Ask HN: Are Managers Necessary? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are Managers Necessary?

4 pointsbluebikethrow12 comments

I'm a tenured software eng who has worked in several startups since 2013. I've never accepted a managing position though have been asked.

Looking back on my career, I noticed that I tend to leave or avoid startups that have created a management layer between executive leadership and ICs.

I understand management is necessary (at a Peter Drucker-level understanding) for a growing business.

However from practical experience, it seems to me that when you start hiring managers is when you start introducing overhead, cruft, and the dead weight of bureaucracy to your organization.

As an eng, I can happily move from company to company lending my strengths as an IC in early stages, and jump ship when things get too formal.

But is there an argument for founders to consider that managers ultimately do more harm than good? The first counter that comes to mind is that you simply cannot scale without management. However, I'm curious to hear others thoughts on this and if they've witnessed alternative approaches that show promise.

Management is necessary and in my experience even in a so-called “flat” hierarchy an unofficial hierarchy of management inevitably arises.

There's a lower bound at which the cognitive load of the business exceeds the capacity of the individuals, and at that point, it's time to introduce managers to reduce a team's cognitive load, and to bubble up the important stuff to the executive level. As companies grow, you need more managers. Eventually, the cognitive load for the executive staff grows again, and you introduce the second layer of managers, usually Director-levels, that manage managers.

In a well-run organization, IMO, it's generally about the flow of information. A CTO of a 5 person startup might review every line of code, but a CTO at a 100 person startup wouldn't have time for that, but would still need to know about major bugs and all of the features that are shipping. A CTO at a 1000 person company doesn't even have time for that, but needs to know about how each team fits together into a larger pattern.

TL;DR: yes, as companies scale, introducing management reduces the cognitive load of teams and their higher-ups.

If you want to read more about this, there's an excellent website/book called Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais[1] that I think captures one way that teams can be organized and how it can help reduce that cognitive load I was talking about. If your company will let you expense it, it's well worth the read IMO.

[1] https://teamtopologies.com/

By far the best answer.

There are other aspects of the observed effect, too. A small startup where the CTO can review all the code is also a startup where the CTO can be involved in all hiring. It's also small enough to not be perceived as a lucrative target for lawsuits, so underperforming employees can be fired much more easily.

On a more macro level, most of the productivity of an organization comes from a minority of its members, and that majority of nonprductivity can really become appalling at large scale.

See https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers

Managers have a place, but business owners need to realise that they are an expensive and inefficient solution, and should only be deployed as a last resort.

Thank you for sharing

> I tend to leave or avoid startups that have created a management layer between executive leadership and ICs.

This is another way to say you leave if you're not trusted at the highest level. Your being behind someone else's management is just a way to keep you away from information and opportunities.

Like I mentioned before that statement, I've been asked. And I've denied it each time.

And I'll say further, it does not lessen the trust between myself and those at the 'highest level' - if anything, they've understood me and respected me for it.

... then why do you 'tend to leave'?

Because I like interesting problems. Sometimes that's programing. Sometimes that's being at the roundtable of decision-making for the business. But either of those things get boring and tedious when you reach a certain scale; when management starts to grow.

They are necessary for the company but not for the employees. The top bosses cannot (don’t want to) be behind every employee to check if they are as performant as they could be.

Do you have an email address or a contact method?

It can be a new email address.

If you have some unique insight in the matter it would be nice if the rest of us could hear it too. Isn't that the point of a discussion forum?

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