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by cscheid 454 days ago
(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”.

5 comments

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

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