Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

I am sure this is going to sound silly, but I honestly still have trouble figuring out what value is contributed by managers and executives at all.

I can't get past the gut feeling that essentially the model hasn't changed for thousands of years: wealthy owner, boss with whip, wage slaves being watched over.

I mean I imagine a group of people who are actually competent and intelligent working together. Some people would have more seniority and power, but everyone is actually a useful worker there involved in the day-to-day work.

I feel like most managers I have had have spent the majority of their efforts trying to pretend that problems don't exist and reduce the amount of actual useful engineering work in order to push _anything_ out faster and cheaper. Or just basically telling people to hurry up.

That's why I think we had the Boeing crapshow. The guy at the top was actually good at doing what management actually is for most companies, like I described above. He avoided doing real engineering and got a product out. And then hundreds of people died. And still they tried to blame the engineers.

It actually comes down to a class struggle for me. Parasites without integrity have managed to work their way to the top while feeding off of the honest workers below.

Sorry I know it's kind of extreme but I am just being honest.

You need management because:

- you need project management. It is an administrative work.

- you need people management. You can leave that to HR, they will do a very poor job, so it's better to have a person from the team fill that role, the more senior and experienced the better. This is admin work

- you need to simplify large organizations into smaller, manageable teams that can focus on items they can swallow. You need team leaders (for the 2 reasons above) and good communicators to keep the team in sync with the rest of the company

- when you have many teams you need "teams of teams", that is one or more management levels.

In any army you don't have management, you have a chain of command. You have generals with a strategy and a vision, you have officers that lead portions of the army, you have NCOs that lead small teams and you have specialists or riflemen that do the grunt work. They all have a role and in most cases you find the higher the rank, the higher the competence, otherwise nobody would follow in battle an incompetent officer (or even shoot him in the back, it's easier in a battle than getting rid of a bad manager in the office).

This hierarchical organization came from real needs and stays there because the need is still there. You can argue some hierarchies gets corrupted, in theory all do, but a hierarchy is generally better than no hierarchy whenever the group is large enough.

Tangential on hierarchies and meshworks by Manuel De Landa: http://netbase.org/delanda/meshwork.htm "To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for."

[Assuming good faith despite some inflammatory language.]

In smaller teams everyone talking to each other and building a shared vision can be quite sufficient. It's indeed common to have startups that have very flat organisation, they might have a designated CEO that's in no actual way above the others. They can be plenty capable of producing amazing results despite the small team size.

However such a small group can't handle larger challenges, like designing and building a commercial jet, they will need many more workers. 1000 workers can't just come together and agree on a shared vision, even ignoring the square law of communication paths just giving each person 10 minutes to present their view would take weeks. Hence, in the very least we will need some communication hierarchy to allow workers to do their job while still synchronising with relevant other teams.

However, just communication is not sufficient, coordination is also important, if the jet is going to have the appropriate range, fuel tanks, engine efficiency and packing density needs to be designed to provide that range. Again, this would take quite some time if everyone should be involved in the process.

This is mostly in the leadership side of course, but covers those who are attentive to the trade off between security and deadlines. It's not reasonable for the individual engineer to be solely responsible to make that tradeoff. In particular, a sloppy engineer might think security is not important at all, and another engineer might think that no risk at all is acceptable to the point where nothing can ever be produced to achieve their standards. It's leaderships role to make sure that standards are aligned between engineers so we don't get a ten year delayed jet with some key parts made out of brittle plastic.

Now, managers can also have a people management role, and tom me those are the ones responsible to keep me as a worker happy and productive. They are also there to detect when some area is understaffed and find solutions to such issues, eg. talking with other teams for assistance, recruiting, decreasing scope, etc. If they weren't there, this job would fall on each individual worker, who would have to go out hunting for support instead of focusing on their actual tasks at hand.

I did not say it had to be flat. I said the people making decisions with power should be involved in doing real work solving problems (such as engineering).

What the Boeing leadership did (not an engineer) was actually to insist that the engineers NOT engineer a new aircraft meeting the new requirements but instead to kludge together something with the minimum changes based on the outdated design so that they could save money and avoid thorough testing.

The reason I use strong language is because the extreme failures of leadership dictate a realistic and honest and strong reassesment. The part that was inflammatory was when those outdated aircraft with oversized engines crashed into the ground and killed hundreds of people.

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