraft
At my company I feel pretty comfortable just asking "Yo, what's your job?".
Why not? Would you be offended by someone else's curiosity?

~~~
wjossey
> Would you be offended by someone else's curiosity?

Me personally? No. Do I know others who would be? Yes.

Always a tricky line trying to be thoughtful about how someone might react to
a particular question, especially when you're just genuinely trying to learn
something about them. But, given this person is likely a relatively unknown
party, not having any trust built up means that there can be misunderstandings
even from simple questions like, "Yo, what's your job?"

That being said, if your company culture is such that everyone you hire
responds well to that style of question, great! Certainly no problem on my end
with that type of questioning. I merely was being a bit more elaborate in my
earlier response to account for someone not necessarily taking something that
brief, well.

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
Do you and they not have a baselevel implicit trust simply due to being
coworkers?

Do people some people think it's appropriate to guffaw at simple questions
like, "What do you work on here?"

If somebody were offended by that question, I would imagine it is not due to
any overreach on my part. It would take an especially megalomanical (or highly
confidential) work environment where superiors would dismiss work related
inquiries outright.

I can imagine in other countries with clear hierarchies, this might be
different. But I imagine even in such places it can be advantageous to be
social and informed in the work place.

~~~
wjossey
> Do you and they not have a baselevel implicit trust simply due to being
> coworkers?

In some cases yes, in other cases, no.

As an example, say you're a product manager in Department A. You, previously,
had to work with Software Team B on a deliverable, and it was a really rough
experience. The team was curt, challenging, and often spoke down to you
because of your role.

There's some turn-over on Team B over the year, and there are a few new hires.
You know of them, but don't really know them at all, as you no longer interact
with that team. One of the new hires walks up to you at lunch one day and
says, "Yo, what is it that you do here?"

Now, a rational approach is to just take that person as just being curious.
Assume best intentions, assume they're just curious, assume it's very genuine.
In that brief moment though, your frustrations with Team B surface up, and you
react, rather than act rationally. You assume that someone on the team was
bad-mouthing you, as you had heard the team lead previously say "I don't know
why we even have product managers here anyway." Now this new hire is coming
over, asking what it is that you even do, and now you've got to deal with this
stuff all over again...

Or, perhaps someone who is from my generation, hearing "What is it that you do
here", would just immediately think of Office Space, and immediately enter
into a "defend your role" sort of mentality, rather than just taking it as
some honest inquiry.

Just to reiterate. I'm not saying one should react the way I'm describing
above. But, I will personally say, I don't always react to questions in a way
that's healthy. How a question is worded to me can make or break my response.
So, whenever possible, especially when giving generic advice on HN, I try to
give suggested phrases that will hopefully avoid any unnecessary reactions,
within reason. Obviously, one can't be possibly remotely aware of the
challenges each and every one of us have had in our lives, and so
misunderstandings are inevitable- But, thoughtful phrasing can go a long way
and help to establish great relationships over the long term.

------
jerkstate
Working with other middle managers to align resources for upcoming projects
according to company goals. For example, if you know you need to implement a
foobar next quarter that will require another team to implement a bazblee that
you depend on, they can work with the bazblee senior manager to make sure the
bazblee gets done, instead of the plumbus being requested by another group
(that is, if the foobar and bazblee are more important to the company's goals
than the plumbus - otherwise, they'll do the plumbus and you won't get your
bazblee - so you probably shouldn't work on your foobar project)

Convincing other managers of your project's alignment with company goals is
usually not an exact science, so your middle manager's ability to get these
things committed to and done can be highly variable, depending on their
connections with other middle managers and their ability to influence.

You can tell if you have a good middle manager if things you need from the
rest of the company tend to fall into place, versus constantly being
disappointed when you ask for stuff from other groups in the company.

Of course this all requires skillful ICs and team managers to manage up and
make sure the middle managers know what they are doing and what they will need
from the rest of the company.

~~~
closeparen
Interesting. We design a project inside the quarter where we committed to
build it, middle managers could not possibly be fighting for dependencies
during the planning cycle because engineers haven’t looked yet to see what
they are.

I’ve long suspected we should be writing design docs and putting them on the
shelf one or more quarters before committing to execute on them, but what do I
know.

