The Default American Workplace is Fundamentally Flawed

"1) Communication breakdown. Multiple offices in multiple locations and no one knows what other people are working on, how much progress they have made and how what they are doing fits into the overall scheme of company goals.

2) Productivity vs. time spent in office. The office can be a wasteland for productivity and time spent in an office building does not directly correlate to more productive progress.

3) Creativity is implicitly discouraged. Creative talent is vastly undervalued, misunderstood and malnourished. The default American workplace murders creativity.

4) Inefficient management. Inter-office politics and personal agendas often influence executive decision making more than shared company goals. "

These are all signs that you need better Middle Management, not less of it, and not sex with it.

Poor choice of title considering the article you linked to doesn't contain anything resembling your words "Fck Middle Management. The article only states that management can 'often' (not always) be inefficient. Additionally; this is not really a guide to a better work life either. Did you link to the wrong blogpost?

Absolutes; like implying that all middle-management is bad, are generally incorrect. Things are never black or white. So when you paint an extreme, you are almost always guaranteed to be wrong. In this case; middle-management can be cumbersome or bureaucratic, but very often also can be helpful, important and necessary. I hope you aren't arguing that all middle-management worldwide is useless; because that would just be silly.

I'm making the effort to comment on this; because I'm increasingly noticing that contributors to Hacker News impose their own beliefs upon a link they submit. By making a title more sensational, you are also making it less nuanced. This doesn't do justice to the writer you promote, and is unfair to the readers at Hacker News.

Edit: rephrased. Edit 2: If you are the writer; disregard the last paragraph ;-)

The post is vague, but it sounds like you're trying to make an app that turns everyone in a large organization into good managers. I understand how you might try to organize the information, but how are you going to ensure that the inputs are high quality? Management is really hard because it is about making difficult trade-offs with uncertain information, all while dealing with human beings who are not deterministic information processors.

A lot of management issues are not problems of technology, they are problems where the best solution is still a suboptimal solution for many of the people involved. The reason every company goal doesn't have a specific task associated with it is because goals are inherently high level and static, but tasks need to be flexible. It's also not certain what tasks will make the goal successful on a given day.

Same goes for promotions. Real life is not an RPG - you don't collect experience points until you become a level 36 Business Analyst. Smart companies promote people when they've proven either a proficiency or aptitude for the next level job and the company has a need for it. It's very hard to set a timeline for either of those, especially when the next level involves hard-to-measure abilities.

I suggest finding another job; they're really not all like the one described. (But, I've been there!)

Even I, who works for a mega corp, have little or none of this. But, I work in a small group, and not in IT but in product development. (I can't claim that the other 39,980 employees feel similarly, though.)

With demand for developers so high, it makes sense to move around until you find a place that feels right.

This isn't an article, it's a sales pitch. And it feels like one of those awful late-night infomercials, to boot:

"If your work life a mess? [Cut to scene of woman at a desk covered in a mess of loose papers, with spaghetti sauce in her messy hair, making a screwed up face and throwing her hands up in the air as if to say 'I give up!'] Try myRandomStartup.io!"

"Inter-office politics and personal agendas often influence executive decision making more than shared company goals."

Office politics are everywhere you go. Be it a huge corporation or a small startup. Everybody has their groups and their axes to grind, friends they promote and demote people they see as a threat.

It would be nice to remove it, but you're talking about something that's a part of every office culture.

The default American workplace as imagined by a programmer, I'd say. " Productivity vs. time spent in office..."

a) Not all workplaces are offices. b) In some workplaces, employing highly skilled personnel (hospitals, say), time spent in the workplace is critical.