I wish I could get rid of my boss because I actually get shit done when I can just "self-organize" with my colleagues.
Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
171–180 of 497 posts
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#172The problem with too many layers of management is mainly that they stop doing what they should do. Making decisions. The lowest management layer cannot make any decisions alone, otherwise the next layer would have no reason to exist. The next layer might even have to hand over the decision to one layer above. Up there no one really understands the decision that needs to be made because they are too far away from the…
A way to sidestep this is by giving people financial authority. Say you're a team lead of half a dozen developers, so you get a blank approval for anything your team orders under 500$, 1 level of review for 500-2k$, and a third level (or HR) approval for hires and raises.
Of course, for that to work a company would have to place trust even into lowest levels of management, and that is what causes a lot of friction: people are feeling the disconnect between them being responsible on one side for the success of a contract that brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, but apparently cannot be trusted to not waste 20$ on someone who managed to drown his computer keyboard in coffee by accident, no, that has to go through three levels of approval.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#173This is going to crash and burn. Humans are tribal. We need hierarchy, whether it's defined or not. We need to know where we fit among a collection of people. At work, bureaucracy gets a bad rap because we like to cite the -bad- examples of it being executed. It's actually a very efficient way to explain someone's purpose, expectations, and tools to succeed. Ripping it out is just taking a c-level mentality of "wanti…
Tribal organization is different than hierarchy. Hierarchy is actually fairly recent; forms of it existed in terms of social class structure and rule for a few thousand years, but today's hierarchy was invented by the modern Christian church.
Humans are social animals, so we absolutely need some form of social structure to function. But how that structure must work isn't rigidly defined. What is clear, though, is that since we aren't innately rational creatures, we do need a simplistic form of governance (typically a power structure of leaders).
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#174> Stewart Butterfield, former CEO of Slack, recently described a dynamic within tech companies behind much of the over-hiring. He noted on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast in late May that when there’s no real constraint on hiring, “you hire someone, and the first thing that person wants to do is hire other people.” The reason is that “the more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in th…
Management is an utter bullshit job that is all about headcount and promo documents at this point. Society and companies can live without this.
As a manager at $megacorp, hiring and promo docs are maybe 5% of my job.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#175 > work together on projects of their choosing for 90 days, before regrouping for their next project.
how do you provide long-term value (never mind complete a new drug?) if everything changes every 90 days?
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#176> Stewart Butterfield, former CEO of Slack, recently described a dynamic within tech companies behind much of the over-hiring. He noted on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast in late May that when there’s no real constraint on hiring, “you hire someone, and the first thing that person wants to do is hire other people.” The reason is that “the more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in th…
> When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?”
Just lie. Then you will see it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not sure how to recruit for managers in a huge corporation, I don’t think even huge corporations necessarily know.
One thing’s for sure: a big difference between some ICs and Managers, at least the managers you actually want to work for, is that those most non-manager ICs seem to be really fucking bought into some very reductive points of view.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#177A boss-less company seems ridiculous to me. Too many bosses is a problem, but so is too few.
People don't seem to understand that good bosses are partners, not tyrants. Their job is to ensure that you can do yours efficiently. Remove the boss and you will spend way too much time trying to find things to do, only to realize the other guy is doing them too, or do things you are no good at instead of doing the things you do best.
I think there has been experiments by communists of boss-less organizations, as it fits the ideology, but it didn't work well. Communism in practice becomes even more "bossy" than capitalism.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#178Self-organizing still leads to bosses, but they just get paid like regular workers. My company does this sort of thing but with dev chapter leads. The chapter leads have no management training and no authority. They don't even really know what you're doing since they're on a separate team and have their own coding work. They're senior devs that have added management responsibilities and are just paid as senior devs.…
I had this job except I didn’t even get paid as a senior dev.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#179> Stewart Butterfield, former CEO of Slack, recently described a dynamic within tech companies behind much of the over-hiring. He noted on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast in late May that when there’s no real constraint on hiring, “you hire someone, and the first thing that person wants to do is hire other people.” The reason is that “the more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in th…
Most companies will have a counter force, the 'cutter'. The 'cutter's compensation is tied to how much they cut. Of course, they will also need a team, to more efficiently cut other teams. And they in turn will also be incentivized to grow their team, the manager of the cutting team isn't immune to wanting to grow their team. But then it gets up to CEO, who has someone reporting to them who's only goal is cutting. Th…
When I was at Intel 10+ years ago, they had this down to an art. They had a name for it, like, "the pool"; they'd reorg all the time. Everyone went into the pool, then the mgrs would pick teams. Your actual progress through your career was loosely tied to how quickly you were chosen. Especially bad IC's never got out of the pool; if you didn't have a req (or title) then you were let go after a year. This had the nice effect that mgrs rarely had to terminate employees: just wait for the reorg & don't pick out the bad ICs.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
In general I agree, but Prodigy-level people can come with their own challenges too. Eg. They're going to be coming up with a million ideas for how to improve things, so you'd better be prepared to listen and support them, which often will require changing the way the organisation works. If you don't (or can't) support them, be prepared for them to get demotivated quickly and move on. The other 90% are generally a li…
First: > so you'd better be prepared to listen and support them ... is in my opinion basic management 101. --- Concerning your other points: I do believe that I at least somewhat know how to work with such people (though I never managed such people). For example, at a former job, I worked under such people; they really liked me, because I was one of the few people who were actually capable of "understanding" their vi…
Part of building an effective team is picking the right tool for the job, and your assertion that ‘genius’-wrangling is always justified / ‘the best thing to do’ is just plain wrong, no matter how much you try to justify it with…what basically sounds like Dunning Kruger self-flattery.
GP is right. So-called geniuses have their own problems. Problems that can’t just be ‘managed away’, just like you can’t completely ‘manage away’ some other types of poor fit. To say otherwise sounds like the sort of elite technical ability fetishism that, ironically, I’d expect from an IC.
If this has worked for you so far, it’s by coincidence.