~~~
ralmeida
At middle-management levels, dependencies are probably more abstract than
system-level dependencies. Imagine your product has no mobile app yet, but one
is in the roadmap for next year. Then someone in marketing is in talks with
Apple about a chance to do a demo in a keynote or something. This would bump
up the priority for the mobile app for this year, but other features
previously in the roadmap have to be moved around. So there’s a level of
managers which will go around negotiating the options.

------
humbledrone
(Note: my replies below assume a sane situation at a FANG company with good
management.)

#define MM middle manager

> But they are never in any meetings

Do you mean they are never in any meetings that you are in, or do you mean
that you have access to their calendars and can see that they have no meetings
at all?

I have never seen a MM who's calendar isn't back-to-back meetings all day
every day. Their job is basically 100% talking to people, whether that's face-
to-face or via email or whatever. Note that depending on how senior they are,
their calendar may be made private, since the names of their meetings and who
they're meeting with might be sensitive ("Sync about possible layoffs" would
be a really bad meeting name to leak).

A large number of these meetings are (1) people trying to influence the MM
(i.e. get them to approve something) and (2) the MM trying to influence other
people (i.e. get a partner team to do something, or get their boss to approve
something).

> And they don't seem to affect the direction of projects in any way

The fact that your team exists and is staffed by N people was an MM's decision
at some point. It may have been someone else who had the idea to create your
team, but they had to make their case to an MM and convince them that it was
worth staffing.

Has your team ever grown, i.e. gotten a slot for one more person? If so, an MM
made the final decision that it was worth allocating another person.

MMs spend as much time managing "up" as "down". An MM's boss is asking them to
justify why the company has 100 people working on X. To do this, the MM has to
demonstrate that there is an important business problem to sole, and present a
convincing strategy to solve it that requires 100 people to execute.

If your basic experience on the team doesn't seem to be directly influenced by
MMs on a regular basis, that may just indicate that you're in a stable part of
the org solving a clear business problem and the MM is satisfied that you are
executing. You would see an MM's influence by (big) changes in team
priorities, project direction, reorgs of your team, etc.

~~~
shostack
Fantastic and accurate description of what they do and the problems they
solve.

Oddly enough, just as there are those who think MMs twiddle their thumbs all
day, there are those who work with or are MMs that think executive leadership
twiddle their thumbs all day.

------
rb808
You should try to get in to some meetings where these guys are. Its good to be
known by these people, you shouldn't be scared of them, esp if you're working
hard for them. Things they do:

Talk to execs to find out what direction of the company has been decided

Choose strategy, approve strategic technology choices, plan for the future

Making sure first line managers & their teams are doing what they're supposed
to

Allocate money to projects, decide which ones need resources, which ones can
be cut

Make a budget, decide how much money to ask for next qtr/year

Hiring policies, hiring managers, plans for hiring staff

Make sure division is following company policy, implement internal controls,
auditing is happy.

Keeping in touch with other divisions and regions to swap ideas and work
together.

Firefighting problems that come up with people leaving, systems not working
properly, projects running late.

------
ishan_chhabra
From first principles, as a manager at any level, your output is the
collective sum of your team's output. You maximize your effectiveness by
finding the right balance of things to do that (a) can contribute directly to
the team's output and (b) improve the team's capability to produce.

Managerial activities fall into 3 key categories: Strategy, People and Habits.

Let's contrast these activities for a Level 1 manager and a Middle manager.

Level 1:

Strategy - The projects that the team needs to do are defined bottom up and
top down, and the Level 1 manager's role is to split it into right chunks,
allocate them and make sure they get done. The operational aspects of tracking
and ensuring things get done is more important here.

People - You have 1:1's with team members to make sure they are at their
personal best and are aligned with the company.

Habits - You ensure that the team is following the right practices in their
day to day that help them be effective.

Middle manager:

Strategy - You try to make sense of the company (or Business Unit) strategy
(both product and Go to market) and then boil it down to the key projects that
your teams needs to accomplish. The important aspects here are high level
definition, prioritization and allocation. You make sure that you allocate the
right projects to the right teams based on their capabilities and past
projects and that they are crystal clear on the the 1-2 big things they need
to deliver per month/quarter.

People - You are heavily involved in hiring and staffing the teams and making
sure that your managers are being effective through skip level 1:1s.

Habits - You ensure that right habits (also called processes, but I don't like
that word) are being followed by teams. eg. Is the weekly planning meeting
happening properly, is work getting tracked, are their development practices
that helped one team which could help other teams, and so on.

I hope that gives you are better picture.

------
deanalevitt
When I worked as a director for a large tech company I had some similar
questions. Because I joined through an acquisition, I never truly adjusted to
the network of managers both above, below and alongside me.

Eventually, about a year after leaving to launch a new startup, I read High
Output Management. Suddenly everything made sense. I'd strongly recommend
reading it.

Many Bay Area companies are led by people who read this book, and I think
you'll gain an understanding of what the mid-level managers worry about in
their day to day.

------
codefreakxff
Was Director of IT. My manager would be considered Middle Management. She had
a half dozen directors reporting her and would meet with them to get updates
and set goals for each department every week. She would pour over all the
financials and accounting to make sure things were on track. She would take
the results of meetings back to Upper Management and tell them everything was
fine. Upper Management would then go play golf and figure out some new way of
expanding our lines of business, or meet with random groups of staff to make
their presence known, put on a friendly face. No idea what else Upper
Management did with the rest of their day

