136 replies
1d13h
Stewart Butterfield, former CEO of Slack, recently described a dynamic within tech companies behind much of the over-hiring. He noted on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast in late May that when there’s no real constraint on hiring, “you hire someone, and the first thing that person wants to do is hire other people.” The reason is that “the more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in the organization…So every budgeting process is, ‘I really want to hire,’ and that to me is the root of all the excess.”
I’ve seen this first hand. One place where I worked HR even had a table of team size vs manager compensation. When I pointed out that it may not be the best idea to directly incentivize managers to hire more people they were less than understanding. Of course it went totally out of control.
But sadly there just is no counteracting force (except perhaps mr Musk). When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?”, and they won’t be impressed when you say “I managed to keep it down to four people”. It’s just something that resonates very strongly with the primitive side of our brains (“You say you were the chief, how big was your tribe?”).
It's called "empire building" and is also part of the principal-agent problem where the manager is the agent and is assumed to have the firm's best interests in mind, but in reality doesn't. As a result, the principal (for example an owner) has to come up with methods to keep their management honest (example... tying most compensation to stock price - although I think this just makes management short sighted).
I was once in a meeting where an IT manager was told his group would have to handle the install for a piece of software that like 2 engineers used. The guy asked for 3 additional head count and my jaw dropped. If someone has ever seen the Avatar Airbender show, I was like Prince Zuko speaking up at his father's meeting. You see I was there as a courtesy and tried to point out that even one headcount seemed like a lot for something that should take less than a week of work for a single employee. At the time I didn't understand that the manager understood this, but was playing for more staff to build their own importance. I didn't understand the games they play. As part of the game...you always say your people are swamped no matter what...or refer to a massive backlog of work even though that backlog is all super low priority and existing employees can be reprioritized.
> the manager is the agent and is assumed to have the firm's best interests in mind, but in reality doesn't.
Every manager I had at every major multinational company only had the interest of their own career progression in mind, not the company's, not their team's. You as an employee under them were just a means to their goal, nothing more. I naively assumed that making them look good and doing the overtime when needed to achieve their idiotic deadlines would also guarantee my ascension later, but boy was I gullible and wrong.
Going the extra mile for your boss might work out for you when everything goes smooth in the org in times of economic prosperity when there's room for everyone to move up, but when the org or economy went tits up, and things were being put on chopping block, those managers didn't hesitate to grab the only parachute for themselves and let their team sink or throw them under the bus to save themselves at the tune of "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish", so I learned the valuable lesson to not go the extra mile for any boss unless I have written guarantees of a reward.
It's the way the reward system is set up in these companies. Climb the ladder and kick it under you after you dangle the carrot in front of naive idiots to push you up that ladder for rewards they might never see. I think someone called it "the GE way".
I’ve been fortunate to have some very good managers.
That’s why I find this idea so horrible. I wouldn’t be where I am now if I had to “self-organize.”
Every time I've seen this sentiment and asked for something concrete on what made them good managers I get answered with platitudes or "nice-isms."
At this point in my career, the emperor has no clothes. There are no good managers, only good peers.
A good manager is simple to see: success is the team's, failure is their fault. If it is not the case, you have a bad manager.
What is so amazing about someone who throws themselves under the bus? Shouldn't a manager increase the probability of success?
Hence why a good manager "throws themselves under the bus" in the event of failure — the manager failed to increase the probability of success.
I like this take a lot. This assumes that authority, competence and responsibility are aligned. However, this is often not the case in "modern" management as authority is spread very thin and responsibility is fluid (highly dependent on outcome).
It's about shielding the team from the consequences of failure. A good manager will say "If my team failed it's because I did not prepare them well enough/lead them well enough/manage expectations well enough". this is what ownership looks like. It is orthogonal to probability of failure.
What is the actual utility of this however? Instead of trying to determine who is to blame, why not try to identify areas of improvement?
Is it possible for the manager to be given insufficient resources by their manager? Such as insufficient pay to hire sufficiently skilled people, or insufficient budget to hire sufficient people?
Whose fault is the failure then?
It's a responsibility of management to ensure that the work is understood and proper resources are negotiated for and allocated to perform it.
