[yks]

Musk’s thing is an ability to say things that are kinda common sense and evident to most low-level techies but which the modern corporate culture prohibits to say aloud, e.g. “lots of managers is actually bad”. Musk says that and everyone is “wow what a maverick”, some L4 eng says that and people comment how it is a loser mindset.

He may be a “true engineer” but I don’t think a particularly genius one at that.

[robenkleene]

Curious what you think of Google's experiment getting rid of managers in the early 2000s?

I think I originally read about this in Measure What Matters:

https://www.amazon.com/Measure-What-Matters-Google-Foundatio...

Here's a blog post that seems to summarize:

https://medium.com/illumination/google-once-fired-all-manage...

(Personally, I came away from reading about this incident thinking most organizations have an appropriate amount of managers.)

[yks]

I think "no managers" approach can work only for tiny organizations. Rigorously hiring self-motivated people might delay the need for managers somewhat but at some point they are inevitable. Once managerial layer is in place, it is looking to grow itself and eventually that growth becomes detrimental by slowing down the project delivery. Different corporate cultures and initial trajectories affect the speed of this evolution, but it seems like every org more or less follows this path if we're looking at the span of decades.

> most organizations have an appropriate amount of managers.

technically true, but what would be the measure? if only we could check the alternative timeline with less managers.

I would not be surprised if quantity of managers in any org is asymptotically approaching the maximum number possible while the org is still able to produce any output.