
First, Let's Fire All The Managers - vellum
https://archive.harvardbusiness.org/cla/web/pl/product.seam?c=573&i=15715&cs=7c855bfce2fd1c3860846954978b1181
======
crazygringo
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-
cont...](http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/07/08/valves-flat-structure-contains-
hidden-layer-of-powerful-management-claims-ex-employee/)

~~~
amirmc
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_Structurelessnes...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness)

~~~
ep103
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
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.

------
ryanbrunner
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?

~~~
nodata
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-
managem...](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/09/valve-management-
jeri-ellsworth)

~~~
mattlutze
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.

------
peterhunt
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.

~~~
protonfish
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
Um, no. Secretaries were replaced with personal computers and websites. Nobody
needs to take dictation anymore, after all, and information is now at
everyone's fingertips.

And the _logistics_ of arranging meetings etc. are handled by office managers
generally, if you're talking about who uses which room and for how long.

The idea that secretaries turned into management is bizarre.

~~~
merrua
I think this is a generational gap. As far as I am aware their is a gap
between what the role of secretaries was seen as (typing, filing) and what the
range of roles contained within the post actually did. There was a good reason
why even now, some people said that a computer, and great search hasnt caught
up with an excellent secretary.

------
analog31
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
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
> 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.

~~~
kabdib
The _best_ managers I've had are ex-coders who have fully realized they cannot
both code and do a good job as a manager.

I had one really good coder cow-orker who became my manager. He tried, and it
was pretty poignant at times, but eventually realized the truth. Until he did,
he mostly sucked at both jobs.

~~~
weland
Yeah, this pretty much sums up what I've seen as well. I know good ex-coders
who became good managers, but the stepping stone to doing it was having to
stop writing code.

------
bane
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.

~~~
lmm
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
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.

------
juanuys
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-m...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1040868/java-syntax-and-meaning-
behind-b1ef9157-binary-address)

------
VLM
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
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?

------
wil421
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.

------
Joeboy
This really needs an NSFW tag...

~~~
gulbrandr
Why?

~~~
RankingMember
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.

------
exodust
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).

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

------
api
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?

------
kfk
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
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.

------
ioesf
A Technology Freelancer's Guide to Starting a Worker Cooperative

[http://techworker.coop/resources/technology-freelancers-
guid...](http://techworker.coop/resources/technology-freelancers-guide-
starting-worker-cooperative)

------
jbgreer
A counter-example from HBR Magazine's December 2013 issue

[http://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-
mana...](http://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-management/)

------
PaulRobinson
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.

------
squozzer
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
The world is not a computer (or else AI would be easy).

------
at-fates-hands
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_...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2013/full_list/index.html?iid=F500_sp_full)

You might want to ask yourself why then. . .

------
michaelochurch
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
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
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.

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

