Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience

I worked for a lot of different managers in my career, both good and bad. At one point I was team lead, but didn't like it too much.

It always comes down to this (in technology): A good manager serves his team, a bad manager thinks his team serves him.

A good manager realises that his team members know more about the tech than he does (even if he is technical). To get estimates, he asks the people who know.

A good manager makes sure each team member can stay focussed on their job.

I didn't like being team lead too much, because I don't like administration, and I don't like to handle shit that you don't want to distract your team. At the end of the day, I was always happy when I could write code. Therefore I leave the 'shit' job for someone who likes it, but I'm glad some people prefer the other.

> If managers fail because the role is too hard for them, we can't expect to get better people, we need to make the role easier

Or maybe we need to start recognizing that engineering management is a thing that has value, requires training, and is distinct from being an engineer with a strong personality.

It's telling to me that rather than elevate the role you're more inclined to destroy it.

> Their essay makes a positive contribution to the conversation

If this weren't a post-Zappos, post-Github, post-Uber world it might. As such it reads like a stale take from 2009, to me. But sure, we can just ignore the cycle of failure in the industry and keep writing the same stale think pieces. Hey check out my fresh new monad tutorial while you're at it, Monads are like burrito aquaducts where the black beans and delicious salsa flow from computation to computation across the continent.

> You're putting the cart before the horse there; in my experience a vertically-layered "microservice organization" like you describe is the product of overmanagement (Conway's law in action).

I've described, with the most pessimistic lens, 2 layers of management to the top of your company, with a focus on team collaboration. Having managers with strong engineering experience and technical sympathy decreases the depth of your organization, it doesn't increase it.

Please don't misrepresent my argument in your rush to dump on the idea of management.

> You don't need a deep technical roadmap, only a product roadmap, because you integrate with other teams at the product level, not the deep technical level. Even in the presence of relatively good management I've found that that's what works best. Think Amazon's famous "platform memo".

Funny then how Amazon has technical management. But as an example of planning, imagine a platform team runs a flight of APIs. There are multiple clients to these APIs all shipping products. Each has their own feature needs. If those teams collaborate on dependencies and optimize around what they need, everyone gets what they need faster. Not coordinating or planning provides a random outcome in a space dominated by sub-optimal outcomes.

> Engineering matters, but planning of engineering has been a counterproductive activity every time I've seen it attempted. Planning and management should be done at the feature level; when it comes to the technical "architecture", trust your technical professionals to figure it out themselves

This entire discussion is predicated on the notion that your managers are technical professionals facilitating this. It's weird how many people refuse to accept the idea that people can exist, while in the same forum glorifying hybrid roles like startup CTOs in the same forum who are obligated to do a lot of management functions AND be the basis of a strong technical department.

P.S., I apologise for the brevity and potential grammar errors. I wrote this on mobile, figuring a prompt response was more useful than an expansive response.

I'm thinking about starting a tech cooperative where the members work on startup ideas [1]. Every member will have complete control to work on whatever they want, and there will be no managers or deadlines. I want to work with people who have enough motivation to fix broken tests and bugs by themselves. It's much easier when it's your own product.

This might not be the most effective way to run a company, but the members will all be self-sufficient, and we'll support ourselves with part-time contract work. Or some might have a full-time job and work on side-projects in their spare time. Eventually we might make enough money to pay for our living expenses.

The projects could be anything, and at the beginning we would focus on revenue. SaaS services, mobile apps, games, open source projects with some paid features (e.g. Sidekiq), or buying some websites from flippa.com.

Once we start making a bit of money, we can shift focus to non-profit work, and fun projects that are purely creative. I have a big list of things that I'd love to work on, and some of them are just fun ideas that won't make any money. But who knows, maybe those experiences will shine light on some new product ideas.

I want to find people who love learning and building things in their spare time. And I want to start a company where all the time is spare time. That's not to say that spare time is always fun. Responsible people use their spare time to do chores and fix stuff around the house. You wouldn't want to live with a roommate who always leaves dishes in the sink and leaves their clothes all over the floor. I want to work with independent people who don't need that kind of management, and build a lot of interesting things together.

[1] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScfFzyzCWPresTMPSb4...

Junior to mid-level.

The individual tasks a manager does are important - my point is they can be handled under many different roles.

All of those roles are quite different from the traditional manager - for example none of those "managers" had strong authority over the developers day to day work the way a manager typically would. Nor did they speak on behalf of the developers.