[bb88]

I'm going to make the observation that politics in a company is caused by management. The more "politics" you have at a company, the more you pay in a "political tax". Effort which should benefit the company is delayed or made harder as employees have to bob and weave to get through the politics.

I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because that's how you got there in the first place.

Edited to add:

I'm not saying get rid of management. I'm saying get rid of bad management. And if your bad management is a malignant tumor, well, it's too late to fix it manager by manager -- because they've internalized how to game the system for themselves.

[cscheid]

(Context: I’m an IC and told my Manager multiple times that I’d quit if they ever make me a manager)

If you truly believe that, please do yourself a favor and read “The tyranny of structurelessness” to understand what a managerless place becomes. everyone and no one becomes a manager, and there’s no explicit avenue of recourse. There’s a good reason management arises. We can discuss good management vs bad management, but pretty fundamentally there’s no such thing as “no management”.

[duskwuff]

I don't think OP was necessarily trying to imply "there should be no managers", but simply "I don't want to become a manager" - which is perfectly valid.

[rafaelmn]

I read OP as change the management to change the culture, not remove it.

[vkou]

> There’s a good reason management arises.

Look, you have me for the rest of your post, but let's not imagine that the kind of management we see in an orthodox corporation in the year 2025 is some kind of emergent grassroots property.

It's a tool created by owners to exercise control over the people whose labour they own.

[consteval]

From what I’ve seen flatter (not flat) company structures have less politics and a healthier culture. When you get into the 7, 8, 9 layer manager hierarchy at a software company is when things have really gone to shit

[Freedom2]

I'm not entirely sure why when one person quits, the company becomes managerless?

[dakial1]

The tricky part is who are you showing the door. My experience is that layoffs is a highly political event as well, and the "most political" managers are the one who stay. Which is natural, as they are the ones who leadership has more visibility to. That team-player, hands-on manager, is worth nothing if (s)he didn't play the politics game. So the company might be worse after this.

[Aurornis]

The most egregious office politics I've ever experienced came from the company that had a pathological aversion to managers.

They aimed for minimizing managerial positions to an extreme. The result was that a lot of ICs were playing hardball politics with nobody to keep them in check.

Really opened my eyes to the reality of office politics.

[sgarland]

Those people are also dead weight. I despise the fact that I have to play politics at work. Work should be based on results, period. Spending time politicking is not producing results; at best, it’s eventually producing via cajoling what could have been accomplished in 1/4 the time if you’d been left alone and trusted.

[bookaway]

>Work should be based on results

The people who play politics also have their work judged by results. Getting yourself promoted to head a project that prints money for the company with little cost doesn't necessarily cause the project to stop printing money.

[sgarland]

If you’re buddies with higher-ups, they absolutely can and will look upon your projects with a softer eye. There’s a limit, of course, and that heavily depends on the company culture, but it’s unreasonable to expect favoritism to not factor in at all.

[0rzech]

IMHO, workplace politics can happen and be caused at any level of a company. I think it's a natural thing for some people to do.

Especially at big companies, which kinda resemble small countries. You get "who likes whom", supervisors' pets, weird alliances, power struggles, backstabbing and other toxic stuff.

What management (at any level) is at fault of is failing to actively weed out these behaviours or indeed straight up doing the same thing.

Also, companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture even if the overall quality suffers. This in turn motivates people to seek other means of being recognized, including workplace politics.

I've seen all of it while being a manager. I hated it with a passion, and fell a victim of it quite a few times myself.

And I agree that people playing workplace politics should either change their behaviour or be let go.

[dennis_jeeves2]

>failing to actively weed out these behaviours

>companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture.

Excellent observations.

People think politics is inevitable when a bunch of people are put together. But if one has courage to retain only the right people, politics can be eliminated. I once worked for a company that achieved that - near zero politics among the managers. It left a lasting impression on me.

[bb88]

>. Also, companies often fail to reward silent, but effective and solid people, and instead opt into creating a loud, noisy rockstar culture even if the overall quality suffers. This in turn motivates people to seek other means of being recognized, including workplace politics.

But that's also a management failure. A lot of managers ask "What can you do for my team or me so we can be more important?" But instead they should be asking, "What can my team do for you?"

[LittleTimothy]

I think this is a simplistic take. In companies where there are clear management structures there are clear and obvious ways for managers to fuck around and play politics. When there aren't clear management chains, people with probably similar characteristics fuck around in different ways - it's just less obvious to some people.

Management is a tool used by people with their own motivations to acheive their goals. But a lack of management lets those same people acheive those same goals in different ways. Whether that's starting up duplicate projects and products, causing chaos and confusion by inserting themselves into topics that don't concern them, or simply picking fights. The same people get along in any organisation, the tool of management is just the easiest to spot from below.

