291–300 of 313 posts
Management and other myths 1. Complex systems tend to produce complex responses (not solutions) to problems. 2. Great advances are not produced by systems designed to produce great advances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
-- Sevaried's Law
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> There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. That's a great way of summing up what I've heard called "managerialism". There's a theory behind, e.g., the MBA that a competent manager can manage anything. That what one manages makes no difference as long as you're a real manager. One of the corollaries of that theory is that all one has to…
I tend to find people with your view have never been an executive managing the managers, or even a manager. When you are (like myself) then you see that good managers / leadership (including tech team leads, etc.) really do make a massive difference in performance with the same people. Things like metrics, values, and re-orgs might seem like Dilbert-esque corporate speak (a view I used to share), but they're incredib…
In the most non-trolling way that I can manage, why can this not be generalized to the economy? Why is academia a special case scenario where bureaucracy and regulations create unintended consequences and cause people to expend effort to get around them, but we can't say the same thing about the economy as a whole? Why do we believe that people can't even manage PhD's at a university, but we can take the same people,…
But, your last sentence to me, seems like a good one. Presumably, that would be an excellent topic to pursue research in, considering we clearly don't have a working theory on it (but that's not my specialty so who knows, maybe there's a bunch of smart people being ignored about it). Thus, it's hard to measure progress in, and we institute perverse incentives per the article.
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I'm not opposed to managers. I am one, after all. But I don't think "management" is a universal skill. I think somebody who manages developers should probably be a developer. I think somebody who manages doctors should be a doctor. And I think there's a lot of merit in non-hierarchical systems, like the way doctors and lawyers are mainly accountable to professional organizations. I agree that metricising knowledge wo…
Agreed. The big problem in academia is that when you don't trust academics you need administration to provide oversight. Administration is now a huge portion of the cost of university education. Not research, admin. To be fair, academics can also be childish, vindictive, sexist. There is also a real problem of hiring one's friends and students. BUT inter-organizational competition helps to some extent with these prob…
There's something disturbingly paternal about the idea that unusually clever and/or creative people can't be trusted to act like adults and therefore need adult supervision from people with authority over them.
Management and other myths 1. Complex systems tend to produce complex responses (not solutions) to problems. 2. Great advances are not produced by systems designed to produce great advances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tend to find people with your view have never been an executive managing the managers, or even a manager. When you are (like myself) then you see that good managers / leadership (including tech team leads, etc.) really do make a massive difference in performance with the same people. Things like metrics, values, and re-orgs might seem like Dilbert-esque corporate speak (a view I used to share), but they're incredib…
I would be more inclined to believe this if the pro-manager view didn't come from the managers the vast majority of the time. It seems too convenient and self-service. Of course managers want to think they make a massive difference. Certainly some aspects can: keeping politics away from your group so that they can work, focusing work tasks by eliminating extraneous ones, advocating for people in the company. However,…
If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability. Absolutely, could not agree more. This is the only way to beat gamification of metrics in my opinion. There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. I fun…
> There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. That's a great way of summing up what I've heard called "managerialism". There's a theory behind, e.g., the MBA that a competent manager can manage anything. That what one manages makes no difference as long as you're a real manager. One of the corollaries of that theory is that all one has to…
They'd probably argue that you have to pay well for a good administrator. How do you measure a good administrator? By how much money they save. So the less the academics are paid, the more the administrators save and so therefore the more they are paid - and we're there.
It used to be academics took turns at administrating for a couple of years, this was before the rise of the professional manager, and they insinuated themselves everywhere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tend to find people with your view have never been an executive managing the managers, or even a manager. When you are (like myself) then you see that good managers / leadership (including tech team leads, etc.) really do make a massive difference in performance with the same people. Things like metrics, values, and re-orgs might seem like Dilbert-esque corporate speak (a view I used to share), but they're incredib…
I am also a manager of managers. I agree 100% that managers/leadership makes a big difference in performance. But I don't see the difference being systems and metrics. I see it much more as interpersonal relationships, respect, and caring about the people that work for you. The manager's competence in the domain itself is also important. Selecting the right person for the job is also vital, but you are specifically a…
Correct me if I'm wrong but this is a minority view in management circles
So many early-career researchers (myself included) bemoan this system and it pushes many of the away from academia and towards fields where you aren't constantly playing tricks (fake co-authorship, salami publishing, over-hyping conclusions) to get ahead in a game where everyone's striving for a tiny number of badly paid jobs.