

How to learn to be a big company manager? - dirtyaura
http://dirtyaura.org/blog/2010/07/10/how-to-learn-to-be-a-big-company-manager/

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mrj
As far as I can tell, being a big company manager is mostly defined by dealing
with internal politics and attending a lot of meetings.

~~~
joshkaufman
^ This.

I worked for a Fortune 50 for six years while building my business on the
side. It was interesting for the first few years, then got old fast. There are
two huge problems every big company has:

1\. Communication Overhead - the more people you have to work with, the
percentage of time you spend communicating with others vs. getting actual work
done rises geometrically until it approaches 100%. You know you're getting
there when you start having meetings to prepare for other meetings.

2\. Bureaucracy - managers are on the hook for other people delivering things
they may not understand and don't directly control, all while dealing with
massive uncertainty. That's why there's so much bureaucracy - things like
Gantt charts make managers feel better by creating the illusion of certainty
and control, even though they mostly make things worse by reducing flexibility
and speed.

If you enjoy (and are good at) playing politics, big companies will be a good
fit for you - that's what you'll spend most of your time doing every day. If
you like spending most of your time creating useful things, don't work for a
big company.

~~~
Balsamic
I've spent the past two years working for one of the monolithic IT consulting
firms. Communication overhead is something anyone attempting to understand
enterprise software needs to grasp. Omnipresent meetings occur as an
individual's defence mechanism. It is a mischaracterisation to treat it as a
problem divorced from corporate structure, as they really are two sides to one
coin.

Holding a meeting keeps a paper trail of your attempts to solve a problem and
dilutes responsibility across all those involved. Hence, despite the fact that
all participants likely sit within ten metres of each other a meeting will
still be scheduled: complete with calendar invites, hour-length time blocks
(as less would not look like the issue is being given sufficient credence) and
the scheduling of follow-up meetings.

Additionally, enterprise projects do not consist of harmonious teams. Each
team is akin to a project of its own: each with its own corporate structure,
politics, budgets, risks and resources. I recently had a manager from one team
demand I attend dual hour-long meetings per day for her team. I politely
declined, stating that to do so my team would require an additional resource
to cover this gap. This did not ingratiate me.

------
growt
read a lot of dilbert comics ;)

~~~
dkarl
You should have left off the smiley.

Meeting of engineers, one engineer gives a presentation of a system that will
be extremely expensive to integrate with, has unknown reliability, offers no
benefit, will suck up the time of a lot of capable people, but we're going to
integrate with it anyway, because we've been told this is part of our
"direction."

Plus our division is going to be paying a crapload of money to some other
division for the privilege of integrating this system, which will affect our
bonuses. It's pretty easy to explain why this is a stupid idea, but the order
came down from our boss's boss's boss's boss, and nobody is allowed to explain
things to a boss's boss's boss's boss, not even our boss's boss. Especially
when you want to explain that the thing she's doing to look good to her boss
(and her boss's boss,) presumably to improve _her_ bonus, is actually bad for
the company.

When it's all done, they will claim it's saving us $N million dollars per
year, even though it was actually a costly mistake. How do I know this?
Because the same thing happened less than two years ago.

Add comedic and artistic skill, and voila, a Dilbert strip. Maybe two or
three.

------
rbanffy
The real question is not how, but why?

~~~
dirtyaura
Headline was a tongue-in-cheek. If you read between the lines, I'm a co-
founder in a small startup with two guys, and I've no intentions to become a
bigco manager. Unless our company grows to >1000 employees (unlikely) and I
for some reason want to stay in the helm (as unlikely).

However, as an armchair sociologist (aren't we all? ;-)) I think it's still
very interesting to study how bigcos are organized, and is there solutions to
growing pains once you go past a few thousand employees.

I personally believe that in the end of the day, you need to have quite
similar skill set to run a startup with 50 employees as you need to run a
company with 5000 employees. It's about leadership and inspiration,
understanding the problems in all levels of work.