When a manager doesn't understand the scope of the work or has not made the case for adequate resources, to the project's jeopardy or their team's, it's typically referred to as mismanagement.
If this culture of under-serving itself for no apparent benefit except to appear too busy to be assigned more work extends elsewhere, it could be an organizational issue. If it's a SNAFU principle situation, management needs to be brought in alignment and trust with leadership, or leadership needs to be replaced. I've encountered both at the same place at the same time, and thankfully the board agreed.
Is it possible for the IC to be given insufficient resources by their PM? Such an insufficient pay or insufficient time or or? Whose fault is the failure then? My point is, we all work between lines and try to do our best, whether we are managers or ICs. A good manager will try to do their best just as you do, a bad one will throw all his troubles on your back, or blame you/the organization/moon phases for them.
In a good organization, there will be several layers of people owning failures of different types. The low level manager can claim ownership of failure to sufficiently manage expectations, their manager can claim ownership of failure to prioritize properly, and a yet higher level leader can own failure to provide funding.
I’ve had good managers and bad managers.
As an IC, a good manager will shield you from the chaos, infighting, changing priorities and ever shifting timelines. They will ensure that you are aware of what’s going on, and have enough clarity to be able to proceed.
A bad manager will most likely try to help by exposing you to all of the above, and cause you get caught up in all of the confusion that comes with it.
Just one example.
To piggy back on it. A good manager will shield you from other bad managers and outsourcing firms promising the moon.
Quite a sad state of affairs.
I think it’s important to say that they also protect from rogue/drive by superstar IC’s. The ones who will come along and “fix” your problem, leaving a mess that nobody understands behind them that makes them look competent and your team incompetent, when in reality they’ve just half assed the job.
I’ve seen managers stand up for their teams and defend against those guys successfully.
It really reveals how clueless some managers are when they sing praises of the "rockstar" IC who from day 1 trash talked their coworkers and broke everything they touched before leaving after a few months to do the same somewhere else.
It shows how managers often just base their opinions on vibes given in meetings and don't care to understand anything they're managing.
For years, all my managers were extremely bad to the point where I thought I was the problem. Until I had my first good manager.
My definition is: if my level of stress after a meeting with a manager is lower than before, then it is a good manager.
With bad managers, I carefully select what I share, often downright lie to them just to limit my stress level. I know a bad manager will throw me under the bus to save their ass, so I behave accordingly. I essentially manipulate them as much as I can: it's politics.
With a good manager, I share all I can, reach out when I need their help, and have their back when stuff goes south. It's team work.
That's a great way to put it. I've had two managers I think of as good and this is definitely something they had in common.
A good manager provides air stops shit falling down while letting through all the credit
Having worked in both very flat and very hierarchical organizations, I can tell you exactly what makes a good manager. Any manager, good or bad, is an information bottleneck. Managers have more organizational exposure and are thus a much bigger target for communication. The good ones filter out noise and help you prioritize your work.
The problem I have with less hierarchical organizations is that when you have only one layer of middle management, middle management gets squeezed between executives and individual contributors and tends to burn out. Even worse with zero layers, where individual contributors are expected to self-manage. Communication overhead ends up eating most of the productive hours of the day.
The empire-building problem with more hierarchical organizations is already well explored in this thread, but communications are also a problem. With too many layers, organizational alignment suffers, and silos develop even if the managers involved are uniformly well-intentioned.
There's an underappreciated upside to silos, however, which is that functional parts of the organization can end up insulated from dysfunctional ones. In flat organizations, dysfunction anywhere is dysfunction everywhere.
From my perspective, I've had mostly good managers, in the sense that I've had multiple managers get fired over the years for being more interested in making sure the team had the tools and support that it needed than doing what the org at large wanted that wasn't possible.
To me, the best managers I've had have done a good job balancing what their team was able to do against what the org needed/wanted them to do. Sometimes that was pushing back against the org and doing the hard work of saying things weren't going to happen, and sometimes it was being clear and sympathetic about conveying difficult realities down to the team about what was needed. I've had managers convey things to me that ultimately led to me quitting and finding other work, but I hold them in high esteem because they clearly communicated what needed to be done to meet demands and I decided it wasn't for me and didn't hold it against me.
