@baldur@rysiek I experienced this phenomenon years ago when I worker at a place that had gone through a financial ruin and suffered a massive reduction of staff size, placing everyone directly under the thumb of the company owner. The man had become accustomed to a certain lifestyle and it brought out his worst personality traits. He ran the company like a monarchy.
@baldur@rysiek Long term employees talked about how it didn’t use to be like this, because before the collapse, there had been enough management layers to isolate the general employees from his antics and whims.
Management isn’t just about telling employees what to do, it’s also about telling the guy at the top “No”.
I think of how every manager’s job at SpaceX’s is actually to manage Elon Musk.
@twipped yes. A good manager is much less of "let me tell you how to do your job"/"gotta come work Sunday, we need to catch that red dot", and much much more of:
being a good shit umbrella, deflecting incoming crap so that the team can stay focused;
telling people to just go home and get some sleep finally, even if deadlines are threatened — and then handling the flak from on top;
making all-nighters etc super rare, but ordering the damn pizza if there is no way to avoid one.
@twipped@baldur there's a related phenomenon: Founder's Syndrome. Affects many NGOs moving from tiny to medium/large in size.
At some point the Founder has to hire themselves out of the job, because no single person can at the same time negotiate with major news orgs, deal with work-related emergency of the "person's life is threatened" kind, think about end of year bonuses and raises for 50 staff, and worry about the price of office toilet paper (real example!).
@baldur reading this has helped me with quantifying a lot of what I've had to deal with throughout my career. I may actually quote it once I get to writing the final post about my experiences with a certain silicon valley company.
There was once a thread by @bcantrill about management and also how Bell Labs did it which I found quite enlightening. One thing that stuck with me was:
Management is there to enable you by removing road blocks but staying out of the way if things work.
There's of course always things you could, in theory, optimize even if things work, but this is exactly the phenomenon alluded to in the end: A manager/glue work will naturally fill the void of "nothing to do" and can threaten to throttle the whole operation over micro management (= micro optimization).
On @mipsytipsy's excellent piece, the one bit that I would add to it is that there is a deep seated problem among management: they often think of their career in terms of the number of reports in their org. This is dangerous thinking: like a software engineer that thinks of their career solely in terms of the number of lines written, the desire for more reports above all else leads to deeply suboptimal results!
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