exactly. the managerial class claims dominion over the rest of us, and then swiftly constructs a rigid social system that locks in their position on top of it. this necessarily includes promulgation of unfounded myths and beliefs taken on faith to support the ossification of the system.

a.k.a. neoliberal economics

Things like metrics, values, and re-orgs might seem like Dilbert-esque corporate speak (a view I used to share), but they're incredibly important once you're trying to get a bunch of people to do something with excellence and speed.

Certainly some aspects can: keeping politics away from your group so that they can work, focusing work tasks by eliminating extraneous ones, advocating for people in the company. However, once you start getting into things like values and metrics it starts becoming a lot more grey. On the one hand metrics are a great idea, a tiny step towards making management more science driven. But on the other, the metrics so often used are such a poor and overly simple representation of a very complex system that it's often hard to see how they provide an accurate view of any given work place.

Goals and values are often completely lame. We value hard work! Your goal is to do your job! Somehow managers must know that they are ridiculed for this. After all entire movies are made doing so. Yet they still seem to want to believe this rhetoric works.

Your skepticism based on who's speaking is warranted. After all, you shouldn't ask your barber if you need a haircut. Yet, maybe your hair stylist has the most expertise. Should you trust your dentist on how often you should get your teeth cleaned?

As long as there are regulations and lawsuits over this sort of stuff, there will be metrics.

The better managers translated the quantitative metrics into qualitative guidance for their teams. The worse managers provided no such buffer and instead made their teams achieve metrics by any means necessary.

This seems like a key insight.

Metrics are key to good management – but metrics are for the managers, not for the teams. Managers that pass metrics directly down to their teams as goals aren't doing their jobs; they're trying to make their team do their job.

Maybe. Thoughts?

Making middle managers accountable for the failure of executives to manage their company, effectively just insulates those people who made decisions from those who know they are terrible decisions.

I was a middle manager who had to do this very thing, and even though my company was happy due to making gobs of money, every review I had was terrible because I wasn't hitting the metric of the month (that generally ended in horrible burn out and hiring even more replaceable people) and I was constantly warned that "You wont bonus this month."

I never got a bonus while I worked there, and yet was highly respected and valued by all my employees.

When I left the company the other great managers followed me, and the business folded, having hundreds of people lose their jobs.

So tell me, why would anyone want this or claim that this type of decision making is "good management"?

Why setup a system that punishes those that help the business and deliver actual value to customers instead of meaningless metrics?

This doesn't follow from the GP's comment. All we know from that comment is that Metrics + some managers = bad.

Maybe this is a matter of necessary but not sufficient? I have no strong opinion, I am just pointing at a grey area.

"Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers—it’s strictly for amateurs."

http://a16z.com/2011/07/19/when-employees-misinterpret-manag...

I'm not saying good management is unnecessary. I'm saying that managerialism is basically the opposite of good management. Metrics can be valuable if used very carefully. But they so rarely are, because a lot of the drive for metrics is really is in service of a cultivated shallowness. Simple metrics allow somebody to swoop in, jerk some levers, provide apparent gain, and then jet off to something else, never mind the consequences.

1. People can't self-manage (to some degree) 2. Performance is the end goal of management

I think both of these are wrong, or at least unfounded. I work in a more-or-less self-managed environment, and performance is actually pretty good. I get to pursue about 50% of my work independently and the other half is either collaborative and in line with a coworker's needs, or is one of those "must-dos". I don't see a possible world where I'd get more work done over the average day if there were artificial metrics like "time spent at desk", "lines of code written" or "number of tasks completed" dangled over my head - I'd probably just fuck off more and come up with clever schemes to break the game. This problem can be seen in academia as well - give a bunch of smart people a matrix of rules and yell "GO!". Watch them optimize.

I'd also argue that if it's only performance you're looking for, you're both ethically and intellectually off base. Good managers do increase performance/productivity - bad managers do not. But to assume that, as with teachers, academics, or software engineers, you can measure and reward behaviors without causing adverse affects on your workplace then you're dreaming. My manager is good because he backs off when needed, leaving me and a coworker to argue about an implementation design. My manager is good because he sets up an area of focus and says "ideas, go!". My manager is good because he will let people take a week or month to pursue a new solution that he personally doesn't understand, but trusts them to solve it aptly. My manager is not good because his team excels in certain metrics - his team excels in certain metrics because he is good. And last, my manager is good because productivity is not the end goal - employee happiness is. Happy employees do good work, and more importantly, they're happy for their own sake, which is much better than being surrounded by burnt out metric junkies.

