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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’

#371

Post by randomdata »

tsimionescu wrote: post #245
smcleod wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d argue your team really shouldn’t grow too big if you want to remain effective. 4-8 people seems to be the sweet spot in my experience.

The truly difficult bit is making an organization with 100 or 1000 different 4-8 people teams to build something more complex. There is a vast array of problems that need solving that just can't be tackled by one 4-8 person team.

It turns out that nothing in life can be tackled by one 4-8 person team. We are all heavily dependent on each other to build the complex things we have. Our solution to make that work at the macroeconomic scale is to employ a service model.

The solution to which you speak is microservices. No, not some misguided multi-process IPC technology model that seems to have tried to usurp the name, I mean real microservices. The people model. Where each 4-8 person team continues to act if they are an independent businesses, even if they legally work for a single organization.

It's not particularly difficult. The macro economy, which operates at an unfathomably larger scale, shows how easy it is. But, indeed, it can be uncomfortable for some people to not feel like they have full control over an organization.

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

#372

Post by bane »

karaterobot wrote: post #121
smcleod wrote: post #12

I’ve worked in an environment where there are no managers for 4 1/2 years and it’s been fantastic. Here’s to getting rid of them in most (but certainly not all!) places.

I've gone the other way! I used to be strongly against managers. I drooled over that Valve manual describing the flat hierarchy, etc., and I would have honestly said that managers in general were a parasite that had latched on to the software industry. That's honestly what I felt. Now I work at a place with not enough managers to go around, and my team basically has 25% of a PM's time, and no dedicated department hea…

It's funny, I just wrote your exact experience in another reply as a hypothetical scenario.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114530

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

#373

Post by sevensor »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #161
pyuser583 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been fortunate to have some very good managers. That’s why I find this idea so horrible. I wouldn’t be where I am now if I had to “self-organize.”

>I’ve been fortunate to have some very good managers. Every time I've seen this sentiment and asked for something concrete on what made them good managers I get answered with platitudes or "nice-isms." At this point in my career, the emperor has no clothes. There are no good managers, only good peers.

Having worked in both very flat and very hierarchical organizations, I can tell you exactly what makes a good manager. Any manager, good or bad, is an information bottleneck. Managers have more organizational exposure and are thus a much bigger target for communication. The good ones filter out noise and help you prioritize your work.

The problem I have with less hierarchical organizations is that when you have only one layer of middle management, middle management gets squeezed between executives and individual contributors and tends to burn out. Even worse with zero layers, where individual contributors are expected to self-manage. Communication overhead ends up eating most of the productive hours of the day.

The empire-building problem with more hierarchical organizations is already well explored in this thread, but communications are also a problem. With too many layers, organizational alignment suffers, and silos develop even if the managers involved are uniformly well-intentioned.

There's an underappreciated upside to silos, however, which is that functional parts of the organization can end up insulated from dysfunctional ones. In flat organizations, dysfunction anywhere is dysfunction everywhere.

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

#374

Post by Mordisquitos »

osigurdson wrote: post #341
arkh wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good manager is simple to see: success is the team's, failure is their fault. If it is not the case, you have a bad manager.

What is so amazing about someone who throws themselves under the bus? Shouldn't a manager increase the probability of success?

Hence why a good manager "throws themselves under the bus" in the event of failure — the manager failed to increase the probability of success.

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

#375

Post by Centigonal »

bane wrote: post #362
silvestrov wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Middle management time breaks down like this: - 40-60% trying to figure out how to turn large strategic goals into projects digestible by your staff - 20-30% coordinating up to get permission and sync with senior management, and then coordinate workshare with your peers - 20-30% coordinating with your staff - 75% of your time then gets sunk into squishy people problem stuff most people would call "HR problems" "But t…

Golden post. I'm a manager at a company that was mostly flat for most of its existence, but is starting to add management as we grow. Middle managers are evil and bad until you find out why you need them. Much better to bite the bullet and design a system with clear roles and good incentives past a certain head count.

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

#376

Post by mattgreenrocks »

_heimdall wrote: post #225
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.

If a successful CEO says it, it is definitely insightful.

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

#377

Post by wizzwizz4 »

incrudible wrote: post #342
Draiken wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A sample of one isn't enough, and in any event their success is not reproducible. They had a major title in Half Life 2, convincing people to install Steam, but that was their last major title and it is not clear that they used this process at the time. Going forward: Someone else created Counter Strike, someone else created DoTA, someone else created Portal, someone else created Team Fortress, someone else create Le…

> someone else created Portal,

A team created Narbacular Drop, and that same team then worked on Portal as part of Valve. It's not "someone else" by any stretch.

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

#378

Post by mattgreenrocks »

neilv wrote: post #120
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?”, and they won’t be impressed when you say “I managed to keep it down to four people” I had this same interaction when applying for Staff+ software engineer (not manager) at two FAANGs. One of the recruiters sniffed, or maybe negged, and said they expected X number people under you for that role. Highly effective small teams was…

> One of the recruiters sniffed, or maybe negged, and said they expected X number people under you for that role.

Ridiculous. Essentially saying the staff role is management in all but name.

> Highly effective small teams was considered small-time, not a selling point. Also not-OK was leading engineering for an early startup. Nor was a cross-company Principal role interfacing with everyone.

Hilarious they insist on holding ICs feet to the fire for hiring while letting their own culture wither away to petty little fiefdoms.

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

#379

Post by novagameco »

_heimdall wrote: post #227
_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…

At my last company, managers success was defined by their reports success, so if we didn't achieve our KPIs by the end of the quarter, my manager would say "You worked really hard this quarter, and I want to make sure you get your full bonus!" then he would just lower the KPI metrics until we achieve ~80% of them (because our CEO believed if you are achieving more than 80% of your goals, then your goals aren't ambitious enough)

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

#380

Post by jeffwask »

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 also dovetails nicely with the old, "If you don't spend all your budget, you lose it next year" management strategy. I can't count the number of times over my career where I heard a boss say, "we need to spend the rest of this before end of year."
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