[UncleMeat]

I do think that this is fair and it is a reason why bad managers stand out so much in people's minds. I think that making it feasible for a team to fire its own manager would be generally a good thing.

But this has little to do with the argument that management as a concept itself is self serving bullshit.

[tayo42]

Why? If most managers are useless that means most in the role aren't actually helping or doing anything yet the world seems to go on. Why have that role then? If you can have someone who is a negative in that role, then you can get rid of it.

[rco8786]

> If most managers are useless

Big IF. Even worse-than-average managers are not useless. To have a truly useless manager is an extreme rarity.

> means most in the role aren't actually helping or doing anything

You're painting a broad spectrum of people on a binary scale. A bad manager is maybe 30% as useful as a great manager. But 30% useful is still better than not existing.

> If you can have someone who is a negative in that role, then you can get rid of it.

By this logic every job is useless. Any role can have someone bad at it.

[tayo42]

Idk if its that big of an "if". People who are ending up as managers are rarely highly trained in the job or receiving a ton of support. Often just attracting bad personalities. Its always someone who wants to do something different then engineering, they become a manager. Imagine if we hired engineers because someones friend thought it sounded interesting and they had to do all their learning on the job.

> By this logic every job is useless. Any role can have someone bad at it.

Its not really the same because there's only one manager. If i had redundant managers maybe then a couple bad ones could get by. bad engineers have a tons of checks to prevent them being a real drain. theres no code review for a manager.

[rco8786]

> People who are ending up as managers are rarely highly trained in the job or receiving a ton of support.

> Often just attracting bad personalities.

> Its always someone who wants to do something different then engineering, they become a manager.

You are saying these things as though they are simple truths that I am just supposed to accept. But I do not.

People who end up as managers are selected for their potential and receive lots of support, more often than not.

Often attracting great personalities since the job is about interfacing with people, more often than not.

It's always someone who wants to do management, whether or not they want to continue engineering, more often than not.

> Imagine if we hired engineers because someones friend thought it sounded interesting and they had to do all their learning on the job.

Yea, sounds terrible. It's a darn good thing we don't hire engineers or managers like this.

[tayo42]

im saying things based on my experience, but if yours is different and you see high quality and effective managers being created from engineers thats cool. can i send a resume over?

> managers are selected for their potential and receive lots of support

This support im questioning. Its all on the job training. I went to business school, i actually have a business degree. I didn't leave that school feeling like i should manage or lead. The "training" is on the job, the people who teach are your small peer of manager peers and maybe some corporate style training. Corporate training has never been effective from what I have seen.

[writeinpencil]

I don't agree. There is a good line in the book "Impro" about good and bad teachers. It says that we think of "good teachers" as providing a lot of some substance called "education" while "bad teachers" provide only a little. In fact bad teachers can and often do not only fail to provide education but actively make students less educated by, for instance, teaching wrong ideas, punishing arbitrarily, etc etc. The same is true of managers. They can easily drop below zero and start to have a negative impact on productivity and their employees.

[cdolan23]

This is very true. I've seen a single bad manager destroy an entire wing of an engineering organization in a couple of months. This person wasn't even a particularly mean or bad person, and had apparently been a successful middle manager for Pac Bell in their previous role. But they had no feel for the team they had taken over at all, and tried to impose a new structure all at once (basically boiled down to all of the senior devs were now technical project managers and wouldn't be coding). Everyone left within a couple of weeks.