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

fortune.com

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

#221

Post by duped »

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…

> When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?”

My father used to tell me he preferred to ask 'what did you build' or 'what did your team accomplish' instead.

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

#222

Post by aorloff »

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 counteracting force is to align business ownership with headcount

So if you handle $$$ worth of book, you get $$$ worth of headcount to keep that going

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

#223

Post by Rebelgecko »

jdlshore wrote: post #129
duskwuff wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve is also fairly bad at maintaining focus on smaller projects. High-profile green-field projects like Steam Deck are fine, but lower priority tasks, particularly maintenance work, suffer. (For example, most of Valve's first-party games - including major titles like Half-Life and Portal - have been unplayable on macOS for nearly five years because there's no 64-bit build.)

I’m on not saying you’re wrong, but old games don’t really count as evidence of lack of maintenance. Games generally don’t receive maintenance unless there’s an ongoing revenue model, which there isn’t for Half-Life and Portal.

TF2 and hats?

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

#224

Post by bottle_roket »

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…

FYI using the words “chief” and “tribe” to emphasize “primitiveness” is pretty cringe.

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

#225

Post by _heimdall »

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…

I'm not sure why this article bothers attributing this insight to the former Slack CEO, this dynamic is nothing new and was a problem well before Slack or the current round of tech companies were around.

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

#226

Post by kjkjadksj »

datascienced wrote: post #213
sowbug wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

There are not many options. Headcount might help (secondment, overtime, contractors, move from another team, new hire) or pushing other work back (or cancelling it, reducing scope) or saying no (find a workaround, go without it). I might of missed it but there is only so much you can do. A win win might be showing how doing X now is not worth it because event Y makes X obsolete or less valuable.

You can just have a queue. I’ve seen departments that basically function as an internal vendor of services to other departments. First in first out. Fixed schedule to expect turn around on most requests. No one complains. Seems quite pragmatic and fair.

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

#227

Post by _heimdall »

_the_inflator wrote: post #127

I am not convinced. Reading the whole article it seems that Bayer is moving to a system better known as QBR, mixed with OKRs and most likely some sort of agile model. There is no no-hierarchies. Working in a 3 month cadence on an organizational level puts a lot of pressure on all people. Usually QBRs work top down and there is more monitoring along the process. What sounds great is more or less success theatre as wel…

I'm been really frustrated by OKRs specifically. The whole system does a great job of appearing to empower a bottom up approach while actually being implemented as a top down, authoritarian system.

It sounds great to be metric and goal driven, allowing employees to decide for themselves how to best reach those business goals. I've never seem it implemented this way though. Instead, I've seen leaders define goals and solutions together, paired with a list of metrics used to define success so specifically that annual reviews and layoffs become an almost mathematical, robotic process.

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

#228

Post by kjkjadksj »

newsclues wrote: post #196
doctorpangloss wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 IC…

Be honest and communicate a superior vision. “My core team is always small but is capable of networking and scaling with other expert teams, in order to manage large projects”

Don’t hate the player, hate the game

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

#229

Post by stuzenz »

jmspring wrote: post #107
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…

Stuart describes one type of mentality. I’ve recently joined a small company as the senior person. My goal is to understand our deliverables, our timing, and can we do it? In enterprise companies like the one I recently left, management is incentivized to kiss up try and do more with less, but wants more people to buttress their role as well as help determine the role above them. My prior boss in this same organizati…

I like your nuanced observation here. It reminds me of a quote I come back to often when I am seeing toxic behaviour in some organisations.

> Dysfunctional behaviour is ubiquitous and systemic, not because people are wicked but because the requirement to serve the hierarchy competes with the requirements to serve customers. People's ingenuity is engaged in survival, not improvement.

- Freedom from Command & Control, John Seddon

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

#230

Post by throwaway2037 »

arwhatever wrote: post #155
giantg2 wrote: post #128

Self-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.…

Reminds me a bit of that Tyranny of Structurelessness essay, well worth a read.

I never heard of it before this discussion. Here is a link that I found on Google: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
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