~~~
shostack
What's funny is that the further removed up the totem pole a role is, the more
people assume they do less and less. Sure in some cases that might be how it
goes, but it would be worth spending some time exploring how things work at
the top. For example, what appears to be a useless golf game may be
relationship building for a future major partnership.

------
jedberg
Now I wonder which FANG you work at. At the one I worked at (N) you would
definitely see the middle managers all the time, and you'd be having skip
level meetings with them on a fairly regular basis.

Their job is to facilitate coordination. The same thing your manager does, but
for other managers. They make sure everyone is working towards useful goals,
make sure hiring and budgets are in line, and communicate with their peers to
avoid overlapping work and most importantly make sure to communicate context
down their teams about why they are doing what they are doing and what the
business hopes to accomplish in regards to their specific area (and overall).

------
wgjordan
Gee, I don't have a direct answer for you on that question; but tell ya what,
I'll run it up the chain and circle back to you on it in a few weeks!

------
projectramo
You can only effectively directly manage so many people. So as you hire more
people you need more managers but then you get too many managers to directly
manage so you need another level.

Imagine you had 10,000 people working for you. Just saying hi to them would
take up all your time. How many people would you say a person effectively
_directly_ manages? Some would say 5, others 15. I think the upper level of
estimates might be 30-50. (Yes, someone is going to say 200.)

Let’s go with 10 for even numbers. So after you hire 100 people you need a
manager for the managers. When you hit 1000 you need another layer. When you
hit 10,000 you need yet another layer.

------
sudhirj
The analogy I like using that of a carriage drawn by a large team of horses.
Workers are the horses, and CxOs are the drivers. Management is the harness
the keeps all the horses pointed in the same direction and running together.

A majority of the physical work is done by the horses, of course, and it looks
like the drivers (Top level management) are slacking off - but everything is
really on them. "Strategy" is really just where to go and which route to get
there. And if they choose wrong or time things badly, everyone else in the
organization has done their work correctly, and the failure is purely
executive.

The workers are great at running (execution), but left to themselves are
horrible at self organizing and running in the direction required in tandem,
with the correct beat and stride. It doesn't matter how strong or fast the
individual horses are, it's much more important that they run together without
friction or distraction and support each other.

That's where (good) management comes in. They're the blinders that keep the
horses from individually pulling in different directions and chasing
distractions, and the harnesses that keep the entire team fixed together. The
exert pressure on horses to both slow down and speed up, and both are vitally
important. Done well, management is critical to making sure that the whole org
works smoothly. They also act as a communication bridge between strategy and
execution. Strategy is great for the all hands once a week or month, where the
execs sing about the promised land, but the weekly plans, budgets, and
responsibilities of making sure everyone is fed and has toilet access are all
management.

