Exactly my sentiment.
From my experience managing managers in big corporations, a lot of the bullshit is created by people who want their own way after a decision has been made. They tend to be the reason meetings are called in the first place, since someone has to make the effort to get everyone moving in the same direction. They are also the most likely to walk around calling bullshit on everything that's happening in the place.
There's no need to denigrate the work of the people who spend more of their time than they'd like in meetings trying to get a big company of individuals to cooperate on goals that are set by executives.
As an aside, there are people who enjoy the kind of work that doesn't necessarily provide instant feedback. Teachers come to mind. Sure, there are little victories and defeats every day, but at the end of the year, there are times when they sigh and wonder what good it did. Try going to a good teacher's retirement party or funeral sometime and mingle with those who come to pay their respects. You'll often hear things like, "He changed my life" or "I'd probably be in prison now if she hadn't been so patient with me." Similarly, the people who make big organizations actually work have an impact on many lives and on the direction of companies, the effects of which are not always visible for years or decades.
The whole flat org with minimal managers "ideal" has been tried lots of places and always failed. I think even Google tried it at some point. Let me tell you a few things that happen when your org gets flatter:
1. Decisions get bottlenecked
Typically, the "flat org" thing gets tried without empowering the rank-and-file to make big decisions. So decisions that would normally get resolved one or two levels up the chain all get bottlenecked at the GM or CEO, who (now having 100 reports) does not have the knowledge or context to always make the right call.
2. Extreme micromanagement
A counter to #1 is if those decisions actually DON'T get bottlenecked: If you think it sucks to have your manager nit-picking over every little engineering decision you make, imagine how bad it is having the CEO do it, and feel he has to because he has no other managers to make those decisions. Let me tell you from experience: It sucks.
3. You get less time with your boss
When your boss has 4-5 direct reports, they can spend time with you weekly to chat about current challenges, help you with career development, give you pointers on things, etc. When he/she has 20-30 directs, good luck getting any airtime at all.
4. Shit rains down on you
A great manager shields his reports from 95% of the shit that gets rained down on him by the higher-ups. Uninformed complaints, decision churn and flip-flopping, "strategic enterprise synergy workshops", requests for perpetual motion machines and features that defy mathematics: If your boss is good, he doesn't let any of this crap get down to you. Without management, you as 3rd engineer from the left on WhatsitApp Project, get a firehouse of this in your face every day.
5. No career advancement
Granted, this is not important to everyone, but if your boss is the CEO or if his/her boss is the CEO, you're unlikely to get promoted at all during your tenure at that company, or you're going to have to wait for one of them to quit. Whereas if you're manager #6 down, there will be plenty of opportunities to find a #5 level manager position to move up to at some point.
You could argue that the reason Uber etc. have found success recruiting workers for pretty shitty wages is because people are willing to give up that much money to not have to deal with a boss.
This trend also has a long way to go: for one, wearables will open up electronic coordination to people whose jobs normally require having their hands full, and two, improved AI will allow the automation of increasingly complex managerial tasks.
I really really hate having weekly meetings with my manager (or any other manager that I had) I don't see a point, it is stressful and takes me away from my job.
More over I don't know any other developer that likes those 1 on 1 meetings with their manager.
I would love a manager that doesn't have time for them, if I would want something from him I would go to his desk and say to him, why meet?
And don't get me even started on the career development, the biggest bull*t is the whole carreer development process and how I have to write what I will do this year, what I did etc.
Are you by any chance a manager, because you sound like one :)
I've come to appreciate how little I know about management over the past few years. I stayed friends with an IT Director who led my department around 1996. He used to say, "If you want to be successful as a manager, you have to remember that your main job is managing personalities everything else falls in place if you do that right." Having run a very small organization for the past couple of years, his message was on target.
My experience with teachers is that the really good ones tend to know. Students come back to say so if a teacher really helped them. My daughter's teacher has former students coming back all the time. My father's former students came back to say thanks. My brother-in-law's students come back. So, it's not quite the tragic, post-mortem recognition that Van Gogh received.
Why else would they exist?
No, but it is bullshit to conflate Dilbert-like management culture for "human nature".
As if its inevitable that the "management of human nature" should necessarily take the form the author argued against.
I've had project management roles before, but the meetings were minimal and I still got to code at least 40% of the time.
- Long meetings with directors and project managers who never read any previous reports so you spend hours explaining the same thing again and again.
- Demanding precise estimates while requirements are nebulous
- There is always one more manager who pops up from nowhere who derails a finally reached agreement with bringing up another nonsense issue
- There are plenty of managers who come into a meeting who monopolize the first half hour asking questions that have been asked and answered a long time ago. Then they monopolize the second half explaining the stuff they learned in the first half with an authoritative voice. They forget everything soon and three weeks later it's the same.
- Creating more teams to make "quick decisions" consisting of insiders who spend weeks deciding how often and when they should meet.
- Some VP inserts another angle into the project that gets refuted several times but somehow keeps coming back.
It's insane. The only explanation I have is that some people are just social and political animals that enjoy talking for hours and getting nothing done. They view work's purpose as having meetings, talking about things and looking good in front of their own manager.
Relationships, interesting purposeful work, and travel has been what I have found to be the most rewarding. Basically experiences over things.
I have not been able to find meaningful/purposeful work in any organization. The life lessons I've learned can basically be summarized as: there is no such thing as purposeful work for which you are paid a wage, and businesses rarely extract meaningful labor out of you. Businesses are rarely punished for being unproductive, and most effort within any organization is spent intensely focused on politics, both internal and external, to ensure the business can create Dutch books and survive any possible outcome without needing to actually be productive.
