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Comment by nspassov | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for sharing your perspective. I find some contradiction in your sentences and this question comes up:

As a manager, can you have both a team full of stars _and_ maintain a hierarchy? If yes, how?

The definition of star is also a bit vague: a person with lots of knowledge and experience can stand out as a star, but in my experience a junior person with less experience having the right way of thinking can also be a star.

Hierarchy means having only a few people steering the vessel, the rest need to align with the leadership, or there is no team. What does it mean to be a star in a hierarchy with the top-down approach?

Still, even in a team full of stars they all need to align among one other, or it's not possible to achieve a common goal. Stars are opinionated because they have knowledge, but that usually comes with an ego, so they need to work around that.

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Eh, in my mind the value of professional managers is to provide a bullshit buffer between the stars. Managing is not as much about steering the vessel as choosing when and where to set your sail before the wind. Individual contributors are the profit centers of any organization. They create the actual product that the customers purchase. While the concept of everyone growing as a person is in vogue right now, that is not the purpose of a company. It is expensive to get the individual contributor to work around their ego, so we use professionals to provide the same result and timeshare them over many employees to lower the unit costs. A manager's primary reason for existence is to remove obstacles from the individual contributors in whatever shape or form that may be. If the manager needs to handle all communication between two prima donna developers, then that is removing an obstacle to generating value for the customer. A manager is like an personal assistant and a parent rolled into one. The manager keeps stars focus on efforts that directly benefit the customer rather than letting them wander off into intellectual rabbit holes of turing tarpits, while also making sure that there is paper in the printer, and pens on the desk. There is a lot more complexity that I am glossing over, but really great managers are the ones that ask the question, "what is preventing my guys from delivering value to the customer?" and then directly and systematically addressing the answers to that question. The really good ones have solved all the big problems and are then worried about the little things like having pens.

Additionally, there is really no need to use force of will to bind together a group of people behind a common vision with the current population and ease of communication offered by the internet. Either everyone is already capable of contributing value to the organization, or they are fired. There are 7 billion people alive now and that number is growing. If you cannot find hordes of people willing to work on challenges in your sector, what does that tell you about the demand for that product?

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