Bad managers typically suffer from delusions of being either horses or
drivers. They either try to work hard like the horses (bad idea - there's no
harness or blinders), or think they're in charge of strategy (they're seen as
just slackers, and no harness or blinders again). They don't temper executive
vision with their knowledge of reality, nor do they transitively inspire
workers.

~~~
astazangasta
>The workers are great at running (execution), but left to themselves are
horrible at self organizing and running in the direction required in tandem

This is an ideological claim that is counter to my experience. Workers are
fine at self-organizing, they just might organize in ways that management does
not agree with because workers and management may have different ideas about
what the company needs. In my experience the usual reason that workers have
trouble organizing themselves is that they are not given control over
resources like hiring and equipment purchases, specifically so that they won't
be able to organize without management.

~~~
xivzgrev
Can you share more of your experience?

Mine tends to be like the OP. For example, suppose a company has a new product
and everyone believes there is a lot of opportunity with new product. So then
each team figured out a strategy on how to approach said product independently
-product managers build new features and iterate -marketers start launching
campaigns to drive adoption and engagement -data science is building new
models to find the best customers for -customer support is trying to figure
out what the hell new product is and what all these complaints are referencing

Etc

Depending on the product / size there may be some self organizing
collaboration but many times not, or certain teams are left out unconciously.
At least one reason is that each team doesn’t yet trust other teams to help
set their strategy - not maliciously but just from a lack of evidence. If you
are trying to maximize impact the intuitive thing is to work out what you can
contribute and ask for what you need from other teams vs developing a joint
strategy / approach. Collaboration takes time with an unknown return. Now if
you happen to know the other teams and already have worked a lot together you
are more likely to reach out from the start.

It’s the senior managers / directors that are calling out that teams should be
talking with each other sooner than later, getting buy in, etc.

~~~
astazangasta
My experience is that senior managers don't have the time or inclination to be
aware of operational issues. They are unable to perceive something like there
is a structural issue between units A and B. These issues are actually seen
and surfaced by workers in units A and B, who actually experience the result
of the mismatch. If they are able to cross-communicate directly they may be
able to resolve the issue without intervention from above. However, they may
not be able to, typically if this involves hiring.

But the only way that a senior manager could even understand there is an issue
is if someone in unit A or unit B makes them aware of it. This is useless
overhead. The workers have to be able to successfully communicate the issue up
to senior management and usually also suggest the resolution, then get buy-in
from senior management on implementation. If instead the workers were more
empowered to make decisions themselves the information and decision-making
bottleneck could be avoided.

------
pacifiedcitizen
The Peter Principle applies here for any large-scale company that has been
running for a good amount of time:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle)

------
xkcd-sucks
They provide a human (inter)face to a group of people, and allow people to
talk about/attribute behavior to an organizational unit as if it were a
person. The most useful thing they(we) do is deal with bullshit drama on your
behalf, like Kelly isn't giving you the thing your boss asked you to get from
her last week because Ellen told Kelly to do something different because John
is an asshole, and documenting everything to cover asses appropriately.
Seriously I just relay information between people and assess whether they've
actually received that information correctly.

~~~
ilaksh
Thank you for being honest.

Couldn't that purpose be served by hiring people who know how to communicate
and are not political, and using technology for group communication and
planning?

------
epc
Really depends on the organization.

Middle managers manage managers.

They are definitely in meetings, just meetings you're unaware of.

My experience dates to IBM in the 1990s so is lacking whatever has developed
since then. At IBM first and second line managers still had some understanding
of the code or product or services being developed/run by their organizations
(and I knew first lines who were still active contributors).

Once you got to third line, those managers are more focused, almost solely
focused on "business" issues and macro operational issues.

As you get higher up an organization, the managers could care less about the
day to day or even month to month issues faced by their organization. They're
focused on will their organization meet or exceed revenue projections? Are you
running below or over budget? You've maxed out space in Blue Cube corners and
at the rate of growth only need 10,000 square feet next year but they can only
rent new space in units of 100,000 square feet. The CEO is demanding 5% cuts
across the board, can you do it without firing people? Or is there a
particular organization you've been hoping to get rid of anyway that you can
terminate en masse?

Even higher up at director and VP level they're focused on profit & loss,
because that's what they get measured on, maybe secondarily customer
satisfaction. Employee satisfaction is mostly irrelevant once you're above a
second line organization.

