
The Default American Workplace is Fundamentally Flawed - mazatlanio
http://blangslet.com/post/58233827613/the-default-american-workplace-is-fundamentally-flawed
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mathattack
"1) Communication breakdown. Multiple offices in multiple locations and no one
knows what other people are working on, how much progress they have made and
how what they are doing fits into the overall scheme of company goals.

2) Productivity vs. time spent in office. The office can be a wasteland for
productivity and time spent in an office building does not directly correlate
to more productive progress.

3) Creativity is implicitly discouraged. Creative talent is vastly
undervalued, misunderstood and malnourished. The default American workplace
murders creativity.

4) Inefficient management. Inter-office politics and personal agendas often
influence executive decision making more than shared company goals. "

These are all signs that you need better Middle Management, not less of it,
and not sex with it.

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edo
Poor choice of title considering the article you linked to doesn't contain
anything resembling your words "F _ck Middle Management_. The article only
states that management can 'often' (not always) be inefficient. Additionally;
this is not really a guide to a better work life either. Did you link to the
wrong blogpost?

Absolutes; like implying that all middle-management is bad, are generally
incorrect. Things are never black or white. So when you paint an extreme, you
are almost always guaranteed to be wrong. In this case; middle-management can
be cumbersome or bureaucratic, but very often also can be helpful, important
and necessary. I hope you aren't arguing that all middle-management worldwide
is useless; because that would just be silly.

I'm making the effort to comment on this; because I'm increasingly noticing
that contributors to Hacker News impose their own beliefs upon a link they
submit. By making a title more sensational, you are also making it less
nuanced. This doesn't do justice to the writer you promote, and is unfair to
the readers at Hacker News.

Edit: rephrased. Edit 2: If you are the writer; disregard the last paragraph
;-)

~~~
aliston
Why is this even the title on HN? The title of the article is "The Default
American Workplace is Fundamentally Flawed"...

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dworin
The post is vague, but it sounds like you're trying to make an app that turns
everyone in a large organization into good managers. I understand how you
might try to organize the information, but how are you going to ensure that
the inputs are high quality? Management is really hard because it is about
making difficult trade-offs with uncertain information, all while dealing with
human beings who are not deterministic information processors.

A lot of management issues are not problems of technology, they are problems
where the _best_ solution is still a _suboptimal_ solution for many of the
people involved. The reason every company goal doesn't have a specific task
associated with it is because goals are inherently high level and static, but
tasks need to be flexible. It's also not certain what tasks will make the goal
successful on a given day.

Same goes for promotions. Real life is not an RPG - you don't collect
experience points until you become a level 36 Business Analyst. Smart
companies promote people when they've proven either a proficiency or aptitude
for the next level job and the company has a need for it. It's very hard to
set a timeline for either of those, especially when the next level involves
hard-to-measure abilities.

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ap22213
I suggest finding another job; they're really not all like the one described.
(But, I've been there!)

Even I, who works for a mega corp, have little or none of this. But, I work in
a small group, and not in IT but in product development. (I can't claim that
the other 39,980 employees feel similarly, though.)

With demand for developers so high, it makes sense to move around until you
find a place that feels right.

~~~
dworin
This is a great point - the culture of a workplace has more to do with the
culture of your team and the quality of your immediate management than it does
with the organization. There are people in small startups who are miserable at
work every day because of bad management, and people who work in large
companies that are excited to go to work and make a difference.

We usually think small companies have better management, but that's survivor
bias - the ones with bad management tend to fail, or not scale up. And the
people who are in large organizations that like their job tend to write about
it less, because they're able to think about other things.

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chasing
This isn't an article, it's a sales pitch. And it feels like one of those
awful late-night infomercials, to boot:

"If your work life a _mess_? [Cut to scene of woman at a desk covered in a
mess of loose papers, with spaghetti sauce in her messy hair, making a screwed
up face and throwing her hands up in the air as if to say 'I give up!'] Try
myRandomStartup.io!"

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at-fates-hands
"Inter-office politics and personal agendas often influence executive decision
making more than shared company goals."

Office politics are everywhere you go. Be it a huge corporation or a small
startup. Everybody has their groups and their axes to grind, friends they
promote and demote people they see as a threat.

It would be nice to remove it, but you're talking about something that's a
part of every office culture.

~~~
bpyne
Spot on but you can generalize it a little more. Anytime you have more than 2
people with their own goals and limited resources, you're going to have
politics. It's built into our species.

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cafard
The default American workplace as imagined by a programmer, I'd say. "
Productivity vs. time spent in office..."

a) Not all workplaces are offices. b) In some workplaces, employing highly
skilled personnel (hospitals, say), time spent in the workplace is critical.

