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’

#381

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:32 PM UTC

kqr wrote: post #237

kjkjadksj wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you are an specialized department, insulated from the organizational goals, and circled by people that only speak in riddles, FIFO is the best you can do.

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

#382

Post by tsimionescu » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:34 PM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #371

tsimionescu wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 macro economy is dominated by gigantic conglomerates that try to own and integrate a significant amount of their entire supply chains - think General Electric, Mitsubishi, Samsung. Small to Medium Enterprises have a few niches where they work (restaurants and other service industries being the largest by far), but they play a relatively small role and are not normally part of any supply chain, they only really work at the very end of the chain.

Similarly, building a whole product out of pure microservices with teams that barely coordinate with each other beyond maintaining their APIs doesn't really work. There is very much a place for such microservices for certain well understood problems (authentication being probably the clearest), but for most domain specific work you need far more coordination than that to truly evolve a complex product.

For example, you can't build a computer game in this model. A modern 3D engine requires far more than 4-8 people, and there is no clean separation between pieces to afford this. And even if there were, there is no One True Way to build one: the teams designing the 3D engine need to communicate with the teams building the game engine and the game designers themselves and the artists to achieve a cohesive whole. A 100-person project just can't (always) be modeled as 15 4-8-person projects.

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

#383

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:41 PM UTC

WWLink wrote: post #236

jurschreuder wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Evidently a lot of people disagree.

Otherwise, we wouldn't see the recurrent explosion of overhyped technologies that create complexity without any providing any benefit at all.

(I really don't understand the mechanism where reasonable ideas become those memes, but their existence is undeniable.)

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

#384

Post by rybosworld » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:44 PM UTC

greatpostman wrote: post #350

lordnacho wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But sadly there just is no counteracting force Does nobody get tired of managing a huge army? Or do they just all assume they can delegate it, like an HR pyramid scheme?

The big secret is managing a bunch of people is easier than doing grunt work

Depends on the company a bit. The older a company is, the more it accumulates the sorts of people who equate management with cracking a whip. This is the laziest form of management and also the least effective. It's incredibly common, though.

There are some really talented managers out there. The sort of folks you want to work for. You'll find more of these at younger companies.

But the harsh/unfortunate reality is corporate culture generously rewards managers in spite of their effectiveness (lack thereof).

Empire building is probably the single biggest drain on the global economy. The good news is it seems to be getting more attention and companies (Bayer, Meta for example) are taking action to combat it.

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

#385

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:44 PM UTC

stuff4ben wrote: post #349

matwood wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. I find that limiting headcount is a great forcing function for only doing what's important. The classic example is Google making X different chat apps. That doesn't happen unless a company is severely overstaffed.

To me that really just screams lazy and incompetent management. Being overstaffed is just a coincidence. A good mgmt structure would have prioritized that roadmap and gotten the cats herded to work towards a singular goal/chat app. I say this as a "cat" myself who has to be reminded to not get distracted by the next shiny thing.

> Being overstaffed is just a coincidence.

I'd say it's not. But causality is the reverse of the GP's.

Being overstaffed is a consequence of not prioritizing the work. Either the staff grows until the important things get done, or the organization shrinks because the important stuff doesn't get done.

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

#386

Post by randomdata » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:48 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #382

randomdata wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 macro economy is dominated by gigantic conglomerates that try to own and integrate a significant amount of their entire supply chains - think General Electric, Mitsubishi, Samsung. Small to Medium Enterprises have a few niches where they work (restaurants and other service industries being the largest by far), but they play a relatively small role and are not normally part of any supply chain, they only really wo…

> the teams designing the 3D engine need to communicate with the teams building the game engine and the game designers themselves and the artists to achieve a cohesive whole.

Sure, just as they need to communicate to the farmer what food needs to be grown in order to ensure that the right food shows up on their dinner table. These are solved problems, though. We already know how to do incredibly complex things at scale.

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

#387

Post by mountainriver » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:56 PM 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…

Wanting to grow isn’t a bad thing, the excess falls on the execs who approve the budgets. If your team has good economics then you should grow, if it doesn’t then the execs shouldn’t be funding it.

Lot of companies have terrible exec teams that are out of touch with the company

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

#388

Post by fuzzfactor » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:57 PM UTC

vsnf wrote: post #334

fuzzfactor wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's called "empire building" No co-incidence New York is called the "Empire State"

What is this supposed to imply about New York?

I would say the bureaucracies of New York City set an early example for lots of other places.

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

#389

Post by theptip » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:58 PM UTC

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…

The flex reply here is to say how much value you created with your small team. Everyone is familiar with Instagram being acquired for $1B at 13 employees, and that track record would be sufficient to carry you a long way even if you did nothing more after.

If that doesn’t work for a given company, well, interviews go two ways :)

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

#390

Post by tsimionescu » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:59 PM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #386

tsimionescu wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The macro economy is dominated by gigantic conglomerates that try to own and integrate a significant amount of their entire supply chains - think General Electric, Mitsubishi, Samsung. Small to Medium Enterprises have a few niches where they work (restaurants and other service industries being the largest by far), but they play a relatively small role and are not normally part of any supply chain, they only really wo…

> the teams designing the 3D engine need to communicate with the teams building the game engine and the game designers themselves and the artists to achieve a cohesive whole. Sure, just as they need to communicate to the farmer what food needs to be grown in order to ensure that the right food shows up on their dinner table. These are solved problems, though. We already know how to do incredibly complex things at sca…

No, it is nowhere near like that. Food is a particularly bad example, as the food industry is extremely wasteful overall, with a huge percentage of all food produced being thrown away at all levels of the production chain all the way to the final consumer.

In addition, most companies that package food in various ways, including major restaurants, either own or contract farming business for specific quantities of specific crops ahead of time, spending large amounts of time to negotiate contracts to this effect, and sometimes working even closer when a particular result is required.

If you find yourself craving Mongolian food one night, you may often simply find that none is available, at any price you are willing to pay, unless you worked with someone to make some months in advance. And conversely if you open a Mongolian restaurant, you may just not find any customers for it and waste significant money on it. (substitute Mongolian with any other food that is not commonly eaten or even thought about in your area)