On a previous job I was working on a component for the project that was a well known Audi model. In 18 months, Audi replaced the manager for that project 3 times.
Managerial careers in German corps are a revolving door where incompetents go in, do nothing, slap the prestigious company name in their resume, then, when the shit hits the fan, jump ship to next prestigious company. Rinse and repeat.
You're all late to the party.
That in late-stage capitalism, all actual work is invariably outsourced, with only management and profits retained?
Someone contrasting engineering culture at Tesla and current "old auto", described part of the latter as being fine with someone else making the actual vehicle, and then just slapping a brand on it. Suggesting causality can go the other way too - innovation is still a differentiator, but is deemphasized by a management culture focused elsewhere.
You start to see a 50-year-old engineer not as a battle-hardened mentor who can be a leader for your teams and instead as a highly-paid shambling pile with less "productivity" than a fresh grad.
That is just an element of consistency. Since the 1980s management 'wisdom' has been centered around the idea that all workers should be fungible, replaceable units of work. Ideas like 'if you are irreplaceable, you are expendable' and the notion that your degree of importance to the functioning of a company is also a measure of how much of a liability you are, etc. They're ideas rooted in the notion that a business should prefer to close its doors rather than do anything which could raise the cost of labor in the market. If an individual becomes important in the functioning of a business, they should be eliminated as swiftly as possible because otherwise they will remain and eventually ask for more money. Since you can never, ever, consider granting that request, you will have to fire them at that point and the damage would be even harder to repair than if you had disposed of them when you first realized their importance. So better to eject them when you first realize it and clean up whatever damage that causes when it is more containable. Perhaps that viewpoint might have had some relevance in industries centered around commodity repetitive physical labor, but I would argue that it is overall destructive in knowledge-based industries. It has been phenomenally successful at suppressing the cost of labor (between 1950 and 1980, the median wage of workers rose 75%, between 1980 and 2010 it rose by only 1%) but it's caused a widespread host of much larger problems that threaten the very foundation of the economy.
This is what I like about Chinese industry, for now...
They have not yet got themselves into "scientific management" coolaid.
"Sales call in the morning, prototypes in the evening" — says all about it. Find a single American electronics maker who can do that.
The crisis in American corporate culture is that people can't find out what their company exceeds in. So much focus goes to MBA things, than whatever is company's main competence gets less and less clear.
But in China, things crystal clear, for now:
Factories compete on cheap widgets
Engineering companies compete on TTM
Lawyers compete on winning cases
Car companies compete on horsepowers
Advertising companies compete on being obnoxious
Banks compete on cheaper loans
No "strategic analysis" bullshit
But I doubt you're wrong on the engineering analysis.
The physical world has the unique property of being unbeholden to vision. Either the widget works, or it doesn't.
And in a marketplace with actual competition, you're going to have a lot of people working very hard to build a better widget.
(I did once work for a startup that was run somewhat like a large company. It failed. Most startups fail anyway, of course, but I don't think this one had to fail.)
Never saw one iota of difference in how management is handled. If anything, the reduced bureaucracy of the start-ups was a problem because it left executive behavior wildly unconstrained, where rampant religious bigotry, sexual harassment, micromanagement and overwork were elevated into practically glorified business ideals and self-serving cultish culture mandates
Executives at bigger companies were just as reprehensible most of the time, but at least had many more layers of other corporate oversight constraining them to at least give appearances of professionalism and sincerely consider employee’s needs when designing policy.
No manager has "absolute power" over you. At a maximum they have the power to fire you. As a software developer in this economy there are far more important things to worry about.
And yeah, I'm a manager!
And withholding a reference for their next job hunt certainly doesn't do anything either.
Nice goalpost moving, though.
And TBH, I don't know anyone who uses their current job as reference for the next job: probably wouldn't go over well. I still have people I last worked with 10 years ago using me as a reference.
A quick glance on the Wikipedia page[1] doesn’t give me the impression that it paints all managers/executives as reprehensible though... But I guess you’ve read it and come to this conclusion?