Depending on the _jurisdiction_ a manager is in, they may have certain legal
responsibilities or authorities that a lower level manager may not have. Even
if you're not the CEO, you might have to sign off on certain contracts
(especially with governments, governments love to have an executive's
signature on things, because they can go after that executive when the $100MM
payroll system costs $300MM and still doesn't work).

~~~
shubb
Thats interesting, it feels like that upper level you mention are more like
individual contributors, except optimising very slow responding systems
indirectly through policies.

~~~
Spooky23
Totally. I’ve worked with very senior level people in corporations and
government. The people at the top who aren’t on the letterhead are
simultaneously powerful and powerless.

All of their information is 2-5 degrees from the source. They are held
accountable for outcomes, and need to be able to navigate through all sorts of
stuff.

Senior government middle managers are the most fucked. They are either civil
service or staff people who moved up the ranks and have extensive expertise in
their programs or field or political appointees who know anything from less
than nothing to being preeminent in their field.

IME, the government people are smarter, but get ground up by the machinery of
bureaucracy. Often times you have layer of formal leaders who are in a
symbiotic relationship with the next level down who really run things. Sort of
like how in many ways sergeants run the army.

------
drewmassey
Why don’t you just ask them? Not in a confrontational way, but like “hey what
are you up to this week?” I’ve worked in orgs from 10-30,000 people and have
always been able to at least get 5-15 minutes with this level of management.

~~~
alexandercrohde
Right, but maybe even go a step further, and be like "Hey Josh how you doing?
Busy day?" They'll likely elaborate, and if they don't _want_ to then it means
your question is overbearing in their eyes.

------
wearsaredhat
Highly recommend the book “The Leadership Pipeline” written by Ram Charan. The
book focuses on developing a pipeline through which leaders within an
organization move and describes accountabilities at each level, along with red
flags that indicate that a manager at a given level isn’t operating correctly
at said level. Very helpful in understanding what happens (or should be
happening) at each level.

Ram Charan is a well respected author and consultant, who has according to
Wikipedia consulted with some of the largest businesses in the US.

~~~
maxxxxx
These books usually describe a very idealized version of the real world. I
think the only way to find out what mid level managers do is to ask them or
ideally to shadow them for a few days.

I think shadowing other roles would generally be very beneficial in a lot of
companies so people understand each other better. I have had a lot of
occasions where I basically thought that some role is useless until I worked
with them and found out what they have to put up with the whole day.

~~~
wearsaredhat
Certainly they do. And the book admits as much. In my opinion, it is still a
valuable read as it gives a generalized lens through which a large org’s
structure, and activities at each layer, can be understood.

------
nojvek
They manage managers. Per every ~8 people, you need some sort of a map/reduce
operation. That is a manager. An organization is essentially a giant map-
reduce hive mind.

Some managers are there due to them just cruising slowly up the chain.

Management is a really hard problem. There are very very few managers I have
met in my entire life that I would work with them again. Some just love the
power of ordering people around. Some are just plain assholes.

Seriously, life is too short to be treated like shit.

------
DanBC
When you talk to very senior leadership they'll talk about the difference
between "strategic" and "operational".

Directors set strategy. Senior managers try to implement that.

~~~
vagab0nd
Sure. I've heard that a lot. But that's very abstract. What actual work is
involved in "setting a strategy"? And why does it seem less visible compared
to other work?

~~~
btown
I like to think of it like this: one layer prioritizes which products, another
layer prioritizes which users, another layer prioritizes which features,
another layer chooses architecture that supports all features, another runs
sprints.

Consider allocating resources to an email client vs. a web browser, then
figuring out how much to focus on enterprise vs. small business vs. consumer,
then figuring out user stories.

All require different analyses - a PM who should be asking specific customers
for feedback would be ineffective if they also needed to agonize about the
financial consequences (market size, biz dev team readiness to sell into that
market, CoCA) of choosing those customers. And even the latter decisionmaker
may be better able to focus by having a departmental budget, and letting the C
Suite decide if browser dominance is something that maximizes shareholder
value.

As a developer these things should seem self-obvious because ideally they were
anticipated a year prior, headcount was allocated, and you were recruited at
the right time. It’s rarely perfect, of course. But it doesn’t have to be -
people don’t need to row in sync down to the millisecond, but without a
coxswain there’s no hope.

