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Comment by talkingtab | Hacker News Reader

The power of language to lead us down stupid roads is amazing.

"It's the job of a manager to know what their reports are up to ...".

The conceptual framework that is required to read and write this sentence is slave labor. Not collaboration. Inherent in this sentence is the same lack of understanding of how people work that turned the US from being the world's biggest producer of cars to not. The Soviet Union crashed and burned because of this prisoner-guard model of interaction.

Collaboration requires trust and common cause. Prisoner-guard embodies neither of these components.

The need for collaboration is a function of complexity and uncertainty. Or upended, you can only "manage" people for tasks that are certain, known and simple. Which in turn means you can't adapt.

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She put it a little strongly (it isn't the only job of a manager) but I don't think it implies everything you're saying.

In a perfectly collaborative team (which can happen in small companies where the goal is very unambiguous), it's still one of the jobs of a manager to know what everyone is doing. Not in an "I suspect you of slacking off" way, but an "I'm making sure we're all coordinated" way.

Do you think a manager shouldn't be aware of what people are doing?

The best manager I ever had was someone I had no respect for at first. He was not a tech wizard and at times I suspected he was clueless. (He was not, just focused on his role.

He thought his job was to ensure that his reports knew what OTHER people in the group were doing. And that we, as a group, knew where we were going. The group was astonishingly successful, because WE got things done. Over a period of years.

The silly company hired some very techy guy who decided to do a rewrite with plugins. Wowy Zowy Tech! Over two years that group became larger and larger and never, ever, ever shipped a product. Hmmmm. Then they went under.

It is the WE that is important. This was not an attack on rbb, although I understand how it read like one, and I am sorry for that.

It was however an attempt to point out that even if you drop the only there is no WE in that concept of how people work. Certainly no one argues for a manager not to be aware, but the crucial element is for team members to be aware.

Companies are information processing machines and managers are the data busses that the sub modules communicate through.

Their job is to make sure that the right people know the right things at the right times. Their job isn't to just know what their team is doing, that's a valueless activity on its own.

That is to say, managers need to know things about what's happening all over the place. Their own reports are probably the absolute easiest thing for them to monitor so this focus on it is kind of strange.

> The power of language to lead us down stupid roads is amazing.

You're taking one part of what the author said and extrapolating it many times further than its original meaning (comparing it to the Soviet Union, really?), ironic.

I did not mean this as a criticism of the author. I understand it reads that way, and apologize. It is an attempt to question the base assumptions inherent in the analysis. As I put in another comment, and as someone else stated, the job of a manager is:

* ensure members of the group know what each other are doing. * ensure members of the team know where the team is going * act as direct report in another team that has another manager that does the same.

Any non-trivial software project will require parallel development. The biggest risk to any non-trivial software project is that when the pieces from parallel development are put together, they will not fit or inter-operate. In my experience.

> collaboration requires trust and common cause

Much more fundamentally collaboration requires communication. In a hierarchy, a manager is a fan-in/out point. It is essential that a manager knows what their team members are doing to effectively perform their role.

Trust and common cause are also essential for effective collaboration. However, I’d argue that regardless of whether these are present or not, the statement in question has to be true.

I had managers in the past who did not know or care what I was doing. They got nothing done. They didn’t know the product. I remember distinctly that one of my colleagues got mad because our manager proposed a feature that he had implemented a year before and was quite a lot of work. On the other hand, this was the coziest job I ever had. Most of us worked about 1-2 houres a day. For me that was fine, but others really struggled with it.

I wonder whether successful Chinese car companies are currently thriving thanks to their implementation of a collaborative trust and common cause culture?

Or maybe there’s a little more to it…?

There’s this theory that systems often thrive at the expense of its individual parts… I guess this is one of such examples.

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