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

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

#471

Post by KaiserPro »

joenot443 wrote: post #321
KaiserPro wrote: post #261

Using 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…

> Do you use Instagram much?

Yes.

Shops, doesn't work, really high friction way to buy stuff.

Reels, great, but how long did it take to get it to work? especailly is it was(or should) have been a modified instagram TV

> "Meta can't innovate" is a take I've been reading online since 2014

Meta has one product, which is advertising. It has singularly fucked up the blue app to the point where its basically unusable for anyone younger than 30. Its trying to get there with instagram, but thats a separate story.

Instagram has been dented by Tiktok. the only saving grace is that the vast majority of impressions on tiktok are for people who are not yet old enough to have a credit card, or if they are, not enough spare cash to be worth targeting. However that is changing.

Meta hardware is great. It's software stack sucks hard.

Oculus: come and play games with us, just don't expect to be able to join your friends. Oh, and before you can play you need to do an update, oh and charge the device, because we wake it up every hour to check to see if we need an update.

You want to join your friends? just start a party! oh wait that game doesn't support it. Ok. have you tried just phoning them?

The amount of research that they are doing is phenomenal. Its just a shame there is no attention to customer experience so that all of that research can be applied to a product that is easy to use and does what it promises.

Rayban stories: Headphones in your glasses! oh wait you want to listen to more than 5 minutes of music? sorry I need to reboot. oh you want me to re-connect to your phone? naaa we can't do that. You'll need to turn me off and on again. but don't get comfortable, we're going to disconnect in 6 minutes! (it took a year for rayban stories to reliably connect to an iphone. a _year_ so much time that the rayban sales specialist said to my optometrist "yeah they look cool, but don't order them, they're way more hassle than they're worth. something like 70% get returned inside a month")

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

#472

Post by gadders »

oceanplexian wrote: post #458
lostlogin wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is probably no instance in civil service history I’m not sure that private firms are much better. Especially if the work they are doing has been contracted out to them.

I think it’s a different calculation in smaller companies or companies where employees have equity. “I make money if the business is successful” tends to remove a lot of bullshit you see in larger corporations and civil service.

I wonder if anyone ever compared partnerships and privately owned businesses of comparable size for management "bloat".

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

#473

Post by Arcanum-XIII »

mjburgess wrote: post #411
mind-blight wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've of the best essays I've read explaining this kind of phenomenon is The Tyranny of Structurelessness ( https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm ). It's a critique from a feminist in the 70s account how the feminist movement's attempt to have no hierarchy created implicit hierarchies that were less accountable too the group than explicit hierarchies

Demands for non-hierarchical political forms have always scared me, and so often, how they are demanded by people whose main skill is to rabble-rouse. Of course, this is no coincidence.

In an interview process they tried to sell this to me. So I asked the question of what would happen in case of disagrement. It would be solved magically by consensus... I told them no. No structure or too much structure leads to the same result: chaos. A different one, but well, not good in either case.

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

#474

Post by kubanczyk »

randomdata wrote: post #456
kubanczyk wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if "each 4-8 person team continues to act if they are an independent businesses", then (by definition) these small teams act on the market. Why would they prefer the closed market over the global free market? On the global free market they are not constrained to 8 employees, they can have 9 or more.

Every business needs millions, if not billions, of people working for them. The complexity cannot be handled otherwise. But back to the topic at hand, there is an impossible level of communication overhead to burden if you try to keep millions (or even tens) of people on a single team. Like the original comment pointed out, we've never actually figured out how to do that. It might be a good idea in theory, but the pr…

Yes, I've tried to point out a different problem with your scheme. Outside of hypothesis, we do have a global market - I think it's disrupting your idea because you cannot prevent an independent team to enter it.

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

#475

Post by kubanczyk »

_heimdall wrote: post #453
kubanczyk wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, exaggerating, the CEO would be responsible to craft a business direction from this set: - publish more as open source, - migrate to novel: - libraries - frameworks - architectures - paradigms - small refactoring that hugely improves elegance and readability, - big refactoring that barely improves anything, - add an impressively-sounding feature, sponsored by letters C, R, D and T - ...in Rust

I'm not saying it'd be easy, or that it'd scale to a massive company, but then I don't think we should have such massive companies which is another discussion. The examples you give are more like every employee getting to decide what they feel like working on. The idea would be for employees, as the ones almost always closest to customers, to define what they see as mattering most. You have to remember that OKRs aren…

My examples were more like every employee getting to decide (cynically, individually) what's best for them.

Your examples are where every employee figures out (altruistically, collectively) what is best for the CEO.

Breaking the symmetry, CEO in both cases decides what's best for the CEO (officially "best for everyone", but in fact you are only counted as "everyone" if you are an employee who is contributing to what's best for the CEO).

I admit that your proposition could very well work fine. Many people do love to get into the shoes of higher-ups.

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

#476

Post by giantg2 »

sokoloff wrote: post #242
giantg2 wrote: post #128

Self-organizing still leads to bosses, but they just get paid like regular workers. My company does this sort of thing but with dev chapter leads. The chapter leads have no management training and no authority. They don't even really know what you're doing since they're on a separate team and have their own coding work. They're senior devs that have added management responsibilities and are just paid as senior devs.…

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.

My company does put managers and ICs in the same pay range. However, due to market rate, managers tend to be higher in the range and make make more than devs. The new chapter lead thing is BS because you have people working 2 jobs for the price of the cheaper 1 (there is no market adjustment for that role). Who wants that extra work for no benefit?

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

#477

Post by matwood »

jncfhnb wrote: post #440
matwood wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 to…

You're right on expanding get on the hill. I didn't want to get too much in the weeds, but thank you for explaining it better.

I would push back a bit on your second point and say that there are many decisions around tactics made in business that are not confirmed with higher ups. This is why your expanded first point is so important. People at all levels of the org are making decisions all the time and you want them to have the most complete picture possible when doing so.

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

#478

Post by kmacleod »

Too late for anyone to see this, but GE/Durham, who build jet engines, do (did?) small teams (Fast Company: Engines of Democracy (1999) https://www.fastcompany.com/37815/engines-democracy https://web.archive.org/web/20221116144415/https://www.fastc...
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