[mmooss]

> I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because that's how you got there in the first place.

Which managers? The CEO, CxOs, and VPs are the place to start.

If you want to change the culture of a place - business, family, community - start by changing yourself.

[lovich]

> I do believe if you want real culture change in a company, the best way to do it is to show managers the door, because that's how you got there in the first place.

You can say that but it only really works if you give agency to your employees. That doesn’t seem to align with Amazons policy’s lately like RTO5.

How do you micromanage employees without managers? And note if your answer is “don’t”, I don’t think that’s an option as the drive for shit like that appears to be coming from the top, not middle managers misinterpreting orders

[raincom]

Figuring out "bad management" is really a hard problem. The same problem exists in the government bureaucracies too.

[whenc]

"Management is that for which there is no algorithm. If there's an algorithm, it's administration." (Maurice Wilkes, IIRC)

[apple4ever]

It may be, but I've also found that very few companies try. Usually because bad management is in charge.

[CharlieDigital]

Incredibly hard. If there were some formula and it was really easy to just keep "the good ones", then every company would only have great managers. It's simply not that easy at scale.

[mirekrusin]

Ask tech leads who consistently deliver value who's good one and who's not – you'll get pretty accurate picture.

[ThrowawayR2]

If there's a clique or patronage, simply asking may not get you the real picture.

[CharlieDigital]

It's amazing how many smart people here think this is just a trivial problem that they can solve for big tech if big tech would only listen.

This is a fundamental human organization problem that many countless organizations of people have failed to perform optimally since people have started organizing into groups.

[bb88]

Listen to yourself. That's what management is supposed to do: manage people -- including other managers. You can't both accept and deny responsibility in the same breath.

If you truly believe that, then this is cognitive dissonance in it's highest form.

[bb88]

Listen to yourself. It's management's job to manage people. Some of those people are going to be managers. So management can't police themselves apparently?

I don't buy it.

[TulliusCicero]

Correct. It's fundamentally a problem that cannot be completely solved. People are too messy.

[bb88]

Then managers are only a salary line -- one that can go away apparently.

[TulliusCicero]

Not being completely solvable doesn't mean that giving up entirely is a better option.

We don't stop all crime, but that doesn't mean we stop funding all police and jails.

[potato3732842]

All organizations. Nonprofits, militaries, religious orders, everything.

And anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant or lying.

[hintymad]

> The more "politics" you have at a company,

Note the "politics" do not necessarily come from any malicious intention. It's just part of the company dynamics. As more layers are added to a company, visibility decreases. As a result, people have to be more political savvy to defend their misses and get resources, which leads to more politics.

[analog31]

Deming agreed with you: Quality control is a management problem. But there's management and there's management. If we're talking about 14000 people, they're not the top managers of the business, and getting rid of them won't change the culture.

They're workers, and Deming also said: Don't blame the workers.

[Marazan]

Middle management _is_ the culture of a company. A regular worker interacts not at all with the CxOs except reading their emails and every day with their managers.

Middle management is also the memory of the company.

[ryandvm]

You want to solve this problem? Then promote from below. We all understand that representative democracy is the best organizational form and then we turn around and run ALL our corporations as dictatorships.

It's not a mystery why - the providers of capital want complete control of the business decisions. But let's at least not be surprised when, like all dictatorships, the organization inevitably implodes.

[asdfman123]

Nah, they're both downstream of complexity. Complexity creates both managers and politics. But managers do create more complexity and more politics.

The problem in companies like this is there are often few incentives for reducing complexity, even in a company like Amazon that claims to value eliminating it.

[firecall]

> I'm not saying get rid of management. I'm saying get rid of bad management.

How do you tell the difference?

[aaalll]

Politics happen due to people. There is this myth that you don't need management or leadership at all. But there are enough examples of bad managed teams and bad self directed teams that its pretty obvious that politics happen in the absence of management.

[WalterBright]

Anywhere you have people, you have politics.

[beambot]

> I'm saying get rid of bad management.

How do you propose measuring good versus bad management?

[newAccount2025]

I think it’s subjective like any role, but mostly you are trying to evaluate what their team is delivering, are they making effective strategic plans, how’s their 360 degree feedback and survey scores of worker satisfaction, are they making successful hires and retaining their people, are they growing the next generation of leaders, and so on?

[bdangubic]

by who is better at corporate politics of course :)

[blueboo]

Systems learn by removing parts, via negativa. -Taleb

[megadata]

Totally. You'll get the Lord of the Flies scenario.

Even with with a manager, if the manager isn't doing much managing then the flies will start buzzing.