The closer you get to pure knowledge work, the worse all of these effects become. In my field, machine learning and statistics, it is about as bad as it can possibly be. Because policy is ostensibly supposed to be based on evidence and sound, statistical reasoning, and it's very fashionable right now to try to characterize all aspects of business planning as if they are "data driven", all that it means is that the corporate politicians now hawkishly focus on statistics/machine learning and "science" as the means by which they control politics.
It unequivocally does not mean that businesses are actually shifting to truly be more scientific in their decision making, nor are they less wasteful, less driven by prestige or politics, less hyper-focused on short-term thinking, etc. If anything, firms are worse on all of these dimensions, and waste vast sums of money setting up big data infrastructure than truly does nothing but give glossy data visualization facades that decisions are somehow being made based on hard data.
What it has taught me is somewhat of the inverse of what you say.
I agree that pursuit of material wealth and power is uninteresting and highly unfulfilling. The problem is that pursuit of meaningful work turns out to be even more uninteresting and even more unfulfilling and you simply end up poorer and sounding like a burnt out crank.
You are probably better off (if you can; I unfortunately cannot) sublimating away any desire for creative, autonomous, meaningful, purposeful, or interesting work -- simply delete that from your genome with hardcore unhealthy repression. Then try to amass enough wealth doing horrible, horrible politics as you can to retire early, start your own small business, or something else where you are personally in charge of what you do and where you don't have a need for anyone else to pay you for your labor output.
The one part I will agree with you on is to definitely value relationships. Whether you are burning yourself out chasing the carrot of so-called meaningful work, or you are killing yourself slowly playing political games to get promotions and money, do not allow either toxin to infiltrate your personal life, and really try to slow your brain down and savor the moments you have with family, friends, and loved ones.
I think business == brainfucked by politics. That is literally what you are compensated for. For some, it's a trade-off they are happy to make, and can be very lucrative. But you can't kid yourself that there is any possible way to pursue success in the business world, whether on your own by starting a company or by working up the ranks elsewhere, that does not ultimately bottom out at being paid solely for your ability to endure being brainfucked by politics.
And how big does your fuck you fund and/or financial stability in general have to be to be able to say No to uninteresting unpurposeful work?
And how much do you need to both pay for travel and to be able to afford the time to travel?
Wealth accumulation is freedom accumulation. You need the freedom to lead a purposeful rewarding life. You can't do that, if your days are consumed by struggling to make ends meet.
A lot of modern inspiremotivationstuff neglects that part.
Would your thirties be as fulfilling as they are if you hadn't spent your twenties in pursuit of wealth? I'd guess not.
Paycheck to Paycheck - getting fired mean, being unable to pay for housing & food.
3 months savings - bills can be paid at once, a lay off puts pressure on one to really jump on the job search.
1 years savings - termination doesn't scare one, but thinking about taking a 1 year sabbatical, while nice, also means that torwards the end of the sabbatical, one must hope /plan apply for jobs after some period of 6-11 months or so. Strict budgeting is paramount.
5 years savings - termination and paying bills has no day-to-day thoughts. One can ponder of maybe dumping that savings into a startup, but if the startup doesn't pan out, one may be in one of the aforementioned states.
10 years savings - one can consider never working again if they reduce their draw down rate to last indefinitely.
20+ years savings - One could try a startup, lose 10 years of savings, and really not worry about anything.
I think people wouldn't necessarily have a problem working indefinitely, if they could participate in a lifestyle business where hours are flexible, workdays are shorter, weekends are longer, commutes are minimized or optional, vacations are plentiful and the pay is above average. For a lot of programmers at large institutions, this is pretty possible if one can find the right boss and company with policies that allow for this. how long these kinds of cushy positions will last is the question.
As someone a hair's breath away from 40 I can tell you it is if you don't have it. I see my body starting to creak and groan, witness Silicon Valley's blatant ageism, take an honest look at my ability to continue to earn into my 60s, take a frightened peek at my wholly inadequate retirement account, and find myself wishing I did more of that "pursuit of wealth" and less "travel and purpose" earlier on in my life.
I'll be happy to do "enlightenment and purpose" when I'm confident that I won't have to choose between dog food and back medicine when I inevitably get old.
I lived on the east coast for years, and I'd happily move back in a heartbeat, but I'd be a nervous wreck every time it looked like another downturn was coming and I might have to scramble to find another job.
The places that scare me are places like Chicago & Atlanta. Outside of Chicago, there's virtually nothing. Outside of Atlanta, it's the same, which usually means moving across the country for something.
You can easily live in SV for under $100k/year. You can earn >$200k as an engineer in SV (and in few other places). SV is almost certainly going to leave you with more money in your pocket than working at the average tech job.
I am a fairly mediocre engineer. I have less than a decade of experience and have never worked at a "top" company. Yet I earned over $200k last year.
You can downplay your expertise, but from reading the About of morgante.net you have plenty of accolades, programming contributions, winning the 2013 ArabNet developer tournament and receiving awards from MIT, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, starting various companies, and even an investment fund. You are very much in a top minority percentage making $200,000 a year with under ten years experience.
I'm not sure how attainable $200k is, but $105k for a mid-career adult is quite low. Perhaps that is the case at actual startups, definitely not the big ones or unicorns.
$111,885 average [1]
$110,554 average [2]
$103,000 average [3]
I know this is HN, where everyone makes $150K and has $1M in savings and a supermodel girlfriend, but in the real world I think things are a little different.
1: http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-facebook-dont-pay-the-...
2: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...
3: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/Sa...
I make a good living for my area but have nowhere near $1.3MM liquid or even my entire net worth. Getting and extra $500k would not give me any peace of mind or security that I don't already have.