There are good managers. They're just also good peers who happen to be your manager and fulfill the role of a manager as best they can. Sometimes the system of the company rejects that, but that's also a sign you're maybe working somewhere that wants you to have no peers and no support, and maybe that should prompt some changes for you as an employee.
I have had a good manager and here are some concrete examples. He thought it was important to deliver what we promised so he would work with us to get good estimates and would then bring those outside our team and argue for a reasonable time/scope. He would deflect stupid requests (add AI to our project that had no reason for it). In my four years working under him he got us two off cycle inflation adjustments by going to HR and telling them to retain good talent in software we need to pay more.
Well I've had good managers but you're right in that they were peers more than emperors.
As for something concrete, I can think of managers fighting for my bonus allocations, fighting for comp days after a crunchy deadline, things like that. Estimation was earnest and not pushy. Problems were handled in a solution oriented way, not a blame game. You could argue that's just maintaining combat readiness but I'll take it.
A disproportionately large group of the good managers I've had were ex-military, and their big traits were clarity about what we were doing and why, and that when the SHTF they would fight alongside the team, not against it. This wasn't exclusive to ex-military types, but if you are so cynical as to believe in no good managers you may want to look for places which employ this style.
I can imagine within gov contracting this same group of people are violently annoying instead, but I have never had the experience of that world.
I've had good managers. They always get outplayed and outmaneuvered and ultimately fired and replaced by sociopaths who spend all their time successfully playing politics and never doing anything significant.
* Understands what every person on their team is doing
* Coordinates actions between team members
* Actively removes things blocking their team
* Navigates the organizational bureaucracy for their team
* Technical enough to pitch in when things are running smoothly
* Personal enough relationship that you can be honest
I see here a lot of generalities about good managers helping you prioritize work, shielding you from chaos, bringing organization to the team, etc. These are necessary, but not sufficient. Any reasonably well-organized, good-intentioned, and less selfish person/manager can do that, but I wouldn't necessarily call them a good manager.
The measure of a good manager is their willingness to do something difficult for them for the benefit of their team or reports, such as saying no to various pressures from upper management, not jumping into latest trends pushed down to the teams, not saying yes to every new pivot, etc. Most people in a work situation would not do that, which is why there are no good managers.
I never said all managers all bad or that they should be removed and employees should self organize instead. Managers are needed so that ICs can focus on the work, the problem is that a lot of large companies, especially from traditional industries, tend to create some of the worst kinds of managers possible because their incentives are the worst.
I'm sorry, this seems almost impossible unless you're a contractor with that explicitly stated in your contract.
I meet the idiotic deadlines, but then just take sick day(s) to make up for the ot.
I dream of a graduation speech where someone says all of this stuff, or even a proper uni course “avoiding corporate bullshit in a narcissistic world and how to sue your landlord” … except the donors wont like this!
A common miscommunication in an R&D organization is asking another team to do a task, and getting the reply that they're willing to do the task if you provide headcount. You're not asking them to grow their team in perpetuity. You're asking them to reprioritize their existing work to accommodate one request.
(I know this isn't really a miscommunication. It's misaligned incentives leading to an exasperating kind of logrolling.)
There are not many options. Headcount might help (secondment, overtime, contractors, move from another team, new hire) or pushing other work back (or cancelling it, reducing scope) or saying no (find a workaround, go without it). I might of missed it but there is only so much you can do. A win win might be showing how doing X now is not worth it because event Y makes X obsolete or less valuable.
You can just have a queue. I’ve seen departments that basically function as an internal vendor of services to other departments. First in first out. Fixed schedule to expect turn around on most requests. No one complains. Seems quite pragmatic and fair.
FIFO is not an efficient way to prioritise work, though. Unless all work has about the same value and urgency, in which case, I guess, that sounds nice.
If you are an specialized department, insulated from the organizational goals, and circled by people that only speak in riddles, FIFO is the best you can do.
Until they become the sole group that does X (Officially), and other groups realize that having them do a simple task related to X is way more hassles and months of wait time so each team just build their own unofficial X or try to circumvent it from day 0.
I'm not say this or that method is better just pointing out what I've seen so far through different companies. Not all work is the same priority but if you try to reprioritize then you can enter the endless quagmire of inter-department/group politics than involve a lot of useless meetings. And a simple FIFO queue can be equally as problematic.
