Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 497 posts

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

#311

Post by toyg »

9659 wrote: post #200
toyg wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically you're describing a lieutenant/sergeant relationship. The sargeant will try to give each private the same commands that the lieutenant would give, with necessary adjustments for the immediate realities of the field.

a time honored and tested management philosophy.

Indeed.

Unironically, a lot of modern war material like "Band of Brothers" is relevant to management and leadership in vertical organizations - which is what most companies are, at the end of the day.

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

#312

Post by Draiken »

incrudible wrote: post #113
agent86 wrote: post #43

Valve - the PC gaming giant and owner of Steam - is very famously a flat organization. Their Handbook for New Employees[1] that goes into detail about how they operate has made its way out into the world a few times as well. [1] - https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/Valve_NewE...

Is there any evidence that this approach outperforms? If you rest on a cash cow, basically any methodology that doesn't literally slaughter the cow is going to work out.

Isn't the fact that they're the market leader in what they do proof enough? Would they have created/found this cash cow if they were a traditional company?

People try to poke holes in their ways, yet they have made legendary games, amazing hardware and absolutely dominate the game distribution market.

Basically all of their competitors use the traditional management style. What other evidence would you expect?

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

#313

Post by gadders »

silvestrov wrote: post #291
tsimionescu wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Depends on if you are managing people or you are micromanaging people. It should be possible to manage 22 employees if you are good at setting directions and explaining why those directions have been chosen. You can have 22 people in one room and do functional group discussions, this is like a good size for a school class. 1 CEO -> 22 level A managers each level A manager -> 22 level B = 22 * 22 = 484 level B each le…

You're only talking about functional management though.

You also have to discuss 22 sets of career plans, interpersonal conflicts, hiring etc and all the other aggravation that comes with dealing with people.

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

#314

Post by tveita »

csnover wrote: post #47
huytersd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who checks on if you’ve completed your assigned work. This can only be possible in an academic/non profit environment where there are no deadlines or fixed client commitments.

By the time someone has entered the workforce it should not be necessary to be ‘checked on’ by some surrogate parental figure. In a functioning workplace, everyone agrees to do their work because it is part of the social contract of working on a team. They don’t need to be told what to do. If someone is falling behind, they’ll talk to other team members and work together to get back on track. You are there to help yo…

On the one hand, yes, of course, and on the other hand on articles about "double employment" you'll see comments basically arguing that the company deserves it if your manager isn't micromanaging you and tracking metrics enough to spot that you're phoning it in.

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

#315

Post by LightBug1 »

On the one hand, this is interesting. On the other hand, Bayer just created an organisation of middle-managers.

And what if you really need to staff up your team? Or are we just suggesting one person does everything? /s

I don't mind if there is or isn't a manager involved. I like self-organzing. What I don't like is if then leads to situations of dumping work on a person in a team because ... oh fck ... there's no manager involved to identify that more resourse is needed and advocate for that resource.

Hence all workers then become the advocates. And therefore, everyone is now managers.

This feels like the Elonisation of the work place. Fire everyone and let's see what happens.

Horseshit if you ask me, which you didn't.

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

#316

Post by master_crab »

silvestrov wrote: post #291
tsimionescu wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Depends on if you are managing people or you are micromanaging people. It should be possible to manage 22 employees if you are good at setting directions and explaining why those directions have been chosen. You can have 22 people in one room and do functional group discussions, this is like a good size for a school class. 1 CEO -> 22 level A managers each level A manager -> 22 level B = 22 * 22 = 484 level B each le…

I forgot where I read it, but a study years ago said something along the lines of 3-7 is the optimum number of direct reports someone can have.

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

#317

Post by fuzzfactor »

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…

>It's called "empire building"

No co-incidence New York is called the "Empire State"

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

#318

Post by fallingfrog »

I feel like this is the kind of thing that works great when employees care about the business and feel like it is theirs to some degree. But if they see themselves as just hired mercenaries or cogs in a machine that cares nothing about them, that’s when you need excessive management.

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

#319

Post by fuzzfactor »

doktrin wrote: post #297
sokoloff wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implicit in this is that managers should get paid more than senior devs. Why? Perhaps senior devs should get paid the same as similar-level managers, principal devs the same as similar-level managers, etc.

At my current company, management is an entry level position that recruits fresh grads. It’s essentially secretarial work under a different name. So certainly in our case there’s no justification for a manager out earning any individual contributors (but they still do, because manager).

>managers should get paid more than senior devs. Why?

Bureaucracy rules.

If almost nobody is going to be getting anywhere anyway, why not?

In a very high technology field, regardless of whether it has anything to do with computers or not, sometimes what is needed is a team of individual high-performers.

Where each member could have the same high degree of expertise in the same relevant area, or at the other end of the spectrum, unique expertise in the variety of complementary domains the project requires.

Fundamentally any one of these productive individuals could do an outstanding job (of some kind) on their own, since that's the entrance criterion.

It's not supposed to go downhill just because you have a project that needs more engineers than one.

Any one of these operators who are not already a "rock star" is just because they do not have a manager promoting them & their talents properly.

The bandleader's got to be in the band with enough talent to be respected by all the band members, and performing right there beside them when it counts most. Especially if they're all rock stars, somebody has to herd cats.

The manager needs open-ended compensation with no upside limitation, other than it can not exceed the income of a single band member, completely dependent on how well the manager promotes those under his wing and how lucrative the gigs are he gets for the band.

Otherwise no rock stars for you.

You know, how somebody really can be 10X at any time, but only if the situation is right in many ways beyond that one individual?

A good manager can bring more than that multiple to the bottom line if they concentrate on promoting & increasing the actual performers' earnings first, rather than themselves.

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

#320

Post by fuzzfactor »

andrekandre wrote: post #175

> work together on projects of their choosing for 90 days, before regrouping for their next project. am i crazy or does intuitively this sounds like a recipe for disaster? how do you provide long-term value (never mind complete a new drug?) if everything changes every 90 days?

>how do you provide long-term value

You don't.

Once you get to the point where a single financial quarter is in the same order-of-magnitude ballpark as the number of remaining quarters that could be sustained without re-capitalization, it kind of makes sense to operate everything with the same 90-day degree of granularity.

It might help to better track the ratio of expected remaining quarters to actual remaining quarters if it really gets down to it.

Of course, the shorter-term your outlook, the more likelihood that the most value-added embellishments will suffer the most, and in an inflationary environment when costs are rising unbearably, the long-term bottom line can have more downward pressure for this reason than the numerical inflation rate is imposing.

Eventually you get to the point where anything that takes more than 5 minutes just isn't going to get accomplished by anyone on any team, and there's nothing anybody can do about it.

Remember what it was like at GM when only the very top executives knew the company was heading straight for bankruptcy without some kind of a bailout?

There was no more reason to continue to build cars as well as they were before.

Everything on the vehicle doesn't have to last as long as a 5-year warranty if the company is not going to be around in 5 years anyway.

Post reply on HN