So maybe my takeaway is that if we're going to do any kind of metric gathering it should probably be sub-perceptible and not be treated as a golden calf. If my CEO wants to devise a clever way of using me as a science experiment in pursuit of better management practices then I encourage that. But to tell people "here's what we're tracking now go off and do good work instead of that" is really fraught with problems.

But I don't see the difference being systems and metrics. I see it much more as interpersonal relationships, respect, and caring about the people that work for you. The manager's competence in the domain itself is also important.

Selecting the right person for the job is also vital, but you are specifically addressing different performance by the same team with a different manager.

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Correct me if I'm wrong but this is a minority view in management circles

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

The need for this sometimes seems to be, itself, an aspect of managerialism. Sure, if you're going to the moon on a tight timescale you probably do need to marshal a larger number of people than can usefully self-organise in the available time. But most projects are much smaller scale. A feature of managerialialist organisations is that there's rarely any consideration of the possibility that a give project could be done by a self-organised group (let alone a single smart individual). Everything starts with managers assigning a "team", which then inevitably ends up requiring management.

Professional managers can of course learn about different jobs, but there is a massive and largely unpleasant difference between being manged by someone who's been promoted for their domain competence and someone who has been parachuted in because of their expertise in ordering people about. Since it's virtually impossible for junior workers to fire a manager they dislike then what appears to be efficiency is often achieved through exploitation. To know this and perpetuate that pattern is to disavow moral agency, converting what is nominally a cooperative enterprise into a zero-sum game.

The problem however, is that they all tend to be absurdly compensated whereas logic would support paying only the first group in that manner.

I suppose if you value employees who are trained by rote and operate in a manner reflecting that training...

So it is a choice we make, tell everyone what to do from an early age and allow them to focus, or try and teach all the things to everyone, using standard testing to make sure everyone is at least keeping their head above water.

</best_post_ever>

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. I agree that metricising performance is only as good as your metrics, and in my personal opinion, metricising knowledge work is a fool's errand (too many variables to accurately capture performance). That is _separate_ from having managers though. Managers can often triage work effectively, help engineers unblock their work, help identify people in the org that contain the domain knowledge necessary to help one of their direct reports, etc etc.

I think the whole urge to track velocity and points and stupid things like that to be absolutely dumb, though. Also I'm an IC and am coming up to the point in my career where I have to figure out a way to not be pushed into management.

I agree that metricising knowledge work is a mistake. But I think it's also true for other kinds of work. In colleges I worked in a factory and there was no end of trouble that came from managing via metrics.

i could be wrong, but i believe in 'real' professions like medicine and law, there's some kind of board/bar rule that prohibits being managed by someone who never had the actual job they're managing. any one know if that's accurate?

To be fair, academics can also be childish, vindictive, sexist. There is also a real problem of hiring one's friends and students. BUT inter-organizational competition helps to some extent with these problems. Regardless, they justify administration and associated costs.

There's something disturbingly paternal about the idea that unusually clever and/or creative people can't be trusted to act like adults and therefore need adult supervision from people with authority over them.

What you describe is how I've seen software dev management properly work, managers are a support structure for the workers, like Admin. They have important and useful skills, but don't get the position of metaphorical aristocracy.

When you have MBA style dated general management they operate by putting the devs subordinate to their management "expertise" and then they don't "triage work effectively, help engineers unblock their work, help identify people in the org that contain the domain knowledge necessary to help one of their direct reports, etc etc." because it's not really in their interest to do so.

It's not just incentives either, there is a huge cultural component, which is why it's so easy to parody "tech management" and have the caricature be recognizable around the world.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

My friend and I have internally renamed the roles "producers", "regulators", and "harvesters" in an attempt to remove the negative connotations. Feel free to use that in your own discussions also.

They'd probably argue that you have to pay well for a good administrator. How do you measure a good administrator? By how much money they save. So the less the academics are paid, the more the administrators save and so therefore the more they are paid - and we're there.

It used to be academics took turns at administrating for a couple of years, this was before the rise of the professional manager, and they insinuated themselves everywhere.

All the credit for his work goes to him, of course. But one can easily imagine him completely flaming out with a different department head and advisor.

It is precisely because people are not cogs that managers can either be a force multiplier or an unmitigated disaster.

EDIT: on rereading, that guy isn't saying all management is like this but that his hypothesis explains certain managers. All right. That makes my comment a non-sequitur.