~~~
dTal
I like the coxswain analogy because it raises the question of why the coxswain
is typically paid orders of magnitude more than the rowers.

~~~
btown
I did a bit of research out of curiosity, and these quotes from coxswains at
[https://www.sfgate.com/sports/ostler/article/Steering-
toward...](https://www.sfgate.com/sports/ostler/article/Steering-toward-gold-
is-a-coxswain-s-fine-art-3684648.php) stuck with me:

"My (two) guys were very mechanical. Every 30 seconds, they wanted the stroke
rate and the position of the boats that were even with us or ahead of us. Guys
really need to know where they are... We control the psychology of the
athletes in the race ... You try to wring every last bit of power out of those
athletes. If you do that, you can lose a race and eventually come to terms
with that."

Any manager out there, at any level, would nod and approve.

------
kabdib
I was more levels from the CEO at Microsoft (up to Ballmer) than I was as a
lowly intern working for the US government at NIST (up to . . . well, Reagan
at the time).

I could see value up to about three levels above me, and maybe a couple at the
top, but those three or four middle layers were pretty confusing. We had
director-level and partner-level people do flybys of our engineering groups,
saying things like "We'll see each other every few weeks, you're doing great
stuff!" and then vanish for six months, a year, or forever. They never seemed
to do anything that mattered.

I work in a flat organization now. Not necessarily better, but there's a whole
lot less dead wood, avoidance by delegation, and simple quit-in-place
behavior.

~~~
Bahamut
These middle layers are doing a lot more work than you probably realize. I am
a little more privy to some of what they do being a senior IC at a FAANG (6
managers away from my CEO) - sometimes managers take on projects that have to
be done but are outside their team's scope. The scale of the project may vary
depending on what level they are. My own senior manager was in charge of one
such project that ended up affecting the whole company (100k+ employees). They
might be in high level discussions with executives about plans on a
weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly basis (potentially all 4 of these levels, like
my own is), and doing advance planning before first level managers and senior
ICs become involved. These managers often have to have an acute sense of what
kind of product may be needed, but good ones will leave the planning of the
details to their reports. Their job is to make sure other teams/orgs are
aligned and that their team/org delivers on expectations set by all parties.

There becomes a point where it becomes impossible to have everyone be aware of
all the knowledge and nuance that is going on without it creating immense
noise - when this happens, these middle layers become vital. You still ideally
want as little of them as possible, but they all should ideally serve very
important purposes. I'm very thankful for all the levels of management in my
own organization and company at least (experience may vary of course), it is
the best management team I have been under at any workplace - other than my
direct manager, each level of management up my chain has over 10 years of
management experience apiece.

------
rramadass
I can tell you that much of "Middle Management" today falls under the category
of "Bullshit Jobs" and "Leadership BS" (books have been published on both). It
is mainly due to mindset and the way that company hierarchies are structured.
"Management" is considered prestigious and hence is given more money then they
are worth. Everybody wants to be a "Manager" in one form or another (there is
something in the human psyche which wants to lord it over others whether
needed or not).

The erroneous belief that if you have a team of 4-6 people you need somebody
to "manage" them is ingrained in the industry. Thus the proliferation of
management "levels" as axioms.

Ideally they should grow organically only as a need arises otherwise a single
level between Strategic/Vision <-> Middle/Operational <->
Engineering/Production should suffice (think of them as concentric circles
with Engineering at the core). In a organization with a such a structure true
middle management exists and you will see them involved in everything since
they are the conduit between the end-goal and the means of production.

------
mathattack
Most are processing information and communicating. A CEO may have a goal. It
takes and army of middle managers to break that goal into actions for
individual contributors, and communicate progress against it. And then they
work on process improvements to make the above work better. It’s a mix of
analyzing, meeting and communicating.

