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Comment by edj | Hacker News Reader

I don't have much experience with managers because I freelance now and I've never worked at a company with more than about 80 or 100 people.

So this is a real question and not snark... Assuming large companies continue to exist, how do you run one without managers?

If your company is 1000 people do have 10 executives and 990 engineers, customer support, etc. and no managers at all? How does everyone communicate? How do the executives delegate?

Do you need some managers? How many per worker is optimal?

It seems like every large corporation in existence has managers. I can't think of any exceptions. So I'm not sure what an alternative would even look like. Perhaps rotating temporary management structured like jury duty?

I'll probably be downvoted because bashing management is a time honored hacker pastime... But I really am curious. Is it possible to do away with management? Is it desirable?

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Oh, you definitely need some managers. I'm not suggesting that we should do away with them completely :-)

In the past (i.e. prior to what we sometimes call "the information age") it was a perfectly reasonable thing to have a very tall pyramid shaped hierarchy within a company. This was because the people at the bottom of the hierarchy needed to be told what to do and how - i.e. the manager was the "expert" at some task.

Nowadays people at the bottom of the hierarchy (especially in technology) tend to know exactly how to do their jobs - in fact they know much more than their manager about their own specialty. This has led (in savvy organisations, at least) to much flatter hierarchies.

> Do you need some managers? How many per worker is optimal?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_of_control

"In the hierarchical business organization of some time in the past it was not uncommon to see average spans of 1 to 4 or even less. That is, one manager supervised four employees on average. In the 1980s corporate leaders flattened many organizational structures causing average spans to move closer to 1 to 10. That was made possible primarily by the development of inexpensive information technology. As information technology was developed capable of easing many middle manager tasks – tasks like collecting, manipulating and presenting operational information – upper managers found they could hire fewer middle managers to do more work managing more subordinates for less money."

Do you really think that managers 80 years ago knew more about task X than the people they managed who did task X every day? I think software/info people like to think our situation is different, but I don't suspect it was all that different in the past. What may be different is that today we have the ability to get a lot more information at our disposal about what's going on in a company than people did 100 years ago.

I think technology has allowed people at the bottom of the pyramid to "own" larger pieces of responsibility within a company, thus allowing them to operate much more independently.

In the past this really wasn't the case. An entire discipline called "Scientific Management" sprung up to explain why workers should be treated almost like animals by management:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management#Taylor.27...

I think this knowledge inversion where the "individual contributors" know more (about the job) than the manager is why many managers do not like agile methodologies like Scrum. Developers are "seizing the means of production". ;)

When developers can work directly with product owners and track their progress, the traditional manager loses. I'm not sure how a developer-driven team might handle HR issues though.

I'm not sure how a developer-driven team might handle HR issues though

There is a nuance here that is being missed, there is management and there is administration, management is authority and administration is coordination among contributors to keep the production line running. Many organizations mistake the two for the same roles as such they give to many administrators authority and make them managers. When many organizations could flatten their management hierarchy and create more administrative roles. HR is a good example of a business function that can be done via administration and not authority. The funny part is when you make people administrators they see themselves more like contributors and become less threatened by efficiency.

Thanks for the clarification. Is the administrator role you describe something like a program manager (PM) or scrum master?

Would you say a "tech lead" is a manager? They have (technical) authority of the product, but not necessarily hiring/firing of other people.

I generally consider leads and architects to be administrators same with project managers, if fact in a good deal of organizations that I have been a part of we did not call them project managers, we called them project coordinators or project liaison which better reflects the role.

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