| ▲ | Aurornis 11 hours ago |
| > He told me that he had worked to develop a tool that would replace effectively all of the middle management function that he was responsible for: gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and reporting that to people above him. Any manager whose job was this simple was on borrowed time anyway. I think the person was feeding you a story around the campfire to impress you. Real management work doesn't operate like this. |
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| ▲ | jasondigitized 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Fake management is far more common than real management. Most of management is centered around hyper-realistic work like activities. |
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| ▲ | pydry 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | My experience with ex Amazon managers is that they brought a toxic culture and destroyed more value than they created. Some people are so focused on whether they could automate their work output with an LLM to ask themselves if they even should. | | |
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| ▲ | nmfisher 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Real management work doesn't operate like this. Don't know about Amazon but my experience with middle management is that it's exactly like that. |
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| ▲ | spiritplumber 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Also, if you bite them after telling them five times "please don't touch me", it's somehow your fault. |
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| ▲ | dialogbox 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >> gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and reporting that to people above him. > Real management work doesn't operate like this. I agree but in the opposite direction. So many managers not only doing that but doctoring, filtering and tainting it as well. So AI would be more effective for the most of bad managers. |
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| ▲ | coreyoconnor 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I left amazon, in part, because of this realization: Much of management was exactly doing that. That was back in the BERT days and even then writing was on the wall. |
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| ▲ | booleandilemma 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Actually I've worked at companies where management is exactly like this. Literally just status updates and asking when things are going to be finished. I have no respect for middle managers whatsoever. These people are a parasite on the industry. |
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| ▲ | hattmall 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Ok, Ok, I get the disdain for middle management. It's basically exactly like you described, but middle management didn't come about for no reason. There really is a value and the idea of automating it away with AI is extremely dubious. One could even argue that middle management is THE most critical role in corporations over a certain size. In that it is the glue that allows them to get to that size. But it's also what gave rise to things like Dilbert and the idea of rising to the level of your own incompetence. Middle management is like the lug nuts on a wheel. If you start with 5, you can take one away and be OK, even two and no issues with normal driving. You can go down to two and as long as you aren't hitting large bumps and they aren't adjacent you mostly likely will be fine for a short trip. You could even remove ALL of the lug nuts and if you travel in straight line over a smooth road you can still drive. After all they mostly just sit there, the tire, the transmission, all the other parts of the car are doing the work. But it's not fair to say that any of the removed lug nuts were doing nothing. The point of middle management isn't really to do anything spectacular on a daily basis. If the company is working well, middle management effectively has no function. It's when things get out of line. Even then though, it's not really middle management that's calling the shots or fixing the problem, but they are critical in noticing the problems and directing resources. Middle management's role is in reducing the time that things are out of line. At least that's the idea, and much like any position, the bulk of the group benefits are overwhelmingly produced by the groups most effective producers. Middle management is the hardest role to hire while simultaneously being the hardest to gauge employee effectiveness. | | |
| ▲ | dasil003 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Middle management is a tremendous market for lemons. It's difficult to do well, and each layer requires a very different skillset. One of the side effects of the hypergrowth era of big tech between 2008-2023 is that a lot of managers were needed to support the amount of hiring, and they weren't very well trained, and often they could claim success for a rising tide almost by default as long as they didn't do anything too blatantly stupid. The Peter Principle is of course well-known, but one of the insidious things is that once you have enough incompetent management and they are entrenched for a while, they will teach all the wrong lessons to an entire generation of new hires coming in. Due to the incentives and optics of large orgs, managers tend to spin everything in a positive light publicly, and the real unfiltered discussions of failure happen in tighter circles. At some point a lot of "successful" folks can have job hopped their way through a bunch of brand name companies just cargo culting on what they've seen done before with no real understanding of how their work actually impacts the company's bottom line. This is one of the reasons I'm incredibly thankful to have spent most of my early career in small companies and startups where the big picture was so much easier to see. | |
| ▲ | dntrkv 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is most definitely an overgeneralization, but in my experience, engineers that constantly talk shit about management are either shitty engineers themselves or they're incredibly difficult to work with and blame everyone else for their shortcomings. Middle management is playing a completely different game. I don't envy them one bit. Sure, there are toxic cultures created by bad management, but that can be said about any leadership role. There is a reason for the hierarchy, if you think you have a better approach to structuring a company, have at it. | | |
| ▲ | anon291 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Having ended up in management by accident and then just sticking around with it for a while just because.... I am now back in an IC role and I mostly feel sorry for my manager honestly. |
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| ▲ | ethbr1 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well said! I'd also add that a critical function of middle management in healthy companies is bidirectional information communication: sharing what their teams are doing up and sharing leadership priorities down. Having worked at some dysfunctional companies where that didn't happen (and a few companies that were amazing at it), it makes a difference at scale. Nothing is more disheartening than working your ass off as an IC, shipping, then finding out that your VP pivoted approach and your project won't be used. |
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| ▲ | nipponese 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In the past, my job has been exactly this. A few times I took my hands off the wheel to see if I was truly redundant. Let's just say, I wasn't. At worst, I was the only one looking at the schedule. At best, I was a support mechanism for people working on an absolutely boring product. |
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| ▲ | khazhoux 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I think the person was feeding you a story around the campfire to impress you. Yeah, this sounds like the guy was just exaggerating for effect. Haven't we all joked before, "I'm writing a tool to automate my own job away." |
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| ▲ | jdmg94 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| you would be amazed at the amount of middle managers who keep failing upwards in organizations like Amazon |
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| ▲ | ganoushoreilly 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Happens in the Govt too. I think it's pretty common that if you can "sell a story" you're in a better spot than simply doing well at the job. | | |
| ▲ | NicoJuicy 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's literally the current president | | |
| ▲ | api 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think he might be the greatest person at failing up who has ever lived. It has to be some kind of savant-like skill. After this he’ll probably become the literal king of the world. | | |
| ▲ | reaperducer 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think he might be the greatest person at failing up who has ever lived. Went bankrupt six times and is still hailed by his followers as an economic genius. Few people can pull that off. | | |
| ▲ | auggierose 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think what is hard to understand for people is how you can go bankrupt six times and still have loads of assets and money. How does that work? | |
| ▲ | hvb2 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Married 4 times, still seen as a saint | |
| ▲ | nick49488171 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | He's going for number 7 it seems |
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| ▲ | retinaros 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| lol. it does. its a good description of about 90% of the mgrs |
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| ▲ | complianceowl 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | woooooo 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Amazon in particular has a highly formalized ritual for reporting up and down that consumes managers entirely. If you don't play, youll be humiliated and fired. The engineers self-organize while the managers are working in their own, different universe. |
