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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Stop with the management already.

If you look at a company of say 100,000 employees, and a generous span of 1 manager to 10 subordinates, there are 33,333 managers - and as they usually are paid better than their subordinates, the cost is typically over 50% of salaries. And it's a rare industry that is not mostly salary as cost.

And we now have an amazing set of technologies and examples of new organisational forms (Linux?) that say "hey, you can eliminate a huge cost base and be more productive.

Wanna bet how the next decade is going to go for those called "managers"?

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Not sure I understand, suppose 100,000 non-managing employees, span of 1 to 10, adds 10,000 managers, span 1 to 10, adds 1,000 more managers, span 1 to 10, adds 100 more managers, and so on. Therefore, for a company of 111,111 employees, there are 11,111 managers. Let's say double the salary on average gives 20-25% overhead?

Why would, for a company of 100,000 employees, it bump up to 33,333 managers?

Linux, organizationally, does not fulfill the same functions as are needed in a company (recruitment, firing, finance, HR to name a few.) How would you model a company after it?

I have never understood why managers need to be paid higher than the people they manage..

That is the single reason for many orgs screwing up their system as this forces excellant developers/workers to abandon their core skills and move into management..

Because once they were the most skilled people and now the market is paying higher wages so either you do too or you don't get to hire managers who can work anywhere else.

It does not force techies into management unless it's an 'up-or-out' kind of organization. It provides a financial incentive (and often a status symbol).

the manager's salary becomes a ceiling for the staff they manage, if managers are always paid more than the staff they manage (and I've heard some managers seriously suggest that they would not be able to manage people who got paid more than them).

It becomes a problem when tech salaries are on the rise, because at some point the company either has to start paying coders more than managers, or has to implement pay rises throughout the management hierarchy in order to retain good technical staff.

At this point its really tempting to promote good coders into management to keep them.

> I've heard some managers seriously suggest that they would not be able to manage people who got paid more than them

This is just greed/pride. As a manager, the only person who knows that an engineer makes more than you is you. And it's pretty common these days for companies to have an engineering track that has a VP-equivalent top position, so it's pretty common that the most senior engineers will make more than most of the managers at the company.

I downvoted you because arguing that managers are unnecessary is so naive and uninformed as to make me suspect that you're trolling.

That's like saying that a film doesn't need a director. Well maybe in theory you could make a film without one but that's not the best way to go about it.

I like to make a distinction between managers and leaders.

- Leaders get a project done. They may or may not be managers. They think about technical problems, they write code, they organize teams and answer questions, they write design documents, they communicate technical stuff to other teams and managers. In some companies these are PMs (but the meaning of PM has been devalued to "someone who does non-technical project management, like bug tracking and scheduling").

- Managers deal with people. They write reviews, they fire people, the might hire people. They do donkey work like finding office space or ordering hardware or making sure that people get compensated properly.

Those are two different jobs, and they're often conflated.

And which of these is a True Scotsman?

Good points. Another distinction is that managers are named by decree from other managers. Leaders, by definition, must have followers and they typically will only follow those that they trust and that have earned their respect (not by decree).

A number of successful companies disagree:

1. Zappos: http://www.businessinsider.com/tony-hsieh-self-management-me...

2. Medium: http://firstround.com/review/How-Medium-is-building-a-new-ki...

3. Valve: https://managing-essentials.com/valve-software-successful-se...

They are the far outliers. Very hard to achieve in my experience.

Since the enormous vast majority of people only have experience working in companies that would never (and definitely have never) tried a flat organizational structure, I think this is kind of a disingenuous statement. From the outside those companies do look like far outliers. But I have a suspicion that hierarchy is only extremely relevant without technology. What I mean here is that technology is a great organizational "flattener" and I think since technology like this is still in its infancy, we can't really make a blanket statement like "this is very hard to achieve". Obviously, you're right to some degree, but I think that is only an artifact of technology not yet having revolutionized "the organization".

Stripe is an example of a company that prided itself on a manager-less structure, but then converted to having management.

Sure, but the same can be said for organizations that were once hierarchical, but then went flat.

Zappos had managers for over a decade before recently starting an experiment to go manager-free.

Medium is a tiny company.

Valve...had some interesting claims surface when their structure was discussed here. Such as a shadow management structure.

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