I do agree though that there is, in many of the organizations I’ve worked in, large and smallish, a perverse incentive structure in that "instead of ability, talent, and dedicated service to an organization, politics, adroit talk, luck, connections, and self-promotion are the real sorters of people into sheep and goats" [1]. But you think the solution to this is more bureaucracy? I’m leaning more towards better selection, cultural norms and perhaps some “separation of powers”. But I’m speculating.
It goes well with my own thinking too, that (in management/power) you want people who are focused on the outside world, with a “selfish” desire to affect/change it. When they act “selfishly” they will at least do something resembling executing on a strategy.
The people you really want to avoid are those that are not very talented or able and just want power for its own sake. When they turn “selfish” they will focus within the organization, promoting cronies, expanding their power base, etc, etc. when others see this the culture goes to hell...
That’s my current theory at least. :P
This has created a new problem, where the existing leadership is looking for traditional signals for promotion and seeing this bizzaro world of incompetents doing the key thing it takes to promote: exercising power at a fairly senior level (a typical officer in the O-6 grade is responsible for about 1000-5000 people), and remember, the flag officers have those deep connections, they know who's competent and they know those people aren't seeking additional responsibilities. So they got Congress to authorize bringing in outsiders at the O-6 level (clearly competent, and have exercised authority at that key 1000-5000 head-count level, or at least 500-1000), which pisses off the career-competents to no end and puts the fear of god into the career-incompetents, exacerbating the situation. Yet it did nothing because who in god's name, making 500k on the outside, is going to take a $150k job at the Pentagon and live in a shack 20 miles outside the Beltway and endure that commute on the 66?
So now the flag officers have finally also gotten authority (finally) to start forcibly retiring the dead wood from the senior ranks: O-4s, O-5s, and O-6s who have failed to select for the next rank several years in a row, frequently sitting in jobs that could be filled by O-2s or O-3s. Keep in mind, the head-count at each rank is capped by Congress, so the competents can't even promote around the incompetents. It's a war of attrition where the dead wood wins because the opportunities outside outweigh the opportunities inside. At which point it really does start looking like a jobs program. Thus these new "continuation selection boards".
This is a real problem. I had one of these incompetent O-5s sitting in an O-3 billet working for me and getting that person transferred out of my group was the single best thing I ever did for group morale. And before you accuse of me of just pushing the problem onto another group, let me just say that steps were taken to ensure this individual will also be seen further up in the CSB list.
But even that new culling process seems insufficient. The standards for record review are too high, and the observed number of forced retirements is too low. The system is driven by fear, uncertainty, and doubt. All the way down.
Ranges for consecutive ranks overlap quite a bit. O-4, Major, is $55231 to $92218. If you are promoted from Captain to Major, and were at the high end of Captain pay, I assume you don't drop down to the bottom of Major pay. Do you go to about the same percentile in Major pay that you had in Captain pay?
This is actually part of the problem with Boeing. They keep all the functions across the aircraft separate, or at least at arms length. So for instance if you want to talk about fuel systems, there is a 737 SME, a 747 SME, a 787 SME, a 767 SME, and a legacy SME.
Cross the pond and want to talk fuel systems at Airbus? There is one SME group that manages all of the fuel systems across the commercial aircraft with leads for each program.
What Boeing created was a system that requires internal competition for resources and promotions and spread knowledge too thin without the sharing of the commonalities across the fleet.
This in a nutshell represents the core failure of modern managerial thinking. What started as "scientific management" many decades ago, an attempt to systematically understand how corporations should operate, quickly evolved into a group think belief that management could function as fungible & completely replaceable units of work-- that a "manager" could be trained up in various basic principles and plugged into any role
There are of course commonalities across businesses, and commonalities across managers for necessary skill, but each business is, in some core, fundamental way, different from others. Good management of a company doesn't following a paint-by-numbers rule book, it requires deep understanding of the particulars of that business, the market & industry it operates in.
I think this is changing, slowly, but the legacy of this flawed thinking is a long one.