------
unnouinceput
My personal experience was at Siemens VDO (Automotive). And here was the
layout: teams (me part of one with 5 other programmers) -> team leader
(programmer also, my direct boss) -> groups (my group was BCM - Body Control
Module) -> Group leader (non-programmer, the middle manager) -> Department
(Hardware for me) -> Head of department -> Board of directors -> CEO. After a
few weeks I started to learn that the middle managers roles are to make sure
to set broad goals within their groups/teams and to make sure resources are
available to programmers to make those goals achievable before deadline. So my
interaction with the middle management was very easy - give them the list of
resources I need it to make sure the goals are done before deadline. And in
doing so I've learned the absolute best truth about this - power is a balance.
I have the power, as a programmer, to make life miserable to a middle manager
if he failed to fulfill my list of demands. Also he had the power to make my
life miserable if he fulfilled his part of the bargain and I do not achieve
those goals before deadline. So after learning this truth instead of taking a
"sir, yes sir" ass-kissing attitude like usually people do when they meet
somebody above them on the ladder, I started to treat them as buddies with "Hi
George, how's the house redecoration working" style. Definitely dispelled any
tensions and made both of our lives easier. Also I had on other organization I
worked for a stuck-up-ass type who expected everybody to bow before him. Since
I was never the bow-before-you type sure we did a collision shortly after I
started working there. My direct boss also told me to suck it up because he
was afraid of that guy too. I didn't like it so next thing I did I went
directly to CEO and complained about that stuck-up-ass manager and that he was
making my life hard without a real reason. Long story short, for the remaining
of my time there (another year) that guy was only honey and sugar with me
while still remaining an a*hole with the rest. It all depends of how you crush
the bad behavior on 1st encounter in the end.

------
astazangasta
The main function of managers is routing information in the organization; this
model was developed in the 1940s. In most large corporations today, there are
a handful of C-level officers, the "executives" \- their role is to make
decisions. The conception of the modern corporation is that these people do
NOT need any specialized domain knowledge in order to be effective, they are
just generalized "decision-makers", that is, they perform the executive
function; what they need is to be fed a reliable stream of information to act
upon.

However, in any large organization there are usually many thousands of times
more workers than there are C-level executives. This produces a huge, two-way
problem of information flow - how can the executives know what all of the
workers are doing, and how can the workers know what the executives want them
to do?

The solution is a hierarchical model; this hierarchical model has been used
throughout history to organize polities, armies, etc., under the control of a
small number of individuals. The basic principle is each unit has a single
manager; each set of units has a ur-manager, etc. This allows information to
flow from the worker to their manager, from the managers to the mid-level
manager, and from the mid-level manager to the executives.

Of course, the information remains bandwidth-limited. Each manager can only,
practically, assimilate information from a limited number of people. This
number probably doesn't change at different levels of hierarchy - the manager
can deal with 10 workers before becoming overwhelmed, the mid-level manager
can deal with 10 managers before becoming overwhelmed, etc. This means the
larger the organization, the more levels of management you need to try to
manage the information flow. Roughly, if you have N workers, you'll need
log(N) levels of managers.

The efficacy of this strategy, however, is limited by a key constraint: the
compressibility of information. If 10 workers are giving information to their
manager, and that manager is passing all of this information on to the mid-
level manager, the mid-level manager is going to be overwhelmed; they cannot
process information from 100 workers. It must be reduced; the job of the
manager is to winnow down the information from 10 workers, determine what
requires intervention from above, and pass this on.

In practice this is extremely difficult; the information might NOT be
compressible (you need, for example, a two-hour presentation to understand a
particular security problem and its implications, not a two-paragraph
summary). A friend of mine who works at a high level in an org said her
observation is that C-level officers are routinely drowning in information;
their answer is simply to ignore the vast majority of email they receive and
to punt on their executive function.

The same problem exists the other way - a C-level officer cannot possibly make
decisions for all of the workers in the hierarchy. They can only give a small
amount of information back to their managers; this information does not
magically uncompress into a sophisticated plan for workers. In reality, people
have to do work to fill in the blanks (i.e., make decisions) at all levels of
the hierarchy.

The result is that information often gets lost - C-level officers are unaware
that their workers feel that the product is broken, that engineering or
security problems are overwhelming management goals, that timelines can't be
met because there are too many constraints.

~~~
scarejunba
Top notch comment. Really feel it captures the problem succinctly. I’m curious
how you built this model. Everything from the notion of compression onwards is
novel to me.

