Comment by siren2026
2 months ago
>> Since the Industrial Revolution, managers typically oversaw work but did not do the labor. You could ask some managers what they do all day, but once you get some management experience, you will start to understand what managers do all day and how there’s enough to do that getting technical work done is relatively difficult, and might compromise their ability to manage well.
Oh believe me. I have managed a lot over my career. Sometime as a TLM and a couple times as a full time manager. I was still as technical and did as much as most people on my team though, which is against what most bigTech companies would consider acceptable for a manager.
All my opinions come from everything I saw and lived during my time as a manager.
I will repeat it again: I'm sure you are not slacking as a manager, most managers I worked with did not slack either. It is simply an artificial function with self-fulfilled busywork. The reason it still exists today is that the managerial class holds the power in most companies and self-hire each other as a way to keep themselves relevant.
A ton has been written about this, so I will put some links:
"Yet for all its dysfunction, the professional-managerial system proved remarkably durable. It persisted because it solved a different problem than organizational effectiveness: it provided a way to allocate status and opportunity that appeared meritocratic while actually favoring those who could navigate institutional prestige hierarchies."
https://eyeofthesquid.com/the-last-days-of-the-managerial-cl...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...
> I have managed a lot over my career
Ah, I do sincerely apologize for making assumptions!
Discussions of history aside - I don’t think your opinion of management, as summarized as an “artificial function with self-fulfilled busywork” is entirely wrong so much as perhaps jaded, pessimistic, or a bit biased. There is a seed of truth there, and you’re right that this has been written about before, and it’s not a new opinion. But it’s also negative and incomplete, it intentionally ignores evidence, and it lacks explanatory power.
If management is useless and self-fulfilling and absorbing money, then why in a competitive capitalist environment can you not find large companies anywhere in the world without it? Or in any economic system that exists, for that matter? Surely if true, then someone else with your opinion can start a company and it would be wildly successful compared to the economic drag of the artificial and self-fulfilling professional managerial class. Why haven’t you started such a company? Why hasn’t anyone else? This is an important question to answer if you want to insist that management doesn’t serve a necessary and functional purpose; “remarkably durable” is a funny expression to use for something that has always existed, by design, from the start, and for which there are practically no counter-examples.
There are a very small handful of companies that claim little to no management roles, except that they still talk about managing and self-organizing and letting people define their roles, so managers emerge. They might claim no management and then still let the good talkers do the prioritizing and organizing and reporting and delegating, just like everywhere else. It might be the same as advertising unlimited vacation; the label sounds amazing while the reality is no different. It looks like the majority of such companies are software companies and have less than 1k employees (which suggests tech companies may be pushing more on reducing management than other sectors). When I searched, Gore came up as one example of a company with more than 10k employees that doesn’t use traditional management, and yet when I go look at their job postings, the very first page has roles like “president” and “manager” and “team leader”.
I’m not making any claims about “most”. TBH, I would actually agree with you, I assume. Most management is pretty bad, and many people are self-serving. Same goes for programmers, let’s not forget; many programmers are just as lazy and self-serving as the bad managers you’ve seen. Sturgeon’s Law is alive and well.
The PMC article kinda nails it - the term and the idea is a spin on Marx, and Marx wasn’t complaining that management is useless, he was just complaining that management kept all the ownership & profits.