For a senior manager, the main problem is organizational blinders: people not seeing the direct route (through fear, ambition, loyalty, etc.) Senior people get to ask the cross-cutting questions that others can't (and let the chips fall).<p>For line managers, they are deluged with impossible, specific asks and they have no real way of knowing if the team will be able to perform, or be happy to. They survive by maintaining fictions and blinders, and staying just ahead in chips.<p>I think he's underselling to say it's instinct; in law it's called ripeness, waiting for when something really needs to be addressed, and then ideally just reflect that in a way people can take on instead of taking control. The senior's job is not to intervene unless necessary, and even then to prefer activating others.<p>So I feel it's a project manager mindset to always be tallying asks; while a senior manager is really tracking issues and capabilities on a different timescale, doing the prep to build the capability to address the issue when it's ripe.
Something about this writing feels off, but for the life of me I can't say exactly what.
To me, as a non-native speaker it feels like a series of interruptions and focus changes with no natural flow. Hard to follow.
It's the writing of someone who has been writing articles like this for <i>decades</i> now, instead of your average blogger or journalist. Just enjoy the difference.
Terminal LinkedIn brain
Very. Short. Sentences. That’s AI
Look up the organizational chart meme. Look at Amazon's chart. You'll know what's off.
I've been enjoying Rands for what feels like 2 decades now. Spot on, over and over again. Great advice few newbies, great reminders for people who have been there before - just generally great.<p>I take this as generally focusing on the what ask (and hence give) becomes. But it reminds me of the business classic Theory of Constraints. To me the laserlike focus, or attempt to get to singular clarity is the point; in this highlight we're seeing the notion of software skills rather then a data-based approach, as it's a soft problem.<p>Both matter. I appreciate this reminder.
This is either very profound or not at all. Can’t figure out which.
I think much of this kind of management faffery might be like advertising - I know half is useless, but I'll be damned if I can figure out which half.
We never found out who Mark was. Or what the problem with Rachel was. Or what and why behind and ahead of the pressure to meet either were in place. So going with not at all. They've literally described their job as having too much cruft that could have been partially solved by the non-existence of their role.
I liked this, although it seemed like there were unusual typos/missing words for Rands in a couple of places. Is this a book draft?<p>It's a good exercise to mentally go around the a meeting room and think about what each person wants from it. Given Rands' job, he obviously starts thinking about it earlier, and for longer, but even a few minutes while everyone's settling in and chit-chatting can make a difference in how you participate.
Harsh take: AI should replace most middle management. It is the easiest part of an organization to replace. The people making things should mostly communicate about company strategy, cross-team issues, and job requirements with an AI. There should be a handful of high-level strategy on top of the AI. The AI should have access to all the documents for the company. The middle management should be put in a spaceship along with HR and sent off to another planet so the people who build things can just get stuff done. This will never happen.
I don't agree with this.<p>But I also found the article really unsatisfying. The idea that middle management should spend enormous amounts of time building relationships because other middle managers got vibes that one day it might be useful is insane. I think the article represents the worst of big, slow tech bureaucracies.<p>Replacing middle management with AI would not work, but using AI to avoid managers needing to have all these meetings would probably work really well. The idea that there's some AI system that has access to all the documents/email/task management systems at the company is a good one, and it could identify situations (like the one in the article) where two projects on opposite ends of the organization are colliding.<p>Instead of two middle managers needing to do 1:1s with no clear need <i>for years</i> because other middle managers got vibes that they should could be replaced by an AI system that uncovered situations like the ones mentioned in the article.<p>This wouldnt replace middle managers, but it might help them do their jobs better.
Adding AI to an organization that is somehow making process decisions based on "vibes" isn't going to solve problems, it's simply going to add yet another problem generator to a dysfunctional system.
I mostly agree. I'm curious to hear more details about why you think AI cannot replace middle management?
> The idea that middle management should spend enormous amounts of time building relationships because other middle managers got vibes that one day it might be useful is insane. I think the article represents the worst of big, slow tech bureaucracies.<p>If your org has anywhere north of 100 engineers across separate teams, intelligence gathering and relationship/trust-building is the only way to effectively do work that crosses the boundary of your team's area of responsibility. It's also the only way to protect your team from stepping headfirst into hot bullshit cooked up by clueless product managers, junior executives and other engineering teams who've unilaterally decided your area of responsibility is in their critical path.<p>> Instead of two middle managers needing to do 1:1s with no clear need for years because other middle managers got vibes<p>This isn't actually how this happens in practice. These 1:1s happen after their teams consistently have to share ownership over something or their work conflicts. It's more of a standup saying what your team is doing and what you're concerned about than a typical 1:1. You also calibrate the frequency as needed. For most of these it's a QBR but for some teams this will be monthly or even weekly. It's not "because vibes".
