Management has its place, but the power relationship is all fucked up. It should be more of a symbiotic guidance/mentoring relationship than a "serve my career goals or I fire you" extortion that generates buttloads of Fourth Quadrant Work ( http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth-quadra... ).
Great article. One nit though. When making a 2d Cartesian graph with the two axis there are accepted quadrant labeling practices [1]. Quadrant I is positive on both axis, Quadrants II and IV positive on just one axis, and Quadrant III is negative on both. What you described as Quadrant IV should really have been Quadrant III. You can flip axis any which way, but the opposite quadrants will always have 1 step in between them. No big deal, but will make little sense if somebody actually tries to visualize your model.
Thanks. On the numbering of quadrants, I'm aware of that. The numbering is an order based on the value to the business.
First Quadrant (interesting/essential) is never an issue to allocate. In the ideal world, all work would be 1st quadrant. It's important and good for morale.
Second Quadrant (undesirable/essential) is what companies have to do. It's a morale liability, but too important not to get it done.
Third Quadrant (interesting/discretionary) is what one hopes will be achieved with slack in the schedule. Ideally, it'll pay off in the long term. It's good for morale, but not relevant to the immediate path-of-execution.
Fourth Quadrant (undesirable/discretionary) is the junk that should never exist.
Originally I used "category" rather than "quadrant", but quadrant implies a certain visualization, even if the numbering is different.
You've answered the question "What do you think management's role should be?" instead of the question he asked.
And how can you have a symbiotic guidance/mentoring relationship when most devs consider management to be just about the worst scum on the planet? Relationships are a two-way street.
The problem with the guidance/mentoring model of management is that it depends on your managers being consistently better than the people who report to them on the tech side and be competent at the art of management itself.
This is only workable if you're a startup that happens to have one of these rare people as founders and isn't planning on growing too much, or your company is among the most desirable place in the world to work.
The way it usually winds up working in practice is that you either promote your top tech people to their level of incompetence where they unhappily fail on the management side, or you hire competent managers who have to enforce a rather low tech competence ceiling in order to fit their command and control style.
Most developers aren't arrogant prima donnas, they want to learn from people who know more than them, but expecting someone to be able to mentor a projects' worth of people while also handling the regular management duties (hiring, delegation, oversight, resource allocation, communication with the execs, endless HR paperwork...) is setting someone up to fail.
This. I had a bad experience with a startup once in which I was the newest developer at a company and was working on a project that used a technology I was more experienced with than anyone else at the company. The whole situation did not do great things for my motivation.
The power imbalance is what causes the relationship dysfunction. Michael favors an "everyone works directly for the company on goals of their choosing" model over hierarchical managed labor.
Managers are an internal police force hired to protect the interests of owners against theft (or adverse negotiation, overcompensation, etc.) by employees. The difference is that we need police in society. Companies don't need a separate police force; ideally, they're self-policing.
I wrote about these incentive and principal-agent problems in detail: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-macle... . Essentially, there need be no conflict of interest between employees and investors/owners. In fact, employees are investors-- of time.
Like police, most managers (by numbers) are good people but the dirty ones are really awful-- and usually get rich. In the corporate context, this is because they get so good at taking credit (the actual A players fear them) that they look like high-performers and rise quickly.
What happens in the worst companies is that owners are protected against low-level workers but robbed by the managers. They fall down hard on the "who will police the police?" question.
A small group of people, if there's full transparency about what's going on and how proceeds are divided, can be self-policing. Rick Grimes is no longer the sheriff of his group of ~10 people. They all take on the "police work"; even children. Yet cities of 4 million and nations of 100+ million need a specific police force. They can't do without them. At that scale, it's a necessary job.
By the time your company needs a police force-- it's spending a substantial fraction of its budget protecting against theft (mainly, "time theft" by an employee who favors personal interests)-- it should be scaled back and hiring made more selective, with transparency improved to make sure incentives are aligned and behavior is above-board and ethical. Cities and nations need cops because they don't fully control who gets in (or is born there); small companies aren't the same way and can be self-policing.
