
A study finds that bosses can be useful but also sneaky - js2
https://www.economist.com/business/2019/10/13/the-usefulness-of-managers
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magashna
Sure, but a good manager is the one who's sneaky on your behalf. Telling
stakeholders a longer timeline than necessary, boosting your accomplishments
so you get a raise, taking the bullet from execs, those are all kinda sneaky
but I sure as hell respected the managers who did that for stuff for me.

The manager you don't want throws you under the bus, over promises and demands
crunch, takes the credit for your work. Equally sneaky, but selfish.

~~~
Hokusai
> Telling stakeholders a longer timeline than necessary

I understand what you mean, but this only creates a escalation problem.
Everybody has to lie to get anything done. So, it is impossible to know if the
decisions taken in the company are reasonable or not.

I guess that this behavior makes sense if everybody up the ladder are
themselves lying.

> taking the bullet from execs

I guess that this is part of the same type of company. Where execs punish
mistakes, like if mistakes were not part of your job. I have seen such
companies driven by fear and the irony of it is that everybody is unhappy and
mistakes are repeated again and again as the goal is just o hide them not to
learn from it.

> The manager you don't want throws you under the bus, over promises and
> demands crunch, takes the credit for your work. Equally sneaky, but selfish.

I guess that this is the manager that ends being promoted to be an exec and
creates a new cycle of unreason, pain and lack of productivity.

~~~
magashna
Most companies are not that perfect unicorn. I worked at a Berkshire Hathaway
company and was constantly going to war with upper management over bullshit.
My direct manager was a saint, and while the company was doing well, I can't
deny it seemed everyone hated it there. I'm happy at a much smaller company.

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k__
People often talk about the extemes. Managers or no managers.

Why can't we have something in-between?

Like, instead of a manager, we have a team assistant. Someone who does
burocracy and orga, but hasn't any power and the power is exercied in some way
by all of the team members.

This would remove the "if all do it no one does it" problem and still prevent
single people decisions.

~~~
cgarvis
At Slalom _build[1], we have People Managers and Team Leads.

Your people manager stays with you as you transition from project to project.
They never have more than six direct reports. They are the person that handles
all the bureaucracy for you and helping you through the org.

Your team lead is sometimes a people manager but probably not yours. They
change based on the project you are on and are responsible for it's success.
Their focus is on delivery not your career.

I'm interested in seeing where this goes as it breaks the responsibility up
without breaking the career progression. There isn't a "technical path" ...
yet.

[1] [https://www.slalombuild.com/](https://www.slalombuild.com/)

~~~
nilkn
This is the organization of the company I work at. Overall I've learned
through experience that this decoupled structure is nice in theory and it's
useful to have as an option, but it should actually be avoided in practice if
at all possible. A developer can end up in a situation where their boss
(people manager) really doesn't know about or understand their day-to-day work
at all, and then their team lead may be vying for authority over the team with
a project manager and product owner, all of whom report in different
organizations and have different motivations and incentives.

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1_player
I've recently landed in a managerial role. If there's one thing I've learned
is that your primary role is to shelter the people under you from all the shit
that's coming from above (like that famous comic of the birds on a pole
pooping on the ones at the bottom.)

If your boss asks to deliver an _unreasonable request_ by tomorrow, your job
is not to make sure it's delivered on time, your job is to say "No."

Might seem obvious but very few managers I've worked under learned that
lesson, that's the reason managers are seen as being useless. A good manager
promotes a healthy workplace.

I haven't kept up with it, but I used to read
[https://randsinrepose.com](https://randsinrepose.com) — some interesting
insight from a software engineering manager.

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kuroguro
[https://outline.com/XRV6AW](https://outline.com/XRV6AW)

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segmondy
"... when it is difficult to measure what managers do, it can be tricky to
design incentives to reward them."

