Sure, there are meta-conversations about process and compensation, and there are younger employees who may need more guidance, and there are intersections with product managers etc. But the ratio of managers to ICs is often higher than needed.

A good manager protects the team from political shit rolling down hill. They understand who is good at what and allows people to thrive in what they are good at. They keep the team focused, and reward and acknowledge teams for their milestones. They explain to the team why they are doing something and what they hope to achieve while asking the team for their thoughts and adjustments. They also go to bat for the team when it's time for praise, raises and recognition. They privately criticize and publicly praise. They know when a team member is a liability and act accordingly. Most today are just ladder climbers or people who have been Peter principled or nepotism-ed into their role.

I've been in the field for nearly 30 years now. Managers in the late 90s, early 00s were way better than the lot I've experienced since.

Here's a decent summary of how we got here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6gMf5zR2c4

I think career wise in 20 years I'd break down my experience as - 25% benign, 25% malign, 50% good.

This is across 6+ companies, 15-20 managers.

https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

The reality is that the Microsoft style of organization is very prominent in the industry.

I simply want to focus on working "in the ground" so management never really rung for me. My endgame goals focus on the opposite of managing a large beauracracy of tech workers on a massive project.

As for giving and getting shit, if you evenly distribute matches over a quadrant of good and bad dev-manager pairings, then 3 out of 4 matches are gonna have a bad time. And even in the top 25% where both devs and managers are good, you can still have a personality mismatch, or other troublesome contextual factors, like your boss's boss, the company's success, the head winds, etc. Work relationships can strengthen or crumble under strain. Of course, the best way to maximize your odds is to do your best to be a good person to work with, but the odds are simply not in your favor in the first place for either party.

Tbh I think this “we should have fewer managers” thing is just the current management fad. It’ll pass sooner or later.

That’s the point, surely

I had two good managers, the rest ranged from innocuous to malevolent. One manager even cursed me for refusing to approve an engineering deviation to allow a passenger plane to fly when the wing composite was delaminating. He said he went through the trouble of preparing the pseudo legal document and how dare I refuse to sign. I told him a) I was not the SME on wings as I was an engine guy b) if this was such a no brainer why didn’t he or the SME sign their approval. This was when I worked at a major airline and wasn’t the only egregious thing I had experienced. This incident was one of the reasons I switched to IT because in software it was unlikely you could be criminally held responsible for such irresponsible behavior.

Anyways. My guess is if I had signed off the pilot would not have accepted the plane during his preflight. Then an investigation would have started on who would have signed off on such a thing.

If you truly believe that, please do yourself a favor and read “The tyranny of structurelessness” to understand what a managerless place becomes. everyone and no one becomes a manager, and there’s no explicit avenue of recourse. There’s a good reason management arises. We can discuss good management vs bad management, but pretty fundamentally there’s no such thing as “no management”.

They aimed for minimizing managerial positions to an extreme. The result was that a lot of ICs were playing hardball politics with nobody to keep them in check.

Really opened my eyes to the reality of office politics.

Especially at big companies, which kinda resemble small countries. You get "who likes whom", supervisors' pets, weird alliances, power struggles, backstabbing and other toxic stuff.

What management (at any level) is at fault of is failing to actively weed out these behaviours or indeed straight up doing the same thing.

Also, companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture even if the overall quality suffers. This in turn motivates people to seek other means of being recognized, including workplace politics.

I've seen all of it while being a manager. I hated it with a passion, and fell a victim of it quite a few times myself.

And I agree that people playing workplace politics should either change their behaviour or be let go.

Management is a tool used by people with their own motivations to acheive their goals. But a lack of management lets those same people acheive those same goals in different ways. Whether that's starting up duplicate projects and products, causing chaos and confusion by inserting themselves into topics that don't concern them, or simply picking fights. The same people get along in any organisation, the tool of management is just the easiest to spot from below.

Which managers? The CEO, CxOs, and VPs are the place to start.

