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’

#231

Post by jmopp » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 5:22 AM UTC

jncfhnb wrote: post #134

fizx wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, sometime middle-manager here. The goal isn't to have me make decisions, its to let people around me make decisions quickly and well enough that most of the time it works out, and when it doesn't, we can roll back easily. If this isn't working out, I hire experts to improve the quality of decision-making, with me making decisions as a last resort.

So… the goal is for you to do nothing? Except not impede people making decisions and hiring consultants when you, not the person closer to the issue, thinks it’s not working?

It's kind of like how the north star for a programmer is to automate themselves out of the job. A good manager will bring the best out of their reports, which leads to making good decisions and executing on them.

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

#232

Post by smetj » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 5:27 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…

> handle the install for a piece of software that like 2 engineers used.

Ah yes .. current prios remain in place, more context switching, operational ownership, unplanned fallout, holidays, meetings ... cutting the pie in more pieces does not give you more pie ... people still seem to think that ...

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

#233

Post by gryn » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 5:32 AM UTC

kjkjadksj wrote: post #226

datascienced wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Until they become the sole group that does X (Officially), and other groups realize that having them do a simple task related to X is way more hassles and months of wait time so each team just build their own unofficial X or try to circumvent it from day 0.

I'm not say this or that method is better just pointing out what I've seen so far through different companies. Not all work is the same priority but if you try to reprioritize then you can enter the endless quagmire of inter-department/group politics than involve a lot of useless meetings. And a simple FIFO queue can be equally as problematic.

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

#234

Post by throw156754228 » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 5:37 AM UTC

Rinzler89 wrote: post #103

7thaccount wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the manager is the agent and is assumed to have the firm's best interests in mind, but in reality doesn't. Every manager I had at every major multinational company only had the interest of their own career progression in mind, not the company's, not their team's. You as an employee under them were just a means to their goal, nothing more. I naively assumed that making them look good and doing the overtime when need…

I meet the idiotic deadlines, but then just take sick day(s) to make up for the ot.

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

#235

Post by lifeisstillgood » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 5:44 AM UTC

I agree that “managers” are these days mostly a legacy from Industrial Revolution. Supervisors at every few dozen people was a solution for armies and factories where the human does all the work. As those workers “do what they are told” and do not “leave the farm” you can call it feudalism if you want.

But now the CPU does all the work so the coders are the new managers

Yes we need fewer supervisor-managers, because we have / need fewer workers. Bauer thinks they just need a few brilliant chemists who can use AI to find that new protein. They might be right.

But there is a flaw - they still Want the cash to flow upwards. They still see owning the capital as the right to get the returns to capital. They still want feudalism, but with fewer grabbing barons.

Bauer seems to have missed the point that self-organising is democracy.

That equal say means equal share

That letting smart mission driven people organise will likely lead to better results around the mission, but also lead to them asking “why aren’t we getting better paid, and who is taking all the money?”

FDR was called a traitor to his class. Or a hero for democracy.

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

#236

Post by WWLink » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 5:49 AM UTC

jurschreuder wrote: post #148

rqtwteye wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for technology used. You won’t get much credit for keeping costs down and keeping things simple. The real money is in developing super complex systems. That will give you respect.

Yes, this is my mantra. Senior Only-Developers are attracted to complex problems and try to make things using as many language from the "advanced" book as possible. That's why I like all-round developers better, they have a bit less to prove by making "smart and complicated" code.

> That's why I like all-round developers better, they have a bit less to prove by making "smart and complicated" code.

I thought we all agreed the best kinda code is the stuff you can debug at 3am. While drunk.

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

#237

Post by kqr » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 5:49 AM UTC

kjkjadksj wrote: post #226

datascienced wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FIFO is not an efficient way to prioritise work, though. Unless all work has about the same value and urgency, in which case, I guess, that sounds nice.

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

#238

Post by WWLink » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 5:55 AM UTC

thechao wrote: post #179

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nic…

That sounds like google's 'team matching' process lol.

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

#239

Post by jongjong » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 5:55 AM UTC

This sounds like a great time to be working at Bayer. What's going to happen though is that this will open up an internal power-grab and then whatever structure comes out of that will remain around for a while.

That said, my gut tells me there is a good chance that whatever structure it ends up might be more efficient than top-down selection. My experience of top-down selection is absolutely horrible. The outcomes are worse than random.

They probably already already did some internal studies to ascertain that teams of professionals could operate autonomously without management... And if they can, it makes sense that managers could only get in the way. You don't need managers if you have the right incentive structure.

Most of what managers do is threaten and allocate punishment. Studies have shown that positive reinforcement is more effective at guiding behaviors than negative reinforcement. What kind of positive reinforcement can one get from a manager aside from a worthless pat on the back? Any employees today actually value that? Better cut out the managers and dangle big bonuses in front of the employees directly. The CEO at the top can save all the pats on the back for themselves!

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

#240

Post by tsimionescu » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 5:58 AM UTC

hasoleju wrote: post #106

The 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…

There is some limit to how many people you can manage effectively. So, in a company with, say, 10,000 employees, you can't have just one layer of management between COs and ICs. You'd either need each manager to work with 500 direct reports, or you'd need the COs to work with 500 managers. If we look at 100,000 employee orgs, this gets even sillier.

If you even attempt something like this, what will actually happen will be a chaotic hierarchy arising within the larger group, with people playing politics to rise above their peers.

Edit: I should add that I absolutely believe a bottom-up organization can work, but it needs to be built with the right organizational model in place. You can't just say "no managers" and expect people to work directly for the CEO. You can put in place rules so that employees can self-organize, appoint representatives to interact with other teams, vote for collective decision making and so on. But this typically requires a huge power loss for the C-suite and owners, which is why it's very unlikely to work well outside of a co-op.