And how can you have a symbiotic guidance/mentoring relationship when most devs consider management to be just about the worst scum on the planet? Relationships are a two-way street.
Well, management is a class of work, not necessarily an entitled set of elevated people. The way you do it is to have a Valve or Github structure (self-executive culture) where everyone is responsible for keeping focus on business goals and the administrative work of the company. So now, management is everyone's job. Don't like how the company's being run? Go fucking do something about it. You're part of the management. Now act like it.
I don't have much love for the idea of a professional executive, though. When you have people whose job it is to Make Decisions and nothing else, then you end up with a small group of people who feel entitled to make their ideas unassailable. That's horrible. The company loses the ability to shred up a bad idea without attacking the person. No idea should be unassailable, and no one should be in the position where the job description is to Make Decisions and there's no participation in the actual work.
By the way, I don't think "managers" are "the worst scum on the planet". Many are fine human beings. Nazis and serial killers and date-raping HS/college alpha types are "the worst scum on the planet", not managers. I think management is a job that most companies structure extremely poorly.
I don't have much love for the idea of a professional executive, though. When you have people whose job it is to Make Decisions and nothing else, then you end up with a small group of people who feel entitled to make their ideas unassailable. That's horrible.
I basically agree with that, but on the flip side, I'm not convinced that management has no role. Self-organization sounds good, and it certainly works in some systems, for some value of "works". The question I have is, when the system is designed to achieve a very specific end - "maximize return on invested capital" - can total self-organization do that?
I also think it's a misnomer to suggest that executives do nothing but "make decisions". Good executives aren't just sitting ivory towers mandating things by fiat, they are conduits and coordinators. They proactively seek out information, identify problems, bottlenecks, etc. and work to coordinate efforts between all involved parties to mediate things.
I think management is a job that most companies structure extremely poorly.
Now that I agree with.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a very flat organizational structure, empowered employees, shared purpose and self-organization. But I think specialization of labor has a role to play as well, and I think there is some value in traditional management.
All of that said, I would love an opportunity to go visit Valve or the W.L. Gore and spend some time observing how things work there. When they day comes that we can grow Fogbeam Labs and have start having to deal with more people, I am very much intrigued by trying to keep management as minimal as possible.
"Maximize return on invested capital" is a horrible goal. It's not even the real goal of most investors. Retirees have most of their money in bonds-- stock gives better returns, and exotic vehicles do better than that (on average)-- but at that age, they don't want the risk. Investment isn't about "maximizing returns". It's about managing risk. Applying calculus and basic knowledge of derivative securities, I can come up with an investment strategy that has an EV of +50% on one year... but that has a good chance of leaving you utterly hosed. (Load up on beta using out-of-the-money call options.)
Also, the claim that CEOs are legally required to operate in short-term shareholder interest is a common misconception, but it's not true. There is no such law. CEOs aren't allowed to make decisions to the advantage of their personal financial benefit while hurting the company (that's called "stealing") and if they use dishonest means, they can go to jail. But a CEO who prioritizes a subjective health concern (sustainability, ethical business, fairness in compensation) isn't doing anything illegal. It's the CEO who gets caught embezzling funds who goes to jail, not the one who increases salaries by 10% to improve morale.
Now, there are a lot of sociopathic executives who use this "legal obligation" (to maximize short-term shareholder returns) to justify a lot of selfish and questionable things (that benefit their bosses, and thus them) but the truth about it is that it doesn't exist. It's an excuse. Classic negotiation tactic: It's Not Up To Me.
Healthier companies, I would argue, are less prone to downside-heavy but often invisible (non-financial) risks. If everyone feels micromanaged, overworked, and underpaid, then you're at risk of external "poachers" if the job market improves. This doesn't show up on a balance sheet, but it's pretty critical.
This is definitely an inherited notion, and one that's quickly (at least in the tech industry) becoming more fuzzy. I get told routinely to push back against project managers if I feel their decision making is flawed. Thankfully, it's not as common an occurrence as it could be. Our PMs are pretty good at seeing product viability and have likely considered most angles that I'll only see as I'm working on it.
But it all goes back to feeling empowered, and its up to your horizontal managers to give you that breathing room.