I have seen it where they are literally the sole provider of x. Cheaper than third party x vendor even because of a lack of profit margin charging internally. Still their terms are straightforward and there’s no bullshitting.
Only works if you have a lot of funds or your funding model isn’t broken. Where I work it’s a big dance around funding IT to build or connect stuff for Ops/Engineering. Because it’s such a chore there are lots of alternatives (ticketing, middleware, event management/collection system etc.) or even shadow IT.
Queue is fine but my experience is small company’s anyway hate them. A queue self manages, so how do you micromanage!
Sprints are an editable queue I guess but even waiting 2 weeks is too much for the nanomanagers.
This seems impossible to fix in a divisional org structure, where each division owns their P&L. If I'm in division A, and division B wants something from us that won't make a difference on my P&L (or will just add costs [headcount]), why would I be incentivized to help? If they pay for it though, that's a fee for service. Seems fine. It's all internal accounting anyway, so it's mostly fake.
No co-incidence New York is called the "Empire State"
What is this supposed to imply about New York?
I would say the bureaucracies of New York City set an early example for lots of other places.
Ah yes .. current prios remain in place, more context switching, operational ownership, unplanned fallout, holidays, meetings ... cutting the pie in more pieces does not give you more pie ... people still seem to think that ...
Yeah
Hiring too much is one of the things the "falling upwards" specialists do
It is interesting how non-economic companies actually are. A company is often just a bunch of people optimizing for their own interests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xRqXYsksFg
Most companies will have a counter force, the 'cutter'.
The 'cutter's compensation is tied to how much they cut.
Of course, they will also need a team, to more efficiently cut other teams.
And they in turn will also be incentivized to grow their team, the manager of the cutting team isn't immune to wanting to grow their team.
But then it gets up to CEO, who has someone reporting to them who's only goal is cutting. The cutter has a team, with some managers of teams of cutters. It's turtles all the way up, but it does end at CEO.
Generally every big company I've worked for, yes, had empire building. But then also had people to cut empires.
So every few years there were layoffs to trim it up.
When I was at Intel 10+ years ago, they had this down to an art. They had a name for it, like, "the pool"; they'd reorg all the time. Everyone went into the pool, then the mgrs would pick teams. Your actual progress through your career was loosely tied to how quickly you were chosen. Especially bad IC's never got out of the pool; if you didn't have a req (or title) then you were let go after a year. This had the nice effect that mgrs rarely had to terminate employees: just wait for the reorg & don't pick out the bad ICs.
Reminiscent of choosing teams in PE/sports lessons at school. The sporty kids who were good at the teacher's favourite sport get to pick, and kids like I was get left to the end. Nice way to get familiar with the pecking order at an early stage.
It's a good way of getting the best team(s), which is what you want in a company. Maybe not so great for the emotional development of children, of course, but it's hard to say.
You get the teams with people who 'get along' not the best for the company. Mediocrity with friends in high places gets far further. That's not any form of meritocracy.
That doesn't happen all the time, at all. It happens more in places where results are less measurable, or where you don't have to attract customers, but that doesn't mean it happens a lot. And merit isn't just competence. If a leader knows from experience they can communicate with someone and be understood, that is a big advantage.
Well, low effect teams are much easier to spot than low effect individuals. So on this case, management actually has a way to solve the problem.
It is a good way to make even teams. But the teacher should do it in his head or make the kids draft from the class list.
I did class list drafts when I was a substitute teacher. It worked OK. But so did random too, which I ended up with using.
That sounds like google's 'team matching' process lol.
That is also how the bones function in the human body.
There's a type of cell called the osteoblasts which grow and reinforce tissue, and there's another type called the osteoclasts, which dissolve it.
So, just an endless cycle of non-economic activities?
Managers want to hire more people because teams are way under-staffed. I’ve never worked on a team that had enough people to do the important things with leeway for sickness vacation and turnover. Maybe there is empire building going on, but I think it’s deeper than that.
Well managed BigCorps are overstaffed 2x. Badly managed BigCorps are overstaffed 3x (or more).
If there is insufficient manpower, it is often because they are building things they shouldn't. At least this was my experience.
