I think it's fine to decide you don't want their jobs, but it's a mistake to frame it as "bullshit" which he does after the section you quote. Human nature isn't bullshit, and any endeavor which requires a large number of people to accomplish requires the management of human nature.
No, sitting in meetings all day, essentially accomplishing nothing really is bullshit. Granted, there are some super productive management teams out there, but the majority of time is spent dealing with nonsense politics, and having meetings to schedule meetings. Stereotypes have basis in reality.
Having held a few of those jobs, I understand the sentiment, but that doesn't mean those positions are unnecessary, especially as organizations get beyond a certain size. I understood his take on it to be that it just wasn't for him since he likes to be able to see something he has built in a fairly short timeframe, and at a place like Motorola in the '90s, middle management and probably many of the executives wouldn't get that kind of feedback.
From my experience managing managers in big corporations, a lot of the bullshit is created by people who want their own way after a decision has been made. They tend to be the reason meetings are called in the first place, since someone has to make the effort to get everyone moving in the same direction. They are also the most likely to walk around calling bullshit on everything that's happening in the place.
There's no need to denigrate the work of the people who spend more of their time than they'd like in meetings trying to get a big company of individuals to cooperate on goals that are set by executives.
As an aside, there are people who enjoy the kind of work that doesn't necessarily provide instant feedback. Teachers come to mind. Sure, there are little victories and defeats every day, but at the end of the year, there are times when they sigh and wonder what good it did. Try going to a good teacher's retirement party or funeral sometime and mingle with those who come to pay their respects. You'll often hear things like, "He changed my life" or "I'd probably be in prison now if she hadn't been so patient with me." Similarly, the people who make big organizations actually work have an impact on many lives and on the direction of companies, the effects of which are not always visible for years or decades.
I'd like to commend you on a well-balanced reply. The following line really struck me, "..., a lot of the bullshit is created by people who want their own way after a decision has been made." That plays out daily in my organization.
I've come to appreciate how little I know about management over the past few years. I stayed friends with an IT Director who led my department around 1996. He used to say, "If you want to be successful as a manager, you have to remember that your main job is managing personalities everything else falls in place if you do that right." Having run a very small organization for the past couple of years, his message was on target.
My experience with teachers is that the really good ones tend to know. Students come back to say so if a teacher really helped them. My daughter's teacher has former students coming back all the time. My father's former students came back to say thanks. My brother-in-law's students come back. So, it's not quite the tragic, post-mortem recognition that Van Gogh received.
I think the point was that he was emphasizing the bosses bosses bosses boss. Many levels of nonsense, leading to politics. Managers do need to exist, and I agree they have a purpose, but often times, even in the company I work for currently. There is more management than there is workers.
The whole flat org with minimal managers "ideal" has been tried lots of places and always failed. I think even Google tried it at some point. Let me tell you a few things that happen when your org gets flatter:
1. Decisions get bottlenecked
Typically, the "flat org" thing gets tried without empowering the rank-and-file to make big decisions. So decisions that would normally get resolved one or two levels up the chain all get bottlenecked at the GM or CEO, who (now having 100 reports) does not have the knowledge or context to always make the right call.
2. Extreme micromanagement
A counter to #1 is if those decisions actually DON'T get bottlenecked: If you think it sucks to have your manager nit-picking over every little engineering decision you make, imagine how bad it is having the CEO do it, and feel he has to because he has no other managers to make those decisions. Let me tell you from experience: It sucks.
3. You get less time with your boss
When your boss has 4-5 direct reports, they can spend time with you weekly to chat about current challenges, help you with career development, give you pointers on things, etc. When he/she has 20-30 directs, good luck getting any airtime at all.
4. Shit rains down on you
A great manager shields his reports from 95% of the shit that gets rained down on him by the higher-ups. Uninformed complaints, decision churn and flip-flopping, "strategic enterprise synergy workshops", requests for perpetual motion machines and features that defy mathematics: If your boss is good, he doesn't let any of this crap get down to you. Without management, you as 3rd engineer from the left on WhatsitApp Project, get a firehouse of this in your face every day.
5. No career advancement
Granted, this is not important to everyone, but if your boss is the CEO or if his/her boss is the CEO, you're unlikely to get promoted at all during your tenure at that company, or you're going to have to wait for one of them to quit. Whereas if you're manager #6 down, there will be plenty of opportunities to find a #5 level manager position to move up to at some point.
I have been thinking about how to solve this problem and have been wondering what AI can do to help. There must be a way of using AI to help empower workers to act in a co-ordinated way to run the business effectively.
Most of the "sharing" or "on-demand" economy is based on this value proposition. Replace a manager's job with software and suddenly your taxi drivers, hotel workers, cooks, delivery drivers, administrative assistants, artists, visual designers, computer programmers, etc. can report to software instead of a person.
You could argue that the reason Uber etc. have found success recruiting workers for pretty shitty wages is because people are willing to give up that much money to not have to deal with a boss.
This trend also has a long way to go: for one, wearables will open up electronic coordination to people whose jobs normally require having their hands full, and two, improved AI will allow the automation of increasingly complex managerial tasks.
There's a balance to how flat an org can be. One can still have a 100,000 person organization that is only 7-8 levels deep. e.g. Starbucks has ~120k US employees and is about 8 levels from a barista to CEO. My organization is about 3k people and is about ~5 levels to the CEO.
I really really hate having weekly meetings with my manager (or any other manager that I had) I don't see a point, it is stressful and takes me away from my job.
More over I don't know any other developer that likes those 1 on 1 meetings with their manager.
I would love a manager that doesn't have time for them, if I would want something from him I would go to his desk and say to him, why meet?
And don't get me even started on the career development, the biggest bull*t is the whole carreer development process and how I have to write what I will do this year, what I did etc.
Are you by any chance a manager, because you sound like one :)
I had a coworker that used to say that when you have more managers than toilets, something's wrong.. To be honest the company we were working on has now laid off more than half the team!
OK, so imagine that middle-manager person stopped dealing with nonsense politics and took on a role in eng or sales or whatever. Would the nonsense politics disappear?
I honestly think it would decrease. There are more managers than management work so they start creating their own work. That applies to all roles when there are too many people. Designers will redesign constantly when they have nothing else to do, programmers will refactor evertyhing, bureaucrats will create rules.
As a way for people to feel like they understand something that they really don't. The human mind will make all kinds of contraptions (religion etc.) as an attempt to rationalize and understand the unknown. I think stereotypes serve the same purpose.
If that's your example, well then my counter is that Apple is arguably in the least innovative, most boring slump of their existence. Nothing but incremental nonsense hardware wise, a desktop OS going no where, and a mobile interface that has largely remained unchanged since 2006.
Well, the author talked about meetings after meetings, slow progress and a huge hierarchy of bosses, and you assumed they are wrong to call it bullshit because "Human nature isn't bullshit, and any endeavor which requires a large number of people to accomplish requires the management of human nature."
As if its inevitable that the "management of human nature" should necessarily take the form the author argued against.
A hierarchy of bosses is not the same thing as Dilbertesque management culture. An organization above a certain size requires managers of managers and meetings. There certainly are bad managers and bad meetings, but it is bad logic to jump from that to a dismissal of management and meetings in general.
