As a developer I don't think I get to see most of what a manager does, other than they are in meetings all day long that I don't attend. So I am not inside the logistics of what they do. But I guess you attend all the meetings your managers do and you know everything they do?
That seems to be a surprisingly inefficient company structure.
I think the most common mistake is the assumption that the coordination by the manager is essential to supply direction and avoid errors and mistakes. This is consistently assumed without actually measuring the amount and severity of mistakes without management direction.
I know I can trust my people to coordinate themselves with very low error rates as long as I provide them with the information and incentives they need to make the correct decisions by themselves.
The total cost of extra full time managers is significantly larger than the measured error cost.
Some of the common management tasks will be loaded onto leaf node staff. This costs less, mostly since they aggressively minimise those tasks to the bare minimum friction while a full time manager tend not to.
It is not 1950. We can trust our people to function much better given the right environment and tools. I've run several large complex international projects with very low management overhead.
>I think the most common mistake is the assumption that the coordination by the manager is essential to supply direction and avoid errors and mistakes.
I mean there are different levels of managers, there is your direct manager who probably just needs to delegate some tasks and trust you to manage yourself, and then manage their local budget, but there are managers also of a division with multiple groups in there and they have to manage stuff about budgets that takes into account legal requirements that people lower than them really aren't aware of.
anecdote time about this managerial level (I've told this anecdote before here) - one time I was consulting at a place and they had these Friday breakfasts for about 7-9 teams together (so about 100+ people in a big warehouse eating danish breakfast) and the division managers would sometimes say some things about what was going to happen in the next few months. So, one time the main guys for all the teams gave this speech about why they were doing something in a particular way and it went very deep detail about accounting rules and a particular financing law that applied so that was why they were structuring the next 9 months work in the way they were because it allowed them use a half a million dollars etc. etc.
Everyone was nodding sagely along as if they understood what they were hearing, but I knew a lot of them didn't understand anything, I didn't understand it all either - I just knew I was hearing the managerial equivalent of nerd speak - like the way I would talk about engineering tradeoffs.
A lot of the developers there spent their time going around talking about how these two guys did nothing and were useless, because from the 'outside' of their work it would look like they just sat around talking.
Maybe they are not as useful as other workers, but I do know that I am not able to adequately judge it from what little details I observe about their daily routines.
It's mostly miss-aligned incentive structures and internal politics. Managers are trying to climb up the ladder, increase influence, get more reports and at the same time keep competing interests from doing the above.
I think it feels slightly different when you're doing it, because internal politics is mostly stuff like "team C has created a new service to do something you'll be doing" and you're trying to work out whether it exists yet, whether it solves your problems, whether it's super buggy, what the roadmap looks like, etc.
If you pick wrong you could end up integrating with something that is vapourware or causes issues, yet if you refuse to pick what is offered it can be treated by the other manager/team as a huge insult and then a narrative can be crafted and verbalised to upper management that it was a non-strategic play on your behalf and wasteful of company resources, etc.
Working within this context with other managers and teams, means constantly needing to understand what they're trying to achieve and offering a helping hand, while protecting yourself from bad decisions that would negatively affect your own team. Even if you aren't trying to climb the ladder yourself, you have to avoid actions that harm your team.
This might be inefficient, but once others are playing this game, you have to be really aware about what is going on, and ensure that you're always playing the right hand.
You don't need to be on every single meeting to get general idea about which manager is adding value and which is not.
I don't need to be expert in management to see that corporate management where managers almost outnumbered team members, changed every few months and attempted to manage without ever learning what product does was bad.
That seems to be a surprisingly inefficient company structure.