Bingo. I find that limiting headcount is a great forcing function for only doing what's important. The classic example is Google making X different chat apps. That doesn't happen unless a company is severely overstaffed.
To me that really just screams lazy and incompetent management. Being overstaffed is just a coincidence. A good mgmt structure would have prioritized that roadmap and gotten the cats herded to work towards a singular goal/chat app. I say this as a "cat" myself who has to be reminded to not get distracted by the next shiny thing.
100%. Why make hard decisions when you can just hire? A company flush with cash simply hires and lets decision makers avoid decision making.
I'd say it's not. But causality is the reverse of the GP's.
Being overstaffed is a consequence of not prioritizing the work. Either the staff grows until the important things get done, or the organization shrinks because the important stuff doesn't get done.
I never knew what a corporate intranet was for until I worked at a huge company. It's for clicking around on, going back and forth, when you have nothing else to do but need to look busy.
At least a contributing factor is that it’s easier (emotionally and politically) to hire additional mediocre people than firing bad ones.
I had this same interaction when applying for Staff+ software engineer (not manager) at two FAANGs.
One of the recruiters sniffed, or maybe negged, and said they expected X number people under you for that role.
Highly effective small teams was considered small-time, not a selling point. Also not-OK was leading engineering for an early startup. Nor was a cross-company Principal role interfacing with everyone.
(However, both companies were still open to me doing their new-grad Leetcode hazing battery or Python grunting automated screening test. Which isn't a sign that their culture is otherwise good, other than the team size fixation.)
Same for technology used. You won’t get much credit for keeping costs down and keeping things simple. The real money is in developing super complex systems. That will give you respect.
Yes, this is my mantra. Senior Only-Developers are attracted to complex problems and try to make things using as many language from the "advanced" book as possible.
That's why I like all-round developers better, they have a bit less to prove by making "smart and complicated" code.
I thought we all agreed the best kinda code is the stuff you can debug at 3am. While drunk.
Evidently a lot of people disagree.
Otherwise, we wouldn't see the recurrent explosion of overhyped technologies that create complexity without any providing any benefit at all.
(I really don't understand the mechanism where reasonable ideas become those memes, but their existence is undeniable.)
For sure, but if you forget to clean up afterwards in a sober state after your drunk session, that code won't stay that clean for long.
The flex reply here is to say how much value you created with your small team. Everyone is familiar with Instagram being acquired for $1B at 13 employees, and that track record would be sufficient to carry you a long way even if you did nothing more after.
If that doesn’t work for a given company, well, interviews go two ways :)
Ridiculous. Essentially saying the staff role is management in all but name.
Hilarious they insist on holding ICs feet to the fire for hiring while letting their own culture wither away to petty little fiefdoms.
I honestly would strongly prefer 4 people who are highly smart (think prodigy- or genius-level) below me than 20 "somewhat intelligent" employees (i.e. what at least 95 % of employees are).
In general I agree, but Prodigy-level people can come with their own challenges too. Eg. They're going to be coming up with a million ideas for how to improve things, so you'd better be prepared to listen and support them, which often will require changing the way the organisation works. If you don't (or can't) support them, be prepared for them to get demotivated quickly and move on. The other 90% are generally a little less high maintenance, but I agree that they will never achieve as much.
IMO your best bet is to pick and choose who you need based on the situation. Your already-in-production CRUD app may benefit from a few extra 50th percentile coders to help with the workload, but if you're building a ground breaking product from scratch, then a deliberately small team of top echelon nerds may make the difference between success and hard fail.
First:
... is in my opinion basic management 101.
---
Concerning your other points: I do believe that I at least somewhat know how to work with such people (though I never managed such people).
For example, at a former job, I worked under such people; they really liked me, because I was one of the few people who were actually capable of "understanding" their visions and make them understandable to less intelligent (but still smart) colleagues.
I really have a tendency to be liked by frustrated highly-smart people, both because I really love to learn from them and I think I am a decent person to talk to if you are really frustrated (on the other hand, much more "ordinary" people often reproach me for being "unapproachable", "having my head in the clouds", "always being so negative", "complicated to work with", ... :-) ).
> ... is in my opinion basic management 101.
Ever heard the one about how uncommon "common sense" often is? ;)
Were it a world where you were correct, but I am unsure how often that actually shows up.
