I have slowly been coming to the realization that just as the internet is doing its creative destruction thing on many obvious institutions (book distribution, music distribution, etc.) there are a lot more areas where it applies equally, although much less obviously.
Management as a career is one of those areas. Really, the whole need for managers (especially "middle" managers) is to maintain a line of communication between the leader of an organization and its producers/workers. Doesn't the internet make this type of job obsolete? In an efficient pipeline (of information), aren't they just bottlenecks?
We're certainly not there yet, quite possibly still a long way away, but once we get to the point where dissemination of pertinent information is at maximum efficiency, we won't need these arbiters of information in the system anymore.
I think this ties in to PG's thoughts on people not being meant to have a boss (http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html) as well as Berners-Lee's talk at TED about getting information onto the internet in as raw a form as possible.
You make a great point and I do agree to a certain extent. However, there have been some projects I've worked on where having a great manager made all the difference in the world. Having someone that deals with all of the non-technical minutia so that programmers can keep building stuff is really valuable IMHO.
Maybe software could fulfill this role one day, but as you say we're not there yet.
It may be that I'm getting too old and cynical, but when I hear arguments about eliminating the middle-man I can't help but think of a quote from Malcolm Reynolds in the show Firefly:
"About 50% of the human race is middlemen and they don’t take kindly to being eliminated."
I agree completely with the quote. I may have been reading too much techdirt lately, but I believe that's pretty obviously the case with the RIAA and the rest of the entertainment industry trying to clamp down on file-sharing.
Taken to it's logical extreme, there are some other pretty radical examples of "middlemen":
* universities (another PG example, http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html)
* banks
* financial regulators (see: xbrl)
* lawmaking bodies
* large corporations
* etc.
Are we ready for this kind of disruption? I have no idea.
but pertinent information needs to travel both ways.
for example: a company ceo might decide that say building a new box which does 3G access with deep-packet-inspection etc might be a very fruitful area to get into. most likely, he doesn't (shouldn't ?) know innards of say http/pop/imap etc etc.
grunts need to implement that. do you still feel you don't need someone closer to the worker-bees who can translate one lingo (techno-babble) into another (mgmt-speak) ?
I agree with your statement to a certain extent. It's the "travel" part that I think is not necessarily true.
Everyone (pertinent) must know everything (pertinent). And once information is ubiquitous, it will no longer need to travel.
As far as translating from one person's lingo into another (whether it's CEO<->Programmer or otherwise), then you can't argue with that. On the other hand, if the CEO and the worker's were able to understand each other directly, then you would have a much more efficient organization.
I would say that the latter example has an advantage over the former.
Management as a career is one of those areas. Really, the whole need for managers (especially "middle" managers) is to maintain a line of communication between the leader of an organization and its producers/workers. Doesn't the internet make this type of job obsolete? In an efficient pipeline (of information), aren't they just bottlenecks?
We're certainly not there yet, quite possibly still a long way away, but once we get to the point where dissemination of pertinent information is at maximum efficiency, we won't need these arbiters of information in the system anymore.
I think this ties in to PG's thoughts on people not being meant to have a boss (http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html) as well as Berners-Lee's talk at TED about getting information onto the internet in as raw a form as possible.