Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’ • Hacker News Board

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#201

Post by noirbot » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:14 AM UTC

sureglymop wrote: post #198

noirbot wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, as someone who is more outspoken and has passible soft skills, I often find myself accidentally becoming team leads in ways that often end up making me a worse engineer. If I'm the only person who understands the work and can express it in legible english, I end up writing all the tickets because the Project Manager can't do it as well as me. I end up leading meetings because I understand the architecture reason…

Don't play the hero. Unless you want to get rewarded with even more work. Do the job you are assigned to or ask for a raise.

Sure, I'm aware of it, but having your team abjectly fail isn't good for your continued job prospects either. You shouldn't be the hero, but you also don't want to have your team get fired for want of you spending 2 hours of work a week keeping it on track.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#202

Post by sowbug » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:28 AM UTC

7thaccount wrote: post #100

bjornsing wrote: post #34

> 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…

It's called "empire building" and is also part of the principal-agent problem where the manager is the agent and is assumed to have the firm's best interests in mind, but in reality doesn't. As a result, the principal (for example an owner) has to come up with methods to keep their management honest (example... tying most compensation to stock price - although I think this just makes management short sighted). I was…

A common miscommunication in an R&D organization is asking another team to do a task, and getting the reply that they're willing to do the task if you provide headcount. You're not asking them to grow their team in perpetuity. You're asking them to reprioritize their existing work to accommodate one request.

(I know this isn't really a miscommunication. It's misaligned incentives leading to an exasperating kind of logrolling.)

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#203

Post by chasd00 » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:28 AM UTC

Self organization works when every single person is ambitious enough to try to do something, brave enough to speak up and be heard, and humble enough to admit they could be wrong and be willing to compromise. No company is full of unicorns by definition. Self organization the scale of Bayer is doomed to fail and so obvious that I suspect it is part of some larger ulterior strategic plan.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#204

Post by mynameisnoone » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:31 AM UTC

Sort of works if you start that way. Meta sort of does this by putting the onus of creating and working on the right project on individual contributors. This is sort of product and project management evasion of division of labor by making everyone shoulder the burden of a cross-cutting concern without any help. Similar to getting rid of secretaries and personal assistants when some leaders aren't good at time management, scheduling, remembering people or events, or being the least bit organized... certain people plus the right personal assistant can comprise an immensely productive and impactful team like a superorganism.

Drastically changing who holds priorities and assists with unblocking company-interfacing issues isn't leadership, it's anarchy without setting a tone or a direction. It just sounds like the leadership class doesn't have a clue what they're doing and will try a reorg and another layoff should the continued beatings not have the desired effect.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#205

Post by leverknudel_tw » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:32 AM UTC

shinryuu wrote: post #158

leverknudel_tw wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm here at Bayer right now and that is pretty much what is happening. The RIFs are finishing up and my team leader is now my peer. Our boss now has 10x the reports. Even a 30 minute 1:1 with everyone would take his entire week. And some people just need (or want ) to be told what to do. You can't have everyone be a Steve Jobs and dream up things with nothing concrete getting done. I believe this is just a smokescree…

Who thought buying Monsanto was a good idea to begin with? Lawsuits were bound to happen. Monsanto has been highprofile for ages, and not in a good way.

Monsanto was a 15 billion revenue dollar company in the same market (ag seeds and products) as 50 billion revenue Bayer. Werner thought he could handle the baggage. The US tort system is proving him wrong.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#206

Post by mcmoor » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:33 AM UTC

bjornsing wrote: post #34

> 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…

The other side of the point is that having manager with small team means those manager need managers, which means another layer. Big team manager means flatter hierarchy which may be desired by everyone.

But yeah following Goodhart's law it's bad if it makes managers hire new people instead of vanquishing other managers and taking other employees under their direct command.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#207

Post by op00to » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:33 AM UTC

bjornsing wrote: post #34

> 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…

Managers want to hire more people because teams are way under-staffed. I’ve never worked on a team that had enough people to do the important things with leeway for sickness vacation and turnover. Maybe there is empire building going on, but I think it’s deeper than that.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#208

Post by leverknudel_tw » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:35 AM UTC

braiamp wrote: post #21

b112 wrote: post #17

There seems to be a bit of over-correct going on here: When Anderson took the helm last June, he learned that the company’s rules and procedures handbook was longer than War and Peace. and “It’s just too hard to get ideas approved, or you have to consult with so many people to make anything happen.” So sure, makes sense that there needs to be some correction. Yet basically it seems that they're just tossing everythin…

If you continue to read further down you will read this: > Employees of Bayer’s consumer health division have already gotten a taste of this new structure—they’re being shown how to practically sign off on one another’s ideas without a manager in sight. This worked in a limited fashion and showed corporate the results they wanted. Now they will do this company wide.

It was a case study in some vitamin packaging. Radically different than introducing a new chemotherapy molecule.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#209

Post by mvkel » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:39 AM UTC

throwaway984393 wrote: post #173

mvkel wrote: post #168

This 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 tha…

Thanks for this etymology. I went down a deep wiki hole!

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#210

Post by CalChris » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:54 AM UTC

MForster wrote: post #45

refurb wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically what tech has been doing for a while. Or at least a derivation of it. Agile, self-managed team, "retrospectives", "scrums". At least that's how it was sold to my employer when they had the same change not long ago. "This is what Google does and they are innovative. Don't you want to be innovative like Google?" Checks all the boxes a CEO wants to hear.

This is not at all what Google does, though.

It is, however, what Google tried.

https://medium.com/illumination/google-once-fired-all-manage...