Part of building an effective team is picking the right tool for the job, and your assertion that ‘genius’-wrangling is always justified / ‘the best thing to do’ is just plain wrong, no matter how much you try to justify it with…what basically sounds like Dunning Kruger self-flattery.
GP is right. So-called geniuses have their own problems. Problems that can’t just be ‘managed away’, just like you can’t completely ‘manage away’ some other types of poor fit. To say otherwise sounds like the sort of elite technical ability fetishism that, ironically, I’d expect from an IC.
If this has worked for you so far, it’s by coincidence.
You don't think having 4 people do the work of 20 people is going to backfire at some point? Nevermind the looming Bus factor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
sweet summer child.
I'm not sure why this article bothers attributing this insight to the former Slack CEO, this dynamic is nothing new and was a problem well before Slack or the current round of tech companies were around.
If they'd picked some older quote from someone else saying similar, someone still would complain that the idea predates them, right back to Socrates.
I don't see it claiming it's some deep novel insight, it's just someone prominent who said something recently that's salient to the point.
I may just being nitpicky here. With such a commonly understood, and old, concept it doesn't need ant attribution. Name dropping a random CEO just feels like a cheap addition to get eyes on an article.
I suppose it kind of is, or an 'appeal to authority', I just don't see that as necessarily bad, it's just like 'don't take my word for it, someone you might actually have heard of or in an important position said blah'.
Proper journalists and newspapers spend plenty of time quoting politicians and senior employees making obvious or previously said remarks too.
If a successful CEO says it, it is definitely insightful.
Management is an utter bullshit job that is all about headcount and promo documents at this point. Society and companies can live without this.
Managers are definitely needed. The problem is the amount and their tendency to accrue unnecessary "fat" in their teams. It's not an uncommon in big companies to see people who have multiple managers at once and have to report to the multiple people/teams. Or having ridiculously high manager/worker ratio.
I love Hacker News. So many people here strive to work for FAANG or some other bloated SV tech company with a free-money grow-or-die mindset, and proceed adopt this view of management as if it’s an immoveable, universal truth.
Without me, my team would drown in less than a week. Say what you want about that implying a lack of resilience, or that I’m not teaching a man to fish, but it’s the current reality. I work insanely hard to ensure that they can do their best work, that their best work always gets better, and that they get the most out of their time in my team, distraction-free. I work insanely hard to smooth over organisational politics, communications failures, and so many other things that every day without fail so many people in this community bitch and moan about.
This is an anonymous account, there’s no benefit to me self-promoting. I’d never be this confidently candid were my name attached, no matter who I was talking to.
Maybe you should go find a better team to work for.
As a manager at $megacorp, hiring and promo docs are maybe 5% of my job.
This is called Parkinson's Law: https://www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law
"To comprehend Factor I, we must picture a civil servant called A who finds himself overworked. Whether this overwork is real or imaginary is immaterial; but we should observe, in passing, that A’s sensation (or illusion) might easily result from his own decreasing energy—a normal symptom of middle-age. For this real or imagined overwork there are, broadly speaking, three possible remedies
(1) He may resign.
(2) He may ask to halve the work with a colleague called B.
(3) He may demand the assistance of two subordinates, to be called C and D.
There is probably no instance in civil service history of A choosing any but the third alternative. By resignation he would lose his pension rights. By having B appointed, on his own level in the hierarchy, he would merely bring in a rival for promotion to W’s vacancy when W (at long last) retires. So A would rather have C and D, junior men, below him. They will add to his consequence; and, by dividing the work into two categories, as between C and D, he will have the merit of being the only man who comprehends them both."
One of my pet peeves is how few people read past the first line of the essay and think Parkinson’s Law is the opening quip about work expanding to fill the time available.
Thanks for the proper write up.
C. Northcote Parkinson is a great and very under-appreciated economist. His books are easy reads and well worth it. He made many astute observations about human behavior, not just Parkinson's Law.
I’m not sure that private firms are much better. Especially if the work they are doing has been contracted out to them.
Just lie. Then you will see it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not sure how to recruit for managers in a huge corporation, I don’t think even huge corporations necessarily know.
