Nazi company.
Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
431–440 of 497 posts
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
22 is so many direct reports. If my supervisor had 22 direct reports. I'd just check out mentally because I know I wouldn't get any real face time with them to discuss issues. Skip manager attention? Forget it. With 22 direct reports, you're not there to add your expertise and make the process better, but to be a cog in the machine.
22 is a reasonable class size for childhood schooling, and every single teacher ever has a clear and everpresent understanding of which kids "get it" or are gifted, and which kids are the problem. They are usually able to get face time with the kids that need it, and they do that to nearly entirely new kids every single year. Good teachers have a strong rapport with their students, and a tangible relationship with ea…
22 is a dreadfully huge class size and only "works" to the extent that we ignore all of the children that fall through the cracks. Teachers have nowhere near enough time to have personal time with the problem children that need it.
Children either excel, tread water, or fall behind. Children who fell behind once will most likely drop out of the school system entirely, unless it was for some very specific temporary reason, or their parents can afford private tutoring.
A school system that really wanted to make every child excel would probably need class sizes of 4-8, but that is well outside the realm of possibility.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they'd picked some older quote from someone else saying similar, someone still would complain that the idea predates them, right back to Socrates. I don't see it claiming it's some deep novel insight, it's just someone prominent who said something recently that's salient to the point.
I may just being nitpicky here. With such a commonly understood, and old, concept it doesn't need ant attribution. Name dropping a random CEO just feels like a cheap addition to get eyes on an article.
I suppose it kind of is, or an 'appeal to authority', I just don't see that as necessarily bad, it's just like 'don't take my word for it, someone you might actually have heard of or in an important position said blah'.
Proper journalists and newspapers spend plenty of time quoting politicians and senior employees making obvious or previously said remarks too.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#434> 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…
My wife observed that in large orgs, headcount is currency. People constantly looking to justify headcount so they can say they have a 10-person org, a 50-person org, a 100-person org. I've seen managers get buy-in to spin up a new department to build a tool they could buy off the shelf for the price of 2 or 3 people. I'm constantly reminded of Mitt Romney's old saw, "corporations are people". Just an admixture of irrational, vain, fallible people. The successful ones make fewer mistakes than the rest.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that you do need explicit integration and cooperation. And you often have way more than 4-8 people working on one of these contracts to even define the terms. And again, most real companies own most of their supply chain, they don't depend on a hundred different suppliers at every level like you seem to be suggesting. And they do this because it's FAR more efficient to have a large monolithic team build…
> The point is that you do need explicit integration and cooperation. Obviously. Like we said, no 4-8 person team is building anything by themselves. For one, most obviously, they'd starve to death if they even tried. Integration and cooperation are literally what defines an economy. > most real companies own most of their supply chain As opposed to fake companies, that have no supply chain, with them being fake and…
> As opposed to fake companies, that have no supply chain, with them being fake and all?
I should have said "companies that can afford to".
> How can you know? The problems needed to be solved to see that through were stated to be unsolved. Was there some breakthrough in the past 10 hours that you haven't mentioned and the rest of us missed?
Because I can look at the price of goods versus their cost. A company that owns the production chain for a sub-component is paying the cost of that component, while a company that doesn't pays the market price.
Also, markets only work if you have competing suppliers for the same product. This in itself is extremely wasteful for software, so trying to maintain an internal market of software where multiple teams build the same service and compete with each other on who has a better version is crazy when there is any alternative.
Again we can see this from the software market: most companies not only don't build an internal market in house to have, say, the best OS, but they actually found that even supporting an external market is wasteful. Instead of buying Solaris or Windows or OS/2, they started collaborating on Linux (and clang, and MySQL, and Kubernetes and others).
But these are not built as a marketplace of microservices. They are built as monoliths with large teams working to add features and collaborating relying on a hierarchy of maintainers to merge them together in a cohesive whole, or on a more elaborate committee system.
So again, I don't see any proof whatsoever that building a company or a product in general out of a marketplace of dozens or hundreds of very small teams has ever worked beyond maybe some niche cases.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#436Using Meta as a source of good management is a fallacy that needs to be tackled. Meta has only managed to release one new "domestic" product since facebook advertising (threads) and only one of the features released on the main apps has stuck (reels) there is no strategic direction at meta, its a mass of noise, poor project management and bloated orgs craving for any metric of success other than what makes the user h…
Do you use Instagram much? Stories and Live have become such integral parts of the platform, for some people that's all they use it for. No posts, no reels, just ephemeral content. One sector of a company bringing in the lion's share of the revenue isn't necessarily a red flag, it's actually the case for a _lot_ of companies. G being the most obvious example. "Meta can't innovate" is a take I've been reading online s…
look into the concept of "monopolism"
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#437> 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 large corporations I've worked for also scored you on "leadership" at the end of the year. This score usually contributes to your bonus and annual pay raise. It is hard to get a high leadership score if you don't have some formal subordinates, so this is another reason people are always looking to get someone working under them, even if they aren't ready for it or maybe don't even need it.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#438I suspect this will split the company in two. A old crowd, that informally sticks to the old world in new teams and a new career crowd that really startups and then get sabotaged or winning team joined by the old crowd. Bayer better hides tho
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
As someone squarely in this position for the last few years (from a prior senior engineering position), I would say my job is to try to emulate the decisions and guidance my manager would give, but to more people than he has time to do it for. This is fairly obvious because for a while he was doing that for too many people because we couldn't find a person for the position. If I can speed up answers and feedback and…
Ok but I think this is still just bad.
If person A manages 6 things and thinks it is too much, he should instead manage 3 things and have a new person B manage the other 3. Not elevate himself to manage person B and C who each have 3 things.
You say your job is to emulate what they would do, but also that there’s a game of telephone going on. That implies your boss is still very much in the loop of those actively communicating, and what’s probably happening is you’re bubbling up lower and lower fidelity information up the chain for them to make decisions.
You should never have the role of trying to emulate what your boss would do. If you’re going to manage managers, then those managers below you should have some sort of functional/technical expertise that warrants them being independent managers or they should have enough autonomy that your relationship is only about allocating higher level resources to them.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#440Earlier 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.
Yep. It's frowned upon in some companies to use the military as an example, but military management has been forged often times in blood. The concept that you're hitting on is called 'commanders intent'. Basically we need to climb that hill over there, but the commander is not going to tell someone exactly how because they won't be in the situation. They trust the people on the ground will make good decisions. I give…
I think this is not a good explanation. “Get on the hill” is a bad order. “We want to get on that hill to gain fire control on that road” is much better. Because that means the on the ground troops can achieve the objective through an entirely different means if the hill is not viable.
Critically, and this is why military analogies don’t work with most large orgs, the on the ground folks don’t need to confirm with top leadership that an alternative tactic is sufficient. In messy business orgs, middle managers play it way too conservatively and try to get their bosses to green light every decision by presenting them a synthesized and watered down view (“the hill is well defended, the other hill is better”). But this is slower, error prone, and at risk of compromise to minor communication failures because the condensed time and attention for the synthesized logic won’t capture the full reasoning (“I don’t get why the second hill is better. Just do the first one”).