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Comment by zwieback | Hacker News Reader

My experience as well, although my large org sometimes seems to move to slowly it's loads better than the startups I've been at.

One thing I'm realizing is really useful, and which we're doing more and more, is putting "program managers" in charge of projects, totally separate from "project managers", which really should be called "people managers". With that split we can have a senior engineer who is interested in management work across multiple teams without worrying about the day to day personnel issues. This only works if everyone supports this approach but here it's working well.

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This sounds like terminology issues. Classically a project manager manages a project (a think with a start and an end, reasonably well defined) and a programme manager manages a set of related projects. People managers depending on intention sound like either engineering team leads, engineering heads of, or line managers.

One crucial difference is around authority. Traditional project managers can generally exercise authority over the people doing the work to get what they want.

With a program manager/people manager split, it might be the case that the person leading the project has to truly lead, because the actual authority sits with the people manager. May or may not be a better structure.

I don't find that to much of an issue - in fact its alot easier. having a conversation with someone about whether this is the best project in the company for them to be working on rather than whether they should be there at all.

maybe the first conversation leads to the second, but its not me :)

> Traditional project managers can generally exercise authority over the people doing the work to get what they want

I don't think this is that different; people have more static line managers, and are assigned to projects, which project managers then govern.

This sounds a lot like the matrix team structure. Can program managers assign work to engineers? And if so, how do you deal with project and program managers giving conflicting tasks?

Yes, the program managers can assign work and they tend to work closely with the involved people managers to balance workload.

I hate matrix management so much.

It's gimmicky and a pain in the arse. I know management does do a job, but it's hard to justify needing two instead of one.

My view I that matrix style management is a solution to a communication problem you haven't figured out.

Instead of fixing the communication throughput problem, your adding more bandwidth and scaling out the number of nodes in hopes it magically fixes the problem.

And it sort of does fix the communication problems, that's why people like it. The trade off is that as an IC its arese to have to jerk two cocks at the same time.

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