One thing’s for sure: a big difference between some ICs and Managers, at least the managers you actually want to work for, is that those most non-manager ICs seem to be really fucking bought into some very reductive points of view.
Be honest and communicate a superior vision.
“My core team is always small but is capable of networking and scaling with other expert teams, in order to manage large projects”
Don’t hate the player, hate the game
Yes, the liars should consolidate with the idiots at the dysfunctional companies, and leave the rest of us alone. :)
Has any company ever tried having a bonus pool divided equally between all employees?
Ie 5% of gross revenue / employees. So every time you add someone you reduce the bonus unless that person adds more to gross revenue?
Did you ever do a school project where yourself and maybe one other person did all the work, and everyone else (2-3 folks) mostly just tagged along on the ride because they were assigned? Or maybe even made it worse?
And everyone got the same grade?
That happens in corp land all the time too, and it’s extremely demotivating.
Worked at a large global financial company 10 years ago in tech. It was well known that the bonus pool was finite per division, but it was also allocated on ratios based on performance reviews and retention. Everyone knew the more people, the smaller the pool -- but then again, tech was a "cost center" so it wasn't like adding technology people (with the exception of quants) earn the bank more money.
I suspect if you incentivized managers to keep their teams small, through a bonus pool, it would definitely result in smaller teams, but also with the danger of overworked ones. That seems self-fulfilling though, if you're overworked but you know there's a reward with it.
That all being said, most places don't have bonus pools so it's a mute point.
This is 100% the first question asked by any management interview.
Yeah, no. Well, perhaps if the role is just to manage it becomes somewhat relevant, but I have personally never experienced this in any interview (and have been in people manager roles for the past twenty years, at companies including F500 industrial, FAANG, and consulting).
I have had management roles and been interviewed for management roles many times.
There hasn't been single interview where "what is the largest headcount you've managed" wasn't conspicuously asked.
Does nobody get tired of managing a huge army? Or do they just all assume they can delegate it, like an HR pyramid scheme?
The big secret is managing a bunch of people is easier than doing grunt work
Depends on the company a bit. The older a company is, the more it accumulates the sorts of people who equate management with cracking a whip. This is the laziest form of management and also the least effective. It's incredibly common, though.
There are some really talented managers out there. The sort of folks you want to work for. You'll find more of these at younger companies.
But the harsh/unfortunate reality is corporate culture generously rewards managers in spite of their effectiveness (lack thereof).
Empire building is probably the single biggest drain on the global economy. The good news is it seems to be getting more attention and companies (Bayer, Meta for example) are taking action to combat it.
Lol… reminds me of a place I worked at where there were 2 developers on the project but 4 project managers. When the project was running late -> they hired 2 more managers!!
This is my current workplace. Projects have 1 developer and 2 project managers. The project managers are in meetings all day every day, doing what? And the developer is constantly being demanded to work impossibly tight deadlines, and deal with the project managers backtracking on the requirements. :/
This is the classic one guy digging the hole and ten observing him doing it.
I've had this discussion a few days ago and it's simply the problem of pay. As soon as you want to make more money you have 'to be in management and act like one' which is utter cow manure since adding managers is not going to make you any product and only delay it or make it worse but the end result is endless managers and not enough actual horses to carry the load.
Stuart describes one type of mentality. I’ve recently joined a small company as the senior person. My goal is to understand our deliverables, our timing, and can we do it?
In enterprise companies like the one I recently left, management is incentivized to kiss up try and do more with less, but wants more people to buttress their role as well as help determine the role above them. My prior boss in this same organization had multiple teams but rather than have the teams talk about their work insisted on being the one to present upward and rarely invited his teams to join.
I like your nuanced observation here. It reminds me of a quote I come back to often when I am seeing toxic behaviour in some organisations.
- Freedom from Command & Control, John Seddon
"Big enough to hunt woolly mammoth"
That will be my reply whenever the next person asks how big the team I used to run was.
My father used to tell me he preferred to ask 'what did you build' or 'what did your team accomplish' instead.
You do get those questions on occasion. But more in the Bay Area than where I live in Sweden.
This is the thesis of Bullshit Jobs!
Bullshit jobs infect the whole stack from the board of management down, but "middle-managers" are probably the most over-represented.