If you want to change the culture of a place - business, family, community - start by changing yourself.

You can say that but it only really works if you give agency to your employees. That doesn’t seem to align with Amazons policy’s lately like RTO5.

How do you micromanage employees without managers? And note if your answer is “don’t”, I don’t think that’s an option as the drive for shit like that appears to be coming from the top, not middle managers misinterpreting orders

Note the "politics" do not necessarily come from any malicious intention. It's just part of the company dynamics. As more layers are added to a company, visibility decreases. As a result, people have to be more political savvy to defend their misses and get resources, which leads to more politics.

They're workers, and Deming also said: Don't blame the workers.

It's not a mystery why - the providers of capital want complete control of the business decisions. But let's at least not be surprised when, like all dictatorships, the organization inevitably implodes.

The problem in companies like this is there are often few incentives for reducing complexity, even in a company like Amazon that claims to value eliminating it.

How do you tell the difference?

How do you propose measuring good versus bad management?

Even with with a manager, if the manager isn't doing much managing then the flies will start buzzing.

Yes some are bad at it. It's why I got into management, so I could replace those bad managers. And so far, for the most part, my employees love me.

Their manager is now a business stakeholder, that is even worse...

2. Someone at Morgan Stanley assumes that lay offs will be the mechanism used to reach the target ratio and does some math that says this'll save $XX billion, based on the number of employees at Amazon and the average manager salary.

3. Business Insider reports on the Morgan Stanley memo.

4. This trash article re-reports on it for some reason.

In reality, teams were re-org'd, managers became ICs. Maybe some were PIP'd. No large layoffs though.

A 14,000 employee cut is less than one percent.

Of course I know there are a lot of warehouse and delivery employees but they have managers, too.

You plugged your Nintendo into a TV using jacks designed by the same company that told your parents which stocks to buy and sell.

Gets even weirder when you get into acquisitions, where Ben and Jerry's ice cream is owned by the same Unilever that is famous for its soap.

For example, Discover spun out from Sears attempts at having an in house credit card. Ally started as a financing division of GM. In both cases, you'd think similarly how it's weird one company runs both a bank and builds cars or sells houses.

It doesn't seem that different, in that Amazon started AWS to support its primary business, then realized they could sell it to others.

Or are you saying you just need to find the good managers? I might have misunderstood.

I'm honestly interested in alternatives.

jokes apart, long ago when I was there, once somebody did the internal org site scraping and found out in our org there were almost 6 workers (status givers) to 1 status takers. and sr. engineers are supposed to 'manage themselves', so really full of political BSers.

edit: I'll say, I've only ever left a job because of a manager. Shortly before leaving my current job, due to a crap manager, the previous manager was fired. The entire org benefited.

I think it would be more useful to split the company down that line, in which case Amazon probably have ~300k(?) on the office side, and this represents more like a 4-5% layoff, a level at which people will really notice it.

Are there alternatives? I ask this as someone who spends a lot of time doing just this. Your addition of the word "human" gave me hope there is a better/alternative system?

The engineers working on complex technology systems are doing a lot of the same kind of things. Technology is disturbingly similar to bureaucracy.

Consider the many HN threads to the effect of "<Service> just deleted my account for no reason and there's no escalation process or human to contact." Now imagine of Social Security ran that way. Health care does, to some extent.

You need a good culture with proper incentives to be rewarded as a good manager. But that's not really the world most live in these days. Instead, the good get exploited by the bad and either leave to protect themselves or cause discourse as they try to do their job and inevitably be overthrown by those above.

Then again, this is HN, where they say the "average" tech worker in the world makes $400K and drives a Ferrari.

The reasons are as usual. Anticipating economic headwinds and how to make number go up despite that,s174 (sp?) changing how you amortize R&D, early attempts to incorporate AI into workflows, etc. Companies at the moment are not at all concerned with lean development nor streamlining workflows.