Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

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> At Monzo, we experimented with some pretty wacky management structures at times. There was a period when our middle managers were basically just responsible for “pastoral care” of each employee. They were not connected at all with the output that the ICs were producing. It was totally insane and overlapped with our period of lowest productivity by far.

Funny - I took a manager role where the company was trying this approach. I was the manager, but I wasn’t empowered to manage the team or their work. They had a lot of feel-good ideas about empowering employees and reducing the role of managers.

It had the same result. Lowest productivity period of my career, for the entire company. It turns out there is some value to traditional management structures when implemented properly. Nearly all of the companies that experiment with weird management structure ideas seem to discover this eventually, and either revert to traditional management structures or they get built up in the shadows via social standing within the company.

> Lowest productivity period of my career, for the entire company

"Productivity" is a nebulous concept in knowledge work. So unless you're referring to a factory with a very concrete, measurable output, this isn't particularly meaningful term.

How was the quality and employee satisfaction (as shown by solicited feedback or subjective anecdotes, plus attrition/turnover, etc.)?

It was low productivity as in we didn’t really accomplish anything. Teams couldn’t figure out what to build because it was forbidden for managers to direct them.

Happiness was down too because everyone just wanted to work, but we had these obscure rules about who could decide what was worked on (not managers) that turned into roadblocks to getting anything done across teams.

This wasn’t a case where “productivity” was an abstract metric that wasn’t measuring the right thing. It was just gridlock where nothing was getting done because nobody was allowed to be empowered to direct things.

Oof, certainly sounds like a miserable train wreck.

These are the sort of ideas that, at best, seem like they should be explored with an isolated R&D approach, or simply left to academics.

And, if they are executed realtime with a companies mainline workforce and somehow succeed, it should be clearly stated and understood that it was—like much "success"—by no small amount of sheer luck (or happenstance via uncontrolled factors, if you prefer), force of will, and patience by the team as a whole, rather than the usual narrative which is the inspired actions of single prescient individual (who will then go on to write a book and give TED Talks about an approach that absolutely cannot be applied anywhere else and does not scale.)

It can be hard or impossible to measure certain things, and just as hard to pick the right measures. But, there are also cases where you can say all reasonable measures are worse in one instance than another. Less new ideas, less happiness, less stuff going out the door, less bug fixes. Especially possible when it’s a time window comparison. This sounds like one of those cases.

I got, what feels like, the most productive month of the year behind me, because I thought that the data nerd top executives flagged me because my GitHub stats were down and they keep an eye on me. It turns out I took something as a hint from my engineering manager that wasn’t directed towards me, and my stats were fine.

In the end they got increased productivity out of me because I thought I was flagged in some faceless soulless nonsensical “insights” dashboard.

And by productive I mean that I feel like I made more impactful changes than usually, so I’m not referring to GitHub stats with fake cheat PRs and changes.

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