The same kind of perverse incentive exists in other forms in other places, like what drives complexity growth in engineering. With people it’s called empire building. With systems I’ve heard it called “resume oriented programming.”
“I built a massively complex system to manage our cloud deployment” looks superficially more impressive than “I eliminated the need for a complex deployment by rearchitecting a bit and consolidating systems, so then I only had to manage a few things.”
The first person will have more code they can cite and more expertise wrangling more systems. They’ll be able to talk about all the big sexy “hyperscale” stuff they have managed with lots of terabytes and Kubernetes and terraform and helm charts. Most people would probably hire this person.
I’d hire the second person.
It’s basically the midwit meme, which is so popular because it illustrates something real.
There seems to be a core conflict in society between systems as things we build to do things vs systems as ends in themselves. Morons just do things. Geniuses just do things. Midwits get mixed up into the process of doing things and forget the point.
That is more of a marketing issue, write something like, "Improved efficiency of deployment by x% by re-architecting systems x, y, and z which saved $xxM/year."
The counteracting force is to align business ownership with headcount
So if you handle $$$ worth of book, you get $$$ worth of headcount to keep that going
That's a great idea. Or just keep your people / sales < then your comps in your industry.
Coming at this problem from the manager / owner point of view: If your company is bootstrapped or hasn't raised a lot of money headcount can be a first guess at valuation. Or how seriously another partner in business takes you. Companies that balloon in size tend to be taken very seriously while small profitable ones get less attention. So the pressure can go both ways.
My wife observed that in large orgs, headcount is currency. People constantly looking to justify headcount so they can say they have a 10-person org, a 50-person org, a 100-person org. I've seen managers get buy-in to spin up a new department to build a tool they could buy off the shelf for the price of 2 or 3 people. I'm constantly reminded of Mitt Romney's old saw, "corporations are people". Just an admixture of irrational, vain, fallible people. The successful ones make fewer mistakes than the rest.
Wanting to grow isn’t a bad thing, the excess falls on the execs who approve the budgets. If your team has good economics then you should grow, if it doesn’t then the execs shouldn’t be funding it.
Lot of companies have terrible exec teams that are out of touch with the company
The other side of the point is that having manager with small team means those manager need managers, which means another layer. Big team manager means flatter hierarchy which may be desired by everyone.
But yeah following Goodhart's law it's bad if it makes managers hire new people instead of vanquishing other managers and taking other employees under their direct command.
Yes, this is frustrating when one cares about efficiency (I do). Whether number of people or amount of budget overall, you're seen as better the more you have.
When shopping for vendors to achieve something, my instinct is to try to find a way to do more with less. But I'm told that's dumb, I need to spend all the budget and ask for more, lest I be seen as a loser.
It also dovetails nicely with the old, "If you don't spend all your budget, you lose it next year" management strategy. I can't count the number of times over my career where I heard a boss say, "we need to spend the rest of this before end of year."
Well said. There's a Turkish proverb "You are a lord, I am a lord, then who's going to plow this land?"
The large corporations I've worked for also scored you on "leadership" at the end of the year. This score usually contributes to your bonus and annual pay raise. It is hard to get a high leadership score if you don't have some formal subordinates, so this is another reason people are always looking to get someone working under them, even if they aren't ready for it or maybe don't even need it.
FYI using the words “chief” and “tribe” to emphasize “primitiveness” is pretty cringe.
Here’s the real culprit that a CEO could do something about:
Of course there’s empire building because of prestige. And even more, the enthusiasm of people who joined your growth company to make an impact, who then see all the possibilities if they just hired a little.
Keeping all those bad and good instincts balanced with the actual company needs is the task of management.
It’s because companies are fat and happy and don’t have enough to do. There’s not alot of hunger for more comp or accomplishment because the org works and people are paid well.
Thats the same dynamic in civil service environments. Some people are motivated by dick measuring contests, and life will find a way to give those folks a metric. When I was a director at a large agency, one of my peers came into my office, proud as a peacock, to let me know that a re-org meant that he now had 113 employees. It smashed his soul when he realized I had more.
It’s all huff and puff.
Same with marketing and other budgets.
The question is always ‘what ad budget did you manage?’.
Not ‘what return on ad spend ratio did you achieve?’.