Why would it be difficult to measure what managers do? Measure the total
output of their team. That's it.

~~~
juliansimioni
It's difficult because almost every word in your answer is a minefield that
cannot be handled simply:

measure: how does one truly measure anything related to a team or individual?
Just as lines of code is a bad measure of a developer, even very quantifiable
things like sales numbers don't tell the whole story. A salesperson who hooks
clients on promises that can't be kept is not doing a good job, no matter how
it might look in one quarter. Goodhart's law exists for a reason.

total: a team that appears to be high performing but depends on the output of
a small portion of that team, or that is high performing despite several team
members, is not a success. People who carry a team often leave for better
compensation or challenge. People who appear to have high output themselves at
the expense of others should be removed from the team. People who are
ineffective on a particular team should find a new environment where they can
achieve more success.

output: Not all teams exist to produce specific output. An IT department might
replace 50 broken keyboards across the company in a quarter, but it would be
foolish to ask "what can we do to get that number to 75?"

their team: A manager usually exists both to help direct reports do a better
job, but also to provide timely and pertinent information to other teams, and
many organizations have teams that primarily serve "internal customers". An
operations team could be given a goal of "zero new bugs or outages" and freeze
all new deployments to achieve it. But the development teams would obviously
be upset, and the entire company would likely suffer.

~~~
celticmusic
the output of a team is knowable. It doesn't matter if that output is the
result of only a portion of the team, if the manager is enabling that small
portion then that's what success looks like.

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awillen
Calling this a study of managers is quite a stretch... it's an arbitrarily
designed game theory problem in which some people are labeled "managers" and
others "workers" with no real relationship to those titles in the real world.

But yeah, managers can be useful and/or sneaky. They can also be sleepy,
hungry, boring, sociopathic and all of the other things humans can be.

~~~
Gimpei
Agreed. I'm all for experimental economics, but let's not exaggerate the
generalizability of a result. Better to see it as a particular form of theory
that needs to be backed up empirically in more real world contexts.

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pencilcode
This is how you devalue science

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goatinaboat
Most companies could chop an entire layer of middle management, perhaps many
layers, and get an instant boost in productivity and happiness. I wonder if
there’s any mechanism for workers and senior management to make this happen
and share the rewards.

~~~
ebiester
I've said this before, but a manager's work is split into thirds:

1/3 is in service of the team. Some of this is bureaucratic (approving expense
reports, hiring/firing/promoting), and some of this is being a team
facilitator. In meetings, watching that everyone is talking and that one
person isn't dominating. Helping with conflict management. Pulling together
people from three teams for a meeting and leading it.

Again, that's about 1/3 of the job. Half of this could be done by team
members, but these are skills that require knowing tech but aren't tech.

1/3 is getting senior management what they need. Does the project need another
developer? What is the high level status of the team? Is there technical debt
that needs prioritizing that requires more than what the individual team can
commit to? These are things that can be done by developers, but it's going to
look a lot like what the manager does, and someone is going to be pulled off
of more and more development work to do these.

And the last third is to the rest of the management team. These are the work
to make the department run that people don't notice.

I worked at a place that had a very lean management:worker ratio, and instead
developers ended up doing a lot of the management work, effectively becoming
managers without the pay bump or recognition.

~~~
adrianmonk
I like the way you've broken this down, and I realize you're just giving
examples, but your first third (service of the team) doesn't include any long-
term development of employees. (Probably just because your purpose here isn't
to make an exhaustive list, but it got me thinking about this.)

I mention this because I think one thing that separates mediocre managers from
really good ones is that the good ones understand each employee's strengths
and weaknesses and try to help them chart a course for success. That means
finding their place on the team and it also means growth. It's to everyone's
benefit if, 6 months or a year from now, that employee is a better employee. A
manager is in a unique position to coach and mentor, and to create the
conditions for growth and encourage it. A self-starter employee will do some
of this on their own, but they usually need the manager to participate too by
doing stuff like recognizing realistic opportunities for an employee to take
on more responsibility and taking a chance by trusting them with it. A lot of
managers don't seem to even attempt to do any of this or aren't even aware
that it's a thing, and then their team languishes and stagnates and they
wonder why they aren't getting anything out of their people.

~~~
ebiester
Certainly, long term development of employees is part of that third, and a
significant one at that. But much of growth is subtle - it's about looking at
projects and going, "Person A can get it done quickly but Person B would grow
and appreciate the task, and Person C feels a bit of ownership over a part of
it, and will grab due to an assertive personality if I let them sort it out
themselves. So I'm going to have to massage a few egos here.) That doesn't
take a lot of time but it is definitely emotional labor.

Emotional labor can be hard to quantify, and so outside of 1:1s and ad-hoc
goal setting meetings and reviews, it's both important and hard to quantify in
terms of time. Further, it's another task that can be a peer task - that is,
it's something that technical leads can do for their teams and management can
reassign the rest.

The original comment was talking about taking out most of management, so it's
probably something they wouldn't consider as a key management priority that
couldn't be done by developers.