~~~
ci5er
The compression up, and the necessary expansion with inventing gap-filling
down (inference) is one of the reasons (together with the general
specification problem) that I don't think that AI is going to take over the
world soon. That is: The generalists don't know how to specify in detail -
they rely on successive layers down to invent what goes in the gap. And then
ultimately, at the bottom layer - the code _is_ the specification. Attempting
to describe to an AI what it needs to generate code is already what we use
compilers and interpreters for. If we aren't clear, in detail, about what we
want, what good would an AI even do? The whole AI will replace coders is an
age-old dream that used to be expressed by drag-and-drop code-modules that
would allow codge-gen to be directed by business domain experts. See how that
worked out...

~~~
scarejunba
Fascinating view. Also somewhat novel to me, but acts in the same manner as
something that management experts like Deming and safety experts like Sidney
Dekker talk about: the magic is in the human details at the point where the
rubber hits the road. Those humans are actively making conscious decisions
about things. The engineer deciding to encode some data model in is using his
human intuition and intelligence to trade off future proofing vs ongoing cost
etc. using some picture he’s designed in his head about the product. He can’t
always ask the CEO about the deets. He’s filling in gaps because the
compression is guaranteed lossy.

Interesting view that that would hamper an effective AI. And cool analogy to
the drag and drop thing.

~~~
ci5er
It's like involving the product owner in deciding whether to use a linked-list
or a bucket or a hashmap for object/DS traversal (say, a list of triangles in
a 3D scene). Most of the time - you just wouldn't involve them. The coder
decides and implements and may or may not even report off what was decided and
why. That's the gap-filling that I think it would be hard for an AI to make
(of course there are a lot of space-time-memory tradeoff costing matrices that
could support an AI decision process).

What I find fascinating about humans is how idealistic we are (as a species).
"Wouldn't it be nice if a business domain expert could just "specify"
applications without the need for technical specs or coders?" (It's just like
a compiler, but smarter, right?) Or (not to get too political), "Wouldn't it
be nice if we could all share economic outcomes more equally without specific
consideration as to contribution?" Well, yes, it would! But, as the old trope
goes: Capitalism is for sinners, and socialism is for saints - and we ain't no
saints.

So, I believe that most humans do their best every day to do the best, in
their situation, with what they know. But individually, we can't know
everything. So, heirarchal management structures are a hack to sorta/kinda
solve a problem with a constraint. 1) No individual is a panopticon or even if
a polymath, capable of industrial-scale output, and 2) We are apparently
tribal hierarchal monkeys, and we operate better (as individuals of the human
species) when there is a chain of command - where no individual can
effectively directly manage more than 8~15 reports.

Thanks for your comment. Hopefully, I didn't drive too far off into the ditch
in my response.

------
tyingq
I can tell you that _" they are never in any meetings"_ is highly unusual for
someone that's a "manager of managers". The places I've been that's pretty
much all they do.

------
cm2012
By the way, when I did a poll of how much time during the day people actually
worked (including meetings), senior people worked the same amount as juniors:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17068804](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17068804).
Time spent working might be irrespective of seniority on average.

------
alexandercrohde
Odds are you can simply add their calendar on google calendars and see when
they've booked meetings.

------
janbernhart
Instead of asking what they do (which could indeed be an odd question), ask
what their vision is. Most leaders like to talk about it. While they explain
their vision, you can ask questions around how to get their, what their role
is in this plan, etc.

------
Edmond
Bullshit jobs :)

These are jobs that are useful sometimes, mostly not. At best you can say they
keep an eye on the organization.

------
icedchai
They probably spend most of their days sending emails, you just don't see
them.

------
ricky2323
For some reason Middle Level Managers are the strongest opponents of remote
work.

------
Havoc
A mix of supervising, teaching and inspiring the people in the trenches

------
IloveHN84
Holidays or home office

------
ubu7737
Managers of every kind have to deal with personnel, meaning humans, and this
is a huge part of what they have to accomplish. They divide their time between
humanistic goals and project goals, and it's very squishy.

Managers have to devote a certain amount of time to understanding you and your
influence on the process and your mental state.

Managers have to have influence with other people. They build relationships
and they form a big picture about the work being done and the timelines
imposed and the human assets they have to motivate to meet the important goals
imposed by the business.

You've heard all this before but it's a very squishy job. There is no template
for it. Management is very, very difficult to do.

