[mwerd]

That's a point of view that would change quickly if you were in one of those management positions.

You get to a point where it's impossible to do the work anymore. There's too much of it. You have to develop teams, processes, structure, etc. that delivers the outcomes you're accountable for with full knowledge that you cannot do them yourself. It's very different than doing the work and experience shows that fewer people are capable of doing it, especially with any repeatability. The working world yearns for effective managers.

I encourage you to compare the productivity of the modern multinational corporation to any commune in history. The people working in collectives are not stupid or lazy. It's not an effective structure.

[LapsangGuzzler]

> I encourage you to compare the productivity of the modern multinational corporation to any commune in history. The people working in collectives are not stupid or lazy. It's not an effective structure.

It’s a hard comparison to make when the goals of those two systems are vastly different.

I worked for a multinational software company and the amount of waste I saw was just staggering. If outside shareholders knew how little we actually produced on a day to day basis, they would probably be appalled. But because the company knew how to engage with market analysts, we looked good on paper. So much of the money made today involves just being the biggest player in a given market, regardless of how effective the product is (i.e. “nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft”)

[phs318u]

But maximum efficiency does not scale linearly with organisational size/product complexity. So yes, lots of wastage, but still possibly the least wastage of other tried-and-tested organisational models.

Also, effectiveness of software relates to the attributes that align to the dimensions of "goodness" as defined by each user not the developer. The software does not have to be the best (among its peers) to be the most effective for me. The same software may be completely ineffective for you, if what you want out of it is different to what I want.

[femiagbabiaka]

Productivity is not a universal good. Productivity on its own does not lead to better business outcomes. The problem with management that doesn’t do or know how to do the work is that they get detached from what should be done — they can be neither visionary nor maintainer. This can be overcome when management loses their ego and listens to those doing the work, merging their high level view with the data gotten from perspectives on the shop floor. I can count the number of people in management I’ve observed capable of doing that on one hand in a decade.

[chrisdbanks]

Agree. In fact one problem many have when new to management is actually doing the work themselves rather than coaching others to achieve it.