A key job of management is to figure out what's <i>actually</i> going on, as opposed to just what people tell you is going on.<p>LLMs are inherently gullible.
Human managers are inherently gullible; we've got no plausible path to unbias them. LLMs have at least one plausible path which is to train them to be a little bit cynical.<p>We're not going to call it "management" necessarily, but there is no question that LLMs are going to take over decision making from managers eventually. Why choose a monkey guessing what the evidence says you should do when you could have an optimised evidence-weighted statistical model making the bets? The only reason to use humans is there are still technical limits on how general the models are, limits that seem to be falling away at a pleasing rate.
Firm, but partial, disagreement.<p>People, especially in remote jobs, benefit from being organized into groups intentionally, with distinct rituals that enable them to operate effectively while they get to know each other better. Another person needs to design and oversee all that.<p>While you can provide templates for that structure that allow oversight to scale so that one person can oversee larger groups, that tends to be more effective in non-remote, and more predictable, work environments. Modern software development is very little of that.<p>I don't have much in-person experience with middle management in contexts outside of software development, and I suspect there are some opportunities to use AI to bring engineers closer to customers.
I have a theory. How close does the following describe you?<p>* You're an engineer with 3-6 years of experience in a primarily IC role<p>* Maybe you've done some tech lead stuff, but you've never actively worked in engineering management.<p>* You feel that management (and HR for some reason?) is constantly in the way of you getting stuff done, and that your life would be easier if you could simply decline every meeting and only communicate through pull requests.<p>Humor me, please. I'll explain after.
I have 35+ years experience as a manager and engineer at large enterprise tech companies (what the kids now call FAANG, though some of the company names were different back then), and was a Founder, CEO and CTO at a $7M VC funded company and several other "differently-funded" startups.
For the sake of moving this along, that describes me perfectly. Please, continue.
Middle-management as we knew it at the turn of the 2010s is probably gone forever. You don't need to coordinate many many teams as you used to. Same as huge frontend team with dedicated support for graphql, etc. AI made most of that redundant.<p>By extension we're going to need a lot less middle managers as coordination problems decrease.<p>As for the point I think you're trying to make, the problem with middle management and other chokepoints in general (like PM teams) is that often they become an antipattern. They soak in all the information and then dole it out parsimoniously, so the typical experience as an IC is to be barely able to see the full picture
It’s a trap.
Couple decades in with some leading but still remaining an IC officially.<p>The right work just doesn't get done without staff engineers and architect types having frequent conversations & meetings as well as constant code reviewing. Or long-term ICs effectively doing this role without the title and expectations/responsibilities (<i>raises hand</i>). You can identify these people because they ask questions relentlessly. Always well-considered ones, but even the ones that might make them look stupid in a meeting.<p>Coding is a small percentage of the work but also just as important. That's the sweet spot. The "non-stop meetings/socializing" people and the "headphones on & grind PRs" types are both two extremes of behavior that are boat-anchors in any organization and will bring productivity/customer-impact to a screeching halt if it goes unchecked for long enough.<p>And it's _always_ those stupid-seeming questions that uncover showstopping problems that would have bit you if left ignored.<p>Edit: Not to greenlight anything Palantir is doing, but in my opinion the FDE/FDSE model is probably everyone's near-future if your company is B2B. You can't be an "ignore meetings" type of person and do that.
This is extremely difficult to read. Can someone summarize the point?
How did you start freelancing? -> The Ask: I want to become a Korea-based freelancer securing work from the US
I hate middle management as much as the next guy.<p>but in this case, specifically. who are these career people thinking about orgs and their movement in years?<p>especially in a job economy where employees are expected to be laid off despite "staggering profits". It feels completely orthogonal to the environment I exist in.<p>is there room for lifers in big orgs? without getting the boot or worrying about the boot?
Relationship oriented workers keep their network as they move from job to job. Never know who you might be able to help or be helped by in the future.
Well, nobody said lifers. But you can't really get a management job without already having management experience. You typically have to be promoted internally, not just go look for a management job elsewhere with no experience.
I'm in a big org and while we had a lot of COVID-related turnover, before and after COVID our average engineer tenure went from ~1.6 years to something like 6-7. I'm at the upper end of my part of the org at 8+ (one at 9, one at 11 one at 13). Only like 3 people in my group are below 6.<p>I would like to move on but also given the current climate that seems ludicrous.<p>People I talk to in similar places are in the same boat. Hiring is frozen, there's not enough people to manage everything we have, and everyone remaining is hanging on for dear life.
The atrocious writing style makes it at least obvious this wasn’t written by AI